23 Artists on Creativity, From Picasso to Kahlo

They thought I was a surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.

Frida Kahlo

Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.

Vincent van Gogh

The only way art lives is through the experience of the observer. The reality of art begins with the eyes of the beholder, through imagination, invention and confrontation.

Keith Haring

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.

Diane Arbus

The texture of experience is prior to everything else.

Willem de Kooning

The artist is a receptacle for emotions derived from anywhere: from the sky, from the earth, from a piece of paper, from a passing figure, from a spider’s web. This is a spider's web. This is why one must not make a distinction between things. For them there are no aristocratic quarterings. One must take things where one finds them.

Pablo Picasso

I can control the flow of paint; there is no accident.

Jackson Pollock

I tell myself that anyone who says he has finished a canvas is terribly arrogant. Finished means complete, perfect, and I toil away without making any progress, searching, fumbling around, without achieving anything much.

Claude Monet

Originality is neither a matter of inventiveness nor method, it is the essence of personality.

Edward Hopper

The herculean task of a photographer is to capture a momentary frame as beautiful in reality, as it would be in a dream.

Ansel Adams

If you refuse to study anatomy, the arts of drawing and perspective, the mathematics of aesthetics, and the science of color, let me tell you that this is more a sign of laziness than of genius.

Salvador Dalí

Art is a guarantee of sanity.

Louise Bourgeois

I think there are many open-ended questions that artists can pose and we can ask communities to feel empowered enough to reply, respond, rebel, and feel amazed by the relentless spiraling of thought and image and action that is the artist's profession.

Kara Walker

A creator needs only one enthusiast to justify him.

Man Ray

The admission of approximation is necessary, for one cannot hope to be absolute in his precision. He cannot see, or even conceive of a thing from all possible points of view, simultaneously. While he perfects the front, the side, or rear may be weak; then while he strengthens the other facade he may be weakening that originally the best. There is no end to this. To finish the work he must approximate.

Alexander Calder

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.

Joan Miró

Great art — or good art — is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don't think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different. There's boring conceptual art and there's boring traditional art. Great art is if you can't stop thinking about it, then it becomes a memory.

Damien Hirst

I've never met a person I couldn't call a beauty.

Andy Warhol

Art without content is like sex without intimacy: technically sufficient, but emotionally empty.

Judy Chicago

Artists and religionists are never far apart, they go to the sources of revelation for what they choose to experience and what they report is the degree of their experiences. Intellect wishes to arrange — intuition wishes to accept.

Georgia O’Keeffe

I don’t think about art while I work … I try to think about life.

Jean Michel-Basquiat

The progression of a painter's work, as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity: toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer. As examples of such obstacles, I give (among others) memory, history or geometry, which are swamps of generalization from which one might pull out parodies of ideas (which are ghosts) but never an idea in itself. To achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood.

Mark Rothko

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

Roy Lichtenstein