Expressive Artistry Quotes

I'm really an artist of feeling. I like creating things when it feels right.

The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral.

When painting portraits a lot of people say, 'Why not get a photograph of the person?' Photography is wonderful and it is an art form in itself, but... my portrait is a culmination of elements... a truer image of a person than just the 'click' of a snapshot.

It's hard to be serious about so many things. [Look at the whole emphasis] on the charts, if you're a songwriter.

The way an actor is trained doesn't ultimately have much bearing on my work. I'm interested in the actor as artist.

You must hold on to the sort of finger-painting aspect of music. That's something I learned, particularly from listening to Neil Young. Tom Waits is another one, because Tom's music is incredibly sophisticated and beautifully arranged, but he's using a toolbox that's unlike anybody else's.

I have no desire to prove anything by my work. I have never used it as an outlet or as a means of expressing myself. I just dance.

As an artist, you've got to see the mess. That's what we do. We get a human being, and it's like putting together a puzzle. And the puzzle has got to be a mixture, a multifaceted mixture of human emotions, and not all of it is going to be pretty.

Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness.

I feel there's so much still to learn about acting. But there is some magic in the capturing of performance and in the process of editing a performance. The psychology of human beings and what's coming through the face... that fascinates me.

As polishing expresses the vein in marble, and grain in wood, so music brings out what of heroic lurks anywhere. The hero is the sole patron of music.

A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center.

Poetry is the inner life of a culture, its nervous system, its deepest way of imagining the world. A culture that ignores its poets, chokes off its nervous system and becomes mortally ill.

Emotional truth is the reward of digging deeply enough to find the truth about how one really feels, but in order to convey this truth with any force, or artistry, one needs to 'create' a form of expression, and this form determines its own "genuine information".

I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands/and wrote my will across the sky in stars

I like, you may say, the glitter and colour that comes from the mouth, and I've always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset.