These Art & Artists quotations are a little gallery of courage and color, celebrating the people who dare to turn imagination into form. Paint, stone, words, and music all become ways of telling the truth with heart. As Ralph Waldo Emerson warned, “Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.” These voices remember that art asks a lot of us — and gives back beauty, meaning, and a glimpse of the soul in return.

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather it makes us see. ~ Paul Klee

When you are an artist, say, a painter, you have this huge white canvas, and you have this unstoppable urge to fill the canvas with color. Red and white and blue. ~ Christo

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work. ~ Emilé Zola

The art of art... is simplicity. ~ Walt Whitman

There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and intelligence transform a yellow spot into the sun. ~ Pablo Picasso

Artists are magicians and I definitely think John Lennon was a Wizard. ~ Yoko Ono

The artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition—and therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty and pain. ~ Joseph Conrad

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life. ~ M.C. Richards

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others. ~ Albert Camus

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in. ~ Amy Lowell

Art is anything you can get away with. ~ Terence Trent D’Arby

How many are silenced, because in order to get to their art they would have to scream? ~ Ann Clark

Art is a harmony parallel with nature. ~ Paul Cézanne

The first mistake of art is to assume that it is serious. ~ Lester Bank

Art is either plagiarism or revolution. ~ Paul Gauguin