Self-Taught Artist Quotes

I have done quite a lot of outsider figures.

To my father, art had no restrictions. He was a true 'American Primitive.' He greatly enjoyed sketching and photography, carrying a camera with him whenever he could.

An artist who is self-taught is taught by a very ignorant person indeed.

I have always been interested in art but had no formal training or experience. It's always been just what I liked, my eye for art.

I have no education, I have no academic background in painting or in music, but I write music and I compose music and I write and I sell paintings, and my rule is, well, they can't arrest me.

I am among the few who continue to draw after childhood is ended, continuing and perfecting childhood drawing - without the traditional interruption of academic training.

There were no museums or galleries in Shanghai, but I was very keen on art - I was always sketching and copying, and sometimes I think that my whole career as a writer has been the substitute work of an unfulfilled painter.

I love color. When I paint, I use a lot of color. I love art that has a vibrancy of color and compositions. I adore the Impressionists, and I'm influenced strongly by them as a self-taught artist.

I started painting at 17; I took a class at Brentwood Art Center. I thought about art school - but I'm just so not a school person.

A primitive artist is an amateur whose work sells.

I paint in oils, I paint in acrylics. I paint figurative and landscape portraits. It's all in my own kind of style. I'm self-taught.

James Thurber was an inspiration because his drawings were so primitive. I am self-taught - I didn't go to art school - so I thought when I started doing them, 'If James Thurber can be a cartoonist, I can,' because his stuff is very raw.

I had learned to harness ignorance with presumption. I was ready to become an unacknowledged watercolorist.

I'm a self trained, autodidactic artist, so all I was ever trying to do was to draw as realistically as possible - but that's what comes out, because I don't really know how to draw! I think when I draw characters, I'm able to reduce them down to little marks that capture the most distinct elements of them.

I taught myself to paint African-Americans, mostly people roughly my skin tone.

My mother is an escaped farm girl from North Dakota and a self-taught artist and painter.

I never went to art school and I never thought of going to an art school. It was just a way of manifesting these ideas I had. Ideas came to me that I needed to express.