Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit. — Mark Rothko
There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories, or songs, or images. Art delights, instructs, consoles. It educates our emotions. — Dana Gioia
A work of art is the trace of a magnificent struggle. — Grace Hartigan
Good art provides people with a vocabulary about things they can't articulate. — Mos Def
In the early stages of creation of both art and science, everything in the mind is a story. — E. O. Wilson
I mean, making art is about objectifying your experience of the world, transforming the flow of moments into something visual, or textual, or musical, whatever. Art creates a kind of commentary. — Barbara Kruger
Art revolves around creating something that isn't there. — Kathleen Hanna
The best stories are often true...The narrative of human life is most beautiful when told truthfully and without boundaries. — Shonda Rhimes
Real art is one of the most powerful forces in the rise of mankind, and he who renders it accessible to as many people as possible is a benefactor of humanity. — Zoltan Kodaly
Good art is art that allows you to enter it from a variety of angles and to emerge with a variety of views. — Mary Schmich
Art in its highest form is art that serves and instructs society and human development. — Harry Belafonte
Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. — Tristan Tzara
Creating something that is universally beautiful. That is art. — Shu Uemura
Short Narrative Art Quotes
There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books. — Charlie Chaplin
Art-making is not about telling the truth but making the truth felt — Christian Boltanski
Art is the signature of civilizations. — Beverly Sills
What is art? Art grows from joy and sorrow, but mostly from sorrow. It grows from human lives. — Edvard Munch
Art is so often better at theology than theology is. — Christian Wiman
Art and music are the vehicle for the zeitgeist. — Hozier
Art is the triumph over chaos. — John Cheever
Art is the colors and textures of your imagination. — Meghan Trainor
Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth. — Pablo Picasso
In learning the art of storytelling by animation, I have discovered that language has an anatomy. — Walt Disney
Narrative Art Image Quotes
You're a work of art. Not everyone will understand you, but the ones who do, will never forget about you.
Narrative Quotes
The greatest evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude but rather the narrative of racial differences we created to legitimate slavery. Because we never dealt with that evil, I don't think slavery ended in 1865, it just evolved. — Bryan Stevenson
We lay out our lives in a narrative we understand, like a movie, but are you enjoying making it or are you wondering who's watching my movie. — Donald Glover
Some people think or expect that you should make the same kinds of art forever because it creates a convenient narrative... I want my work to embody my inherent contradictions. — Kiki Smith
The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore.
I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about. — Stephen Greenblatt
I think human beings have evolved to appreciate narrative, in the same way that we have evolved to learn language. What is narrative, after all, but a kind of super-language, where stories, like words, are ways of encapsulating information? — Alex Epstein
Chiefs who no more in bloody fights engage, But wise through time, and narrative with age, In summer-days like grasshoppers rejoice - A bloodless race, that send a feeble voice. — Alexander Pope
Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.
Multimedia is not more media, but the employment of various kinds of media (and hybrid media) for what they each offer to advance the narrative. — Fred Ritchin
There are three types of thought that our brains produce: insightful used for problem-solving, experiential focused on the task at hand, and narrative chatter. Those types are so distinctively different from each other that they occur in different parts of our brain. — Mo Gawdat
Bitcoin is eating the world. It has become a supermassive black hole that is sucking in everything around it and destroying it. This narrative is only going to grow over the next 18 months. — Raoul Pal
There has been a failure to grasp how competing narratives fight for the attention of angry young Muslims, and we have grossly underestimated the appeal of the jihadist brand. — Maajid Nawaz
Figurative Art Quotes
Your looks are laughable, unphotographable, yet you're my favorite work of art. Is your figure less than Greek, is your mouth a little weak? When you open it to speak, are you smart? — Chet Baker
There's no diploma in the world that declares you as an artist—it's not like becoming a doctor. You can declare yourself an artist and then figure out how to be an artist. — Kara Walker
I did study the art of being a barber because I wanted to figure out what my routine would be. Do you start in the front or back? Top or bottom? Swivel the chair or walk around? What I did discover is there's no such thing as the perfect haircut! — Sean Patrick Thomas
There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively - because without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. — Frank Zappa
I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either. — Antoni Tapies
It's just a combination of letters I liked. And when your whole art's based on the lettering you choose, you kinda figure out what ones work together. I just liked the shapes of the k, a, w, s. It has no meaning. — KAWS
Figure skating is a mixture of art and sport. — Katarina Witt
When I was in art school, I thought art was something I would learn how to do, and then I would just do it. At a certain point I realized that it wasn't going to work like that. Basically, I would have to start over every day and figure out what art was going to be. — Bruce Nauman
Geometry is the art of correct reasoning from incorrectly drawn figures. — Henri Poincare
With Gnaw I was thinking about traditional sculpture, about carving. I was also interested in figurative sculpture. I put those two ideas together and decided that rather than describing the body, I would use the body, my body, as a tool for making art. — Janine Antoni
Personal Narrative Quotes
The third person narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape. — Andrew Vachss
They trap you in the toxic narrative that quitting is a weakness, an easy way out or, worse yet, that quitting is failure. I assure you – quitting is for winners and quitting is a skill. — Steven Bartlett
I've worked out of a series of no's. No to exquisite light, no to apparent compositions, no to the seduction of poses or narrative. And all these no's force me to the yes. I have a white background. I have the person I'm interested in and the thing that happens between us. — Richard Avedon
Sometimes I can better describe a person by another person's reaction. In a story in my first book, I couldn't think of a way to sufficiently describe the charisma of a certain boy, so the narrator says, "I knew girls who saved his gum." — Amy Hempel
Collective freedom provides the basic conditions for people to narrate their own lives, hold power accountable, and embrace a capacious notion of human dignity. — Henry Giroux
'God' - as revealed in his book of edicts and narratives is practically an idiot. He has nothing to say that any sensible person should want to listen to. — Johann Most
The charade of politics is to make voters think that the personal narrative of the candidate affects the operation of the corporate state. It doesn't really matter on the fundamental issues whether the President is Republican or Democratic. — Chris Hedges
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE — Mark Twain
We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread. — Paul Auster
In food, issues that surround purchasing and that whole realm have a very political component and they branch into stories that can be really compelling. Just being on the farm, interacting with all these people in the industry, leads to personal narratives that can be used to make a larger point. — Dan Barber
Artwork Quotes
I tried different techniques during my career, but I especially fell in love with painting with oil and pallette-knife. Every artwork is the result of long painting process; every canvas is born during the creative search; every painting is full of my inner world. — Leonid Afremov
They paint me as a villain, I just autograph the artwork. — Lil Wayne
Unfortunately, the general interest in art among the Japanese is very low compared to that of Western countries. I would love to be able to correct that by bringing many more pieces of interesting artwork to Japan. — Yusaku Maezawa
I began collecting artwork as a way to help young artists to promote their work as well as to increase awareness of contemporary art among the younger generation. — Yusaku Maezawa
I always see these landscapes in my dreams, and feel happy. I desperately try to transform these dreams into artwork, so that even while napping, I construct and reconstruct various images. — Yayoi Kusama
I could never live without artwork. It's a constant inspiration. — Narciso Rodriguez
I would love to be able to share my artwork with as many people as possible so that I can help spread an appreciation for art in general. — Yusaku Maezawa
The seed of your next artwork lies embedded in the imperfections of your current piece. Such imperfections are your guides - valuable, objective, non-judgmental guides to matters you need to reconsider or develop further. — David Bayles
People who have ordered my pieces to be removed should have asked themselves before if they were artworks or vandalism. — Invader
I always try to treat the book itself as the artwork. I don't want you to stop while you're reading one of my books and say, 'Oh! What a gorgeous illustration!' I want you to stop at the end of the book and say, 'This is a good book. — Chris Raschka
Graphic Art Quotes
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist — Francis of Assisi
The life of a designer is a life of fight. Fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease. For us, the visual disease is what we have around, and what we try to do is cure it somehow with design. — Massimo Vignelli
Perfect typography is certainly the most elusive of all arts. Sculpture in stone alone comes near it in obstinacy. — Jan Tschichold
Creating is about sharing ideas, sharing aesthetics, sharing what you believe in with other people. — Shepard Fairey
The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive. — Vladimir Lenin
The artist constructs a new symbol with his brush. This symbol is not a recognizable form of anything which is already finished, already made, already existing in the world - it is a symbol of a new world, which is being built upon and which exists by way of people. — El Lissitzky
The observer must learn to look at the picture as a graphic representation of a mood and not as a representation of objects. — Wassily Kandinsky
Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated. — Paul Rand
You can have an art experience in front of a Rembrandt... or in front of a piece of graphic design. — Stefan Sagmeister
The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech, nor by speech itself. The resources of the graphic art are taxed beyond their powers in attempting to portray its features. Language and illustration combined must fail. — John Wesley Powell
Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language. — Steven Pinker
The world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age. — Marshall McLuhan
Our one goal is to give the world a taste of peace, friendship and understanding. Through the visual arts, the art of celebration of life. — Steven Spielberg
I like photography because it is a reality medium, unlike drawing which is unreal. I like to mess with reality...to bend reality. Some of my works beg the question of is it real or not? — Storm Thorgerson
The style of ancient Egyptian art is transcendently clear, something 8-year-olds can recognize in an instant. Its consistency and codification is one of the most epic visual journeys in all art, one that lasts 30 dynasties spread over 3,000 years. — Jerry Saltz
Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves. — Julia Morgan
Don't be afraid of expressing what you really mean in your art, what you really feel. Say it visually, as strongly as you can. Push as far a reach as you can, then go all the way! — Kay WalkingStick
We never really perceive what color really is, as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art. — Josef Albers
The system is the work of art; the visual work of art is the proof of the System. The visual aspect can't be understood without understanding the system. It isn't what it looks like but what it is that is of basic importance. — Sol LeWitt
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist. — Pablo Picasso
Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing. — Georgia O'Keeffe
I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart. — Vincent Van Gogh
I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. — Mark Rothko
The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity. — Alberto Giacometti
Art alone makes life possible - this is how radically I should like to formulate it. I would say that without art man is inconceivable in physiological terms...
Even the act of peeling a potato can be an artistic act if it is consciously done. — Joseph Beuys
Art itself cannot be taught, but craftsmanship can. Architects, painters, sculptors are all craftsmen in the original sense of the word. Thus it is a fundamental requirement of all artistic creativity that every student undergo a thorough training in the workshops of all branches of the crafts. — Walter Gropius
Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels. — Francisco Goya
Sciences provide an understanding of a universal experience, Arts are a universal understanding of a personal experience... they are both a part of us and a manifestation of the same thing... the arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity — Mae Jemison
Visual Storytelling Quotes
I've been obsessed with this kind of visual storytelling for quite a while, and I try to create material that allows me to explore it. — Brian De Palma
Visual storytelling of one kind or another has been around since cavemen were drawing on the walls. — Frank Darabont
But I think we're also just talking about the literacy of the audience. The visual literacy of the audience. They've seen so many images now, especially here in the States. There's so much to look at, to watch. So the visual storytelling literacy is harder to impress. — Keanu Reeves
I'm a visual filmmaker so the camera is a big part of my storytelling tool and it's something that I really rely on to tell a scene or create the suspense that I need and create the emotion of a scene or a sequence. — James Wan
I achieved perfection, my type of perfection - visual storytelling. Storytelling was my style. — Jack Kirby
Frank is such a great visual storyteller, that if you study his artwork you see that his Sin City books are already the best movies never seen on the big screen. — Robert Rodriguez
So I like to try to go back and develop pure visual storytelling. Because to me, it's one of the most exciting aspects of making movies and almost a lost art at this point. — Brian De Palma
Pixar has outdone itself in visual magic and vivid storytelling. — Peter Travers
I wanted wherever possible to lean into the comic form and do things in the story telling that could only be done in comics and which pay homage to the many strands of comic and visual storytelling tradition. — Arvind Ethan David
I really admire visual storytelling that shows you what's happening, instead of tells you what's happening. I think it really forces the filmmaking to be very clear. — John Kahrs
Nearly everything that defines much of our daily experiences is consummatory in nature. Yes, we consume products and services. But we also consume life experiences, religious narratives, art, literature, and ideas. — Gad Saad
Art brings a message into a room. It should make us perceive in a new way - either through color, form or narrative content - something we had not perceived before... and perhaps reveal something to you about yourself. — Gloria Vanderbilt
In art, scandal is a false narrative, a smoke screen that camouflages rather than reveals. When we don't know what we're seeing, we overreact. — Jerry Saltz
I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction. — Jonathan Lethem
I love telling stories. And even in single images, I tend to have stories inside them. I've always loved film, but I was making drawings and paintings and photographs. And you put art and narrative together, and that really is comics. — Dave McKean
Be it sculpture, poetry, or narrative fraught with terrible insight... art does endure. It troubles and pleases, inspires, and reminds us that humanity is ever capable of adding to the sum of the world's grave beauty. — Stephanie Mills
The best way to truly understand narrative art is to experience it. — George Lucas
A turning point in the public's perception of the building art came with the publication of Frank Lloyd Wright's 'An Autobiography' of 1932, a picaresque narrative that captivated many who hadn't the slightest inkling of what architects actually did. — Martin Filler
Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry. — Eugenio Montale
I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form. — George Hickenlooper
As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be? — Stephen King
Voltaire's novel [Candid] offers us parallel universes, the possibility of entering into alternative worlds existing side by side, and this is something quite modern. Nested narratives and parallel universes are popular at the moment in many different art forms. — Mark Ravenhill
The poem is not only the point of origin for all the language and narrative arts, the poem returns us to the very social function of art as such. — Ron Silliman
Characters last. Beautiful writing lasts. A compelling narrative lasts. Art survives long after ideas go extinct. — Joel Achenbach
As you may know, my motto is: "All memory is fiction." It could just as easily be: "All fiction is memory." Unpacked, these two statements defy the ease of logic, but offer some really important truths about narrative art, at the very least, and about memory. So I would say that all art is personal. — Kwame Dawes
Not all Peter Greenaway's stuff is sequential, narrative story. Some of it is like an art installation and I'm not particularly interested in being in an art installation to be honest. I'm interested in the story. — Martin Freeman
The 20th century saw far greater catastrophes than September 11th, as bad as it was, and they didn't render literature or art or music irrelevant. In fact, I think that literature and art help us to understand - sometimes they provide narratives and metaphors for understanding history, for understanding recent catastrophes. — Jay McInerney
I do use art as a site of protest, particularly in relation to dominant narratives. — Vivek Shraya
I'm also developing my own narrative, because I'm the son of a widow. And so, while working with women and gathering their oral histories, I'm taking a step back to do my own art book and visual work. — Chath Piersath
When a culture is being dumbed down as effectively as ours is, its narrative arts (literature, film, theatre) seem to vacillate between the brutal and the bland, sometimes in the same work. — Tom Robbins
But music doesn't sum up my approach to literature - even in Vain Art of the Fugue. To 'fugue' I had to invent 'trap-words,' or words that would force the narrator to turn around and start his path anew. — Dumitru Tepeneag
If there was no risk, it wouldn't be art. It wouldn't be worth making. There is risk even in a fairy tale. Fiction is closest to pure narrative, and pure narrative is simply the logic we try to impose on an ever-changing reality. — Chris Abani
Art in the United States is a kind of visual entertainment focusing on expected narratives. — Massimiliano Gioni
What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for the first time, every time. — Aleksandar Hemon
I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative... The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated... All art to me is about problem solving. — Steven Soderbergh
To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth. — William Zinsser
The museum in D.C. is really a narrative museum - the nature of a people and how you represent that story. Whereas the Studio Museum is really a contemporary art museum that happens to be about the diaspora and a particular body of contemporary artists ignored by the mainstream. The Studio Museum has championed that and brought into the mainstream. So the museums are like brothers, but different. — David Adjaye
I'm aware of narrating certain experiences as they happen or obliterating those experiences with narrative and then those stories - not the experiences themselves - might become material for art. This kind of transformation shows up a lot in 10:04 because the book tracks the transposition of fact into fiction in the New Yorker stor — Ben Lerner
Sometimes the art pieces I gravitate toward speak to me in terms of narrative, at other times they speak to me in terms of mood. — Claudia Rankine
[My work] looks very cinematic because it's not abstract video art. It's sometimes very narrative and since I play with film grammar in my video work, making a feature film was almost the same challenge. — Nicolas Provost
If you just go get one of these little fine arts degrees or writing program degrees, it never forces you to confront your responsibility as narrator, whereas any of the social sciences make you at look the interaction between the storyteller and story. — Dorothy Allison
We all have an aggressive dedication to the narrative arts - comics, film, electronic gaming, and more. We spend much of our time and effort exploring those forms and have an enormous investment in the arts. We're all part of the same brotherhood as far as I'm concerned. — Jim Steranko
There's nothing else exactly like it in any other art form, the orchestration of so many different elements. It's endlessly fascinating what can be done editorially. You can create meaning where there was none, you can create feeling where there was none, you can create narrative where there was none. Two frames can be the difference between something that works and something that doesn't. It's fascinating. — Steven Soderbergh
I don't like making didactic, pedagogical documentaries based on standard formulas of narration: I'm only interested in the ambitious French tradition of the documentaire de création where the film, if successful, is not about something but that something itself. The goal is to incorporate areas of risk and paradox that we associate with cinematic art. — Damian Pettigrew
'Everything beautiful occurs when the body / is suspended,' Helena Mesa quotes a performance artist who hangs his own pierced body in the air. Mesa's poems are artfully suspended between lyric and narrative, between humans and animals, between Latin America and the U.S., between desire and the difficulty of its fulfillment. Horse Dance Underwater is an inventive, musical, and powerful debut. — Mark Doty
By denying people's sense of visual beauty in painting and sculpture , melody in music , meter and rhyme in poetry , plot and narrative and character in fiction , the elite arts wrote off the vast majority of their audience . They purposely excluded people who approach art in part for pleasure and edification in favour of social one-upmanship and an ever-narrowing, in-crowd elite. — Steven Pinker
I think the one that's going to be the hardest to make into a film is the one that's probably going to be made into a film, which is 'The Art of Racing in the Rain.' I mean, it's narrated by a dog. How do you do that? But hopefully we'll get to see. — Garth Stein
I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. — Samuel Johnson
Independent films will probably kill themselves off by virtue of their own success. With a crossover hit like PULP FICTION, the criteria by which art-house movies are produced and marketed and exploited have changed. With studio money and overheads and budgets and deal-making machinery, a certain kind of narrative structure and popcorn-type payoff start infusing themselves. — James Schamus
In Red Flags, Juris Jurjevics has brilliantly accomplished a feat that is becoming a major characteristic of 21st century literature: the seamless combining of a genre form with the deep resonance of literary art. This book is thrilling to read for both its narrative drive and its insight into the human heart. — Robert Olen Butler
Works of art are not so much finished as abandoned. Perhaps poems can be perfect. A short-short story might even be perfectible, as effective and enjoyable for one reader as the next. But novels and other book-length narratives are great rambling things that always contain some flaws. For works of any length, there comes a point when your continued tinkering won't improve the whole, but will just trade one set of problems for another. — Bruce Holland Rogers
A narrative voice with conviction is often hard to find. But not in baseball. The minors teach two lost American arts: how to chew tobacco and how to tell a story. — Thomas Boswell
The designs of the paper euros, introduced in 2002, proclaim a utopian aspiration. Gone are the colorful bills of particular nations, featuring pictures of national heroes of statecraft, culture and the arts, pictures celebrating unique national narratives. With the euro, 16 nations have said goodbye to all that. — George Will
You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form. — Tom Stoppard
In Conclusion
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