Art Process Quotes & Sayings

The work of art is above all a process of creation. — Paul Klee

Ruskin's much-derided moral theory of art was part of an attempt to show that this human activity, which we value so highly, engaged the whole of human personality. His insistence on the sanctity of nature was part of an attempt to develop Goethe's intuition that form cannot be put together in the mind by an additive process, but is to be deduced from the laws of growth in living organisms, and their resistance to the elements. — Kenneth Clark

Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a sylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry as the art of the word made me yawn. I also understood that I couldn't sustain myself very long on the poems of others. I had to go out from myself and literature, look around in the world and lay hold of other spheres of reality. — Zbigniew Herbert

Art is a thing where, the least likely thing that you think is going to be art, is precisely the thing that is going to be art. And I would even hold that true to a reality television show ... maybe the entire overarching process of the show actually exists as an artistic structure. — Richard Phillips

Art is in the process of redefining our relationships to each other ... The creative minds are bubbling, bubbling, and I know the soup that's coming up next time is going to feed a lot more of us. — Ruby Dee

In any evolutionary process, even in the arts, the search for novelty becomes corrupting. — Kenneth E. Boulding

There's a difference between the 'art' of writing and the 'craft' of writing. Art is subjective, its beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, but craft is objective. There is a right way and a wrong way to craft. — Gerard De Marigny

I am an artist. Any artist knows that their creations, their pieces must express an array of human emotion and experience. From the juvenile and innocent, to the erotic and the dangerous, and everything in between. Because Life is all of these things and more. It is the artist's divine purpose to reflect what Experience has shown them and others. What truly sets us apart from each other is whether or not we truly know ourselves enough to reflect objectively; but, through our own unique 'voice'. — Solange Nicole

No, I never had any dreams. The process of art is a dream in itself. The artist just doesn't ... you work out something. It's yours. You don't have to go to sleep to do that. You do that on the canvas. — LeRoy Neiman

Many errors and tragic disillusionments are possible in this process of emotional recognition, since a sense of life, by itself, is not a reliable cognitive guide. And if there are degrees of evil, then one of the most evil consequences of mysticism - in terms of human suffering - is the belief that love is a matter of "the heart," not the mind, that love is an emotion independent of reason, that love is blind and impervious to the power of philosophy. — Ayn Rand

After painting comes Sculpture, a very noble art, but one that does not in the execution require the same supreme ingenuity as the art of painting, since in two most important and difficult particulars, in foreshortening and in light and shade, for which the painter has to invent a process, sculpture is helped by nature. Moreover, Sculpture does not imitate color which the painter takes pains to attune so that the shadows accompany the lights. — Leonardo Da Vinci

Creating any type of art is an actual experience inasmuch as it affects the artist's life. The experience of writing not only merges disparate parts of the mind, this expressive experience affects the evolution of the self. Writing is not about the process of creating a piece of literature; rather, writing is an artistic, transformative experience. All opposite forces in human nature are reconciled in the unity of consciousness, which is why the most fully developed human being strives to makes their unconsciousness thoughts, feelings, and prejudices conscious through acts of contemplation. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Art is frightening. Art isn't pretty. Art isn't painting. Art isn't something you hang on the wall. Art is what we do when we're truly alive. An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artist takes it (all of it, the work, the process, the feedback from those we seek to connect with) personally. — Seth Godin

Creation is not a moment of inspiration but a lifetime of endurance. The drawers of the world are full of things begun. Unfinished sketches, pieces of invention, incomplete product ideas, notebooks with half-formulated hypotheses, abandoned patents, partial manuscripts. Creating is more monotony than adventure. It is early mornings and late nights: long hours doing work that will likely fail or be deleted or erased - a process without progress that must be repeated daily for years. Beginning is hard, but continuing is harder. Those who seek a glamorous life should not pursue art, science, innovation, invention, or anything else that needs new. Creation is a long journey where most turns are wrong and most ends are dead. The most important thing creators do is work. The most important thing they don't do is quit. The — Kevin Ashton

Everything worthwhile ends. We are in the perpetual process now: creation, maturation, cessation. — John Logan

We're built to deal with death, disease, failure, struggle, heartbreak, problems. It's what separates us from the animals and why we envy and love animals so much. We're aware of it all and have to process it. The way we each handle being human is where all the good stories, jokes, art, wisdom, revelations, and bullshit come from. — Marc Maron

I intend to create a new work of art, all my own. A still life, of sorts. You three will be vital parts of the process. Rejoice in your good fortune." In the sterile environment of the laboratory, with the cold assistance of his personal robot guards, Erasmus proceeded to vivisect the trio of victims, oblivious to their screams. "I want to get to the heart of the matter," he quipped, "the lifeblood of it. — Brian Herbert

Art is the human process that produces by the way (it is not its only or ultimate object) Secondary Belief. — J.R.R. Tolkien

I'm so involved in the process that sometimes at the end of a day, I can look at the piece on my desk and really wonder how it got there. At other times, I really have to struggle with a piece to turn it into what I had in mind. Sometimes, I give up and leave it half finished to work on something else. Then in a few days, when I come back to it, I can see what it wants to be ... which sometimes is not at all what I had in mind. When I just let that happen, things seem to go more smoothly. — Wendy Froud

Even creating shit is hard to do. First, you need money to buy food. Then you have to chew it, eat it, and swallow. A complex process called digestion follows. Finally, you have to strain and excrete your foul smelling wonder into the world. Try doing that with a paint brush! — Jonathan Heatt

What happens when you combine your passion, strength and value? This is the process of creating true art. — J.R. Rim

About 1998, when 'Wide World of Sports' and the 'Footy Show' came to an end for me, I couldn't type. When I started architecture, it was a very aesthetic, creative, an almost art process, where lettering and thick line were how you expressed yourself on the paper. — Max Walker

The greatest opportunities for creative transformation are often lodged in our discontents. Art is an alchemical process that feeds on emotional energy. When we realize that a perfect equilibrium in our lives might not be the best basis for making art, then we can begin to re-vision our stress points. So rather than try to rid your life of tension, consider doing something more creative with it. — Shaun McNiff

The art of dharma practice requires commitment, technical accomplishment, and imagination. As with all arts, we will fail to realize its full potential if any of these three are lacking. The raw material of dharma practice is ourself and our world, which are to be understood and transformed according to the vision and values of the dharma itself. This is not a process of self- or world- transcendence, but one of self- and world- creation. — Stephen Batchelor

One of the beauties of art is that it reflects an artist's entire life. What I've learned over the past 30 years is really beginning to inform what I make. I hope that process continues until I die. — Andy Goldsworthy

Learning styles Visual - learn best by seeing Auditory - learn best by hearing Tactile - learn best by doing Oral - learn best by saying Social - learn best in groups Logical - learn best in linear process Imaginative - learn best through art, story, and image — John Ortberg

Truth to life, at the start, to be sure; yet once the process gets under way, truth to art is the greater allegiance — Julian Barnes

Emphasizing the body as art, these artists amplified the role of process over product and shifted from representation objects to presentational modes of action. — Kristine Stiles

I've totally learned in this process that 99% of the time, your gut is right, and you know what's right for you. I know exactly what's right for my career and for my art, and sometimes, even if the whole room is saying, 'Don't do that, don't do that,' you know that doing that is going to be good for you, in the long run. — Lorde

Poetry can be criticized only through poetry. A critique which itself is not a work of art, either in content as representation ofthe necessary impression in the process of creation, or through its beautiful form and in its liberal tone in the spirit of the old Roman satire, has no right of citizenship in the realm of art. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Merleau-Ponty's painting inhabits the same rhetoric as early cinema: it makes the invisible visible, or rather it makes visibility visible; it forms from the thresholds of the visible and invisible world, an order, mode, or aesthetic of visuality. Not only of the small or fast, but of visibility as such. The visuality of the visible and the invisible is found in the mixture of the body and its world, of your body and your world, all your worlds, all your bodies in this world and all those others. Painting is the process by which the visuality of the visible and invisible is made manifest: "Painting mixes up all our categories in laying out its oneiric universe of carnal essences, of effective likenesses, of mute meanings." Each painting is a universal archive, a picture of the universe, a universal image - and like a dream. — Akira Mizuta Lippit

I have this
here's this thing where it's going to sound sappy to you. I have this unbelievably like five-year-old's belief that art is just absolutely magic. And that good art can do things that nothing else in the solar system can do. And that the good stuff will survive, and get read, and that in the great winnowing process, the shit will sink and the good stuff will rise. — David Foster Wallace

Hitler's vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording ... Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science. — Aldous Huxley

Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career. 8
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. 9
There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. — T. S. Eliot

To be a parent is a great art. To give birth to children is nothing - any animal can do it; it is a natural, biological, instinctive process. To give birth to a child is nothing great, it is nothing special; it is very ordinary. But to be a parent is something extraordinary; very few people are really capable of being parents. — Osho

Here's another analogy. Human beings bring only a handful of facial features to the blueprint of how we look - two eyes, two eyebrows, a nose, a mouth, a pair of cheekbones, and two ears, all pasted onto a somewhat ovular-to-round face. That particular blueprint doesn't often vary much, either. Interestingly enough, this is about the same number of essential storytelling parts and milestones that each and every story needs to showcase in order to be successful. Now, consider this: With only these eleven variables to work with, ask yourself how often you see two people who look exactly alike. In a crowd of ten thousand faces, you would be able to differentiate each and every one of them, other than a set of twins or two in attendance. Where we humans are concerned, the miracle of originality resides in the Creator, who applies an engineering-driven process - eleven variables - to an artistic outcome. Where art is concerned, there is something to be learned from that. — Larry Brooks

PLEASE TELL ME YOU KNOW OF SYLVIA PLATH
Conventions bleed my soul
squeeze me old
wear me grey
like a headstone in transit.
It's tradition and form
fear of the unknown
driving me dead
in tight spaces darkly.
I cry aloud
but who can hear
when I stand alone
in the middle of an art show ... . — Chila Woychik

The process must be concealed from - non-existent for - the photographer, who by definition need think of the art in the taking and not in the making photographs ... In short, all that should be necessary to get a good picture is to take a good picture. — Edwin Land

Sannyas is the art of flying ... the art that stops the process of gravitation and starts the process of grace. All that is needed is a state of let-go. All that is needed is a readiness to be possessed by the upward dimension, a readiness to open to the sky. — Rajneesh

The world really changed after 9/11, not just in the tragic way, but in every way. So it took me a couple of years to even understand how my art form I could process any of this. When the world changed, eliciting laughter with subjects that were funny to me before 9/11 just didnt seem good enough. — Albert Brooks

My recommendation instead, however, is that we do not surrender questions of value, whether absolute matters of truth, goodness, and beauty or relative judgment of more or less truth, goodness, and beauty. With those questions to the fore, in fact, we can interrogate various other traditions and truly learn something that can improve our own. Perhaps the Presbyterians really do know more than we do about due process in church government. Perhaps the Orthodox really do know some things we do not about iconography. Perhaps the Mennonites really can teach us the meaning of 'enough.' Perhaps the Pentecostals can help liberate us from dull and disembodied worship. Baptists who have learned to improve their procedures from Presbyterians, their art from the Orthodox, their finances from the Mennonites, and their worship from the Pentecostals do not therefore become worse Baptists but better ones. And so around the ecumenical circle, no? — John G. Stackhouse Jr.

No man ever reached to excellence in any one art or profession without having passed through the slow and painful process of study and preparation. — Horace

An invisible, yet active current of mental energy, underscores any book as well as any other form of artistic creation. A creative burst of psychological energy ignites any creative project. The emotional energy that underlies the artistic work propels it forward endowing it with articulation, texture, rhythm, and movement. When the expressive energy of the artist flags, the work comes to a stopping point and it takes on its final composition. — Kilroy J. Oldster

For the benefit of kids, "chart art" pulls them away from electronic screens, both big and small. They can enjoy pencils and colors in their hands, while they create pictures that evolve on paper. "Griddles" will get their thought process going, along with problem solving, and discovery - not to mention hand-eye coordination and motor development. It's also a learning tool for numbers and letters on the printed page — Lorraine Holnback Brodek

A basic law: the more you practice the art of thankfulness, the more you have to be thankful for. This, of course, is a fact. Thankfulness does tend to reproduce in kind. The attitude of gratitude revitalizes the entire mental process by activating all other attitudes, thus stimulating creativity. — Norman Vincent Peale

Art is a process of concentration. It is both the distilled essence and the commentary upon otherwise mundane activities and reflections. Musical notes must be charged, must gather more than one and the surface meaning, must reveal audible and "inaudible" connections to other notes, patterns, and meaning, either by way of affinity or contrast. — Russell Sherman

Art has something to do with beauty. The act of creating beauty pulls the portion of your soul to the surface that is true to the way you were created. — Timothy Simpson

The Shah regarded politics as the province of demagoguery, an art in which only charlatans could excel. He had no time for what he saw as the tedious process of achieving consensus through debate and discussion and tried to justify his solitary exercise of power by insisting it was what Iran needed to catch up with lost time. He believed he was more patriotic than anyone else and needed no advice on how best to promote and protect the highest interests of the nation. — Mohammed Reza Pahlavi

I love coffee because for a few minutes every day I put all of my focus and energy into the creation of something great. I enjoy it for a few minutes, but then it's gone. Until tomorrow when I start the whole process all over again. On any given day, that morning cup might be your last, so you'd better give it your all. Making a great cup of coffee is a perfect work of Zen art. The topic of this book may be making coffee, but the sub-text message I want to put out into the universe is one of always taking the time to appreciate the small things and never take anyone for granted, whether it's your spouse, your friends, your parents, the barista that makes your espresso, or the farmer that grows the coffee beans. Treat every conversation and every relationship as if it, just like that perfect cup of coffee, were a precious work of temporary Zen art. Because it is. — Steven D. Ward

Warning:
This data storage unit, or "book," has been designed to reprogram the human brain, allowing it to replicate the lost art that was once called reading. It is a simple adjustment and there will be no negative or harmful effects from this process.
What you are doing: "Reading" Explained
Each sheet is indelibly printed with information and the sheets are visually scanned from left to right, and from top to bottom.
This scanned information is passed through the visual cortex directly into the brain, where it can then be accessed just like any other data. — Mike A. Lancaster

The design process, at its best, integrates the aspirations of art, science, and culture. — Jeff Smith

What gets me excited by the process of making art is how unrelated elements get fused, which is a formal process. The content is the easy part. Putting it together in a way that's cohesive is the challenge. — Jordan Wolfson

Now, to describe the process of the Wrapped Reichstag, which went from 1971 to '95, there is an entire book about that, because each one of our projects has its own book. The book is not an art book, meaning it's not written by an art historian. — Christo

Sometimes life is hard. Things go wrong - in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do: make good art ... Someone on the internet thinks what you're doing is stupid or evil or it's all been done before: make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and it doesn't even matter. Do what only you can do best: make good art. — Neil Gaiman

Life, raw life, the kind we lead every day, whether it leads us into the past or the future, has the curious property of not seeming real enough. We have a need, however illusive, for a life that is more real than life. It lies in the imagination. Fiction would seem to be the way it is processed into reality. If this were not so we should have little excuse for art. Life, raw life, would be more than satisfactory in itself. But it seems to be the nature of man to transform - himself, if possible, and then the world around him - and the technique of this transformation is what we call art. — Wright Morris

Use the creative process - singing, writing, art, dance, whatever - to get to know yourself better. — Catie Curtis

The discovery in art is often gradual, a process of minor discoveries riddled with uncertainties and the potential for making that which is discovered vanish before your eyes, like a mirage. — Geoff Dyer

Thinking is seeing ... Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things. — Honore De Balzac

Stories are the collective wisdom of everyone who has ever lived. Your job as a storyteller is not simply to entertain. Nor is it to be noticed for the way you turn a phrase. You have a very important job
one of the most important. Your job is to let people know that everyone shares their feelings
and that these feelings bind us. Your job is a healing art, and like all healers, you have a responsibility. Let people know they are not alone. You must make people understand that we are all the same. — Brian McDonald

Most people view the artistic process as something of a mystery. Leverage that, and engage your prospective clients with good stories. For many, buying art is their escape from the real world. Make it entertaining and enjoyable. — Cory Trepanier

Ever since his first ecstasy or vision of Christminster and its possibilities, Jude had meditated much and curiously on the probable sort of process that was involved in turning the expressions of one language into those of another. He concluded that a grammar of the required tongue would contain, primarily, a rule, prescription, or clue of the nature of a secret cipher, which, once known, would enable him, by merely applying it, to change at will all words of his own speech into those of the foreign one. His childish idea was, in fact, a pushing to the extremity of mathematical precision what is everywhere known as Grimm's Law - an aggrandizement of rough rules to ideal completeness. Thus he assumed that the words of the required language were always to be found somewhere latent in the words of the given language by those who had the art to uncover them, such art being furnished by the books aforesaid. — Thomas Hardy

One of the core reasons for creating 'Station to Station' was to provide a space for exploration and cultural friction between different mediums. It should be natural for mediums like music, film and art to cross over, and we wanted to empower that process. — Doug Aitken

When the spirit of child's play enters into the creative process, it's a wonderful force and something to be nurtured. — Joni Mitchell

Art and science have so much in common - the process of trial and error, finding something new and innovative, and to experiment and succeed in a breakthrough. — Peter M. Brant

But it is not time constraints alone that produce such fragmented and discontinuous language. When a television show is in process, it is very nearly impermissible to say, "Let me think about that" or "I don't know" or "What do you mean when you say ... ?" or "From what sources does your information come?" This type of discourse not only slows down the tempo of the show but creates the impression of uncertainty or lack of finish. It tends to reveal people in the act of thinking, which is as disconcerting and boring on television as it is on a Las Vegas stage. Thinking does not play well on television, a fact that television directors discovered long ago. There is not much to see in it. It is, in a phrase, not a performing art. But television demands a performing art. — Neil Postman

As for mending, I think its good to take the time to fix something rather than throw it away. Its an antidote to wastefulness and to the need for immediate gratification. You get to see a whole process through, beginning to end, nothing abstract about it. You'll always notice the fabric scar, of course, but there's an art to mending. If you're careful, the repair can actually add to the beauty of the think because it is a testimony to its worth. — Elizabeth Berg

Let us summarize these three points more concisely:

(a) The rejection of art as a mere emotional, individualistic, and romantic affair.
(b) "Objective" work, undertaken with the silent hope that the end product will nevertheless eventually be regarded as a work of art.
(c) Consciously goal-directed work in architecture, which will have a concise artistic effect on the basis of well-preparated objective-scientific criteria.

Such an architecture will actively raise the general standard of living. This represents the dialectic of our development process, which purports to arrive at the affirmative by negation - a process similar to melting down old iron and forging it into new steel. — El Lissitzky

For something to become a work of art, a labeling process must take place that requires three participants: an artist who produces an apt object, a client or public, and a critic or connoisseur who mediates between the artist and the public to assure them of the artness of the thing. If I make a painting, it is not sufficient for the painting to be "art" that I consider it so, nor even that you, my friend and neighbor, admire it and hang it on your wall; it must be certified as art by competent authority and exhibited in the institutionally appropriate place, a gallery or museum. — Wyatt MacGaffey

I'm interested in art, and I think about the process of making art. It's part of my personality, my experience of the world, so it ends up in the movies. It's where my head is. — Charlie Kaufman

Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) - how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at see, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. Catastrophe has become art; but this is no reducing process. It is freeing, enlarging, explaining. Catastrophe has become art: that is, after all, what it is for. — Julian Barnes

This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation that is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places - the activities that are intimately associated with boredom - are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeated stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained. — Walter Benjamin

The art of writing involves making as many cups of tea as you can in the time available for writing. Then adding extra time for writing ... — Alan Dapre

If you seek to develop the mind fully, for the enlightenment process, you will benefit if your career is related to computer science, law, medicine, or the arts. — Frederick Lenz

Writing, like any art, is a continuing process of discovering the infinite possibilities of Life. — Hubert Selby Jr.

Creativity can replace conformity as the primary mode of social being ... We can cling to that which is passing, or has already passed, or we can remain accessible to-even surrender to-the creative process, without insisting that we know in advance the ultimate outcome for us, our institutions, or our planet. To accept this challenge is to cherish freedom, to embrace life, and to find meaning. — Stephen Nachmanovitch

I never demonstrate how art should be made or what the outcome should look like. Instead, give kids the tools and the materials to make their own art. Have them experience the process. — Jerry Pinkney

art is
a mode of stalking — Ron Silliman

We are the ORIGIN of our art, its homeland. Viewed this way, ORIGINALITY is the process of remaining true to ourselves. — Julia Cameron

Innovation is an evolutionary process, so it's not necessary to be radical all the time. — Marc Jacobs

Pop is everything art hasn't been for the last two decades ... It springs newborn out of a boredom with the finality and over-saturation of Abstract-Expressionism, which, by its own esthetic logic, is the END of art, the glorious pinnacle of the long pyramidal creative process. Stifled by this rarefied atmosphere, some young painters turn back to some less exalted things like Coca-Cola, ice-cream sodas, big hamburgers, super-markets and 'EAT' signs. They are eye-hungry; they pop ... — Robert Indiana

At it's essence, art is an alchemical process. Alchemy is a process of transformation. — Julia Cameron

I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process. — Henry James

Let's talk of a system that transforms all the social organisms into a work of art, in which the entire process of work is included ... something in which the principle of production and consumption takes on a form of quality. It's a Gigantic project. — Joseph Beuys

Thought and cognition are not the same. Thought, the source of art works, is manifest without transformation or transfiguration in all great philosophy, whereas the chief manifestation of the cognitive processes, by which we acquire and store up knowledge, is the sciences. Cognition always pursues a definite aim, which can be set by practical considerations as well as by "idle curiosity"; but once this aim is reached, the cognitive process has come to an end. Thought, on the contrary, has neither an end nor an aim outside itself, and it does not even produce results; not only the utilitarian philosophy of homo faber but also the men of action and the lovers of results in the sciences have never tired of pointing out how entirely "useless" thought is - as useless, indeed, as the works of art it inspires. — Hannah Arendt

The job is what you do when you are told what to do. The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed.
Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can.
The job might be difficult, it might require skill, but it's a job.
Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people.
I call the process of doing your art 'the work.' It's possible to have a job and do the work, too. In fact, that's how you become a linchpin.
The job is not the work. — Seth Godin

When it comes to my art work I would say that I am a perfectionist, although my sketchbook, and my process, is a mess. — Noma Bar

The voice of painterly integrity spoke to me. And the idea was that one would find this anguish, or whatever, and construct it into images that would appear. You already feel very ill and you're trying to put this riddle together because it is the prescription for health. I believe in art as a spiritual health-giving process, not just some style. — Malcolm Morley

A work of art is said to be perfect in proportion as it does not remind the spectator of the process by which it was created. — Henry Theodore Tuckerman

I really wanted to get into this art school about two years before I started working at the Grille. I applied and waited. But when the acceptance letter arrived, my heart had done some changing so that being molded by God was far more exciting than the acceptance.... I changed in the meantime. The thing that was so important to me when I first wanted it wasn't as vital when it happened. God had changed my heart in the process." (Buck) — Alice J. Wisler

I probably sensed the serious formality of the ceremonies and felt what others were feeling then. Looking back, I'd guess that it had opened up a gaping hole in my psyche. In the process of creating art, I might be trying to fill that hole, or to reduce its depth, or to make it feel less hollow. I think that making art could have helped from that moment on. — Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook

Bringing a novel to light - revealing the form and cadence, shadows and demeanor of a protagonist constructed from thin air - linking scenes and synchronicity across translucent time - holding up a glass brimming with chilled, never-tasted liquid, then sipping from it with intoxicated focus - allowing lovers to make a perilous mess of things, fall apart and nakedly come back together again - looking through conjured windows deep into someone else's snow-bound solitude, feeling utterly alone yet being all-connected: this is not writing. It's world-creating.

It's raw, exposed dreaming. It's humbling. At first too personal and intimate to share, it evolves like a child into a life of its own until I have no say in what comes next.

It's what I wake at 4am to say Yes to, the spinning possibility of a new story relentlessly commanding me to write it down so it can whirl in your experience. — Laurie Perez

A Classical style ... is the syllogism of art, the only legitimate process from one world to another. Classicism is not the manner of any fixed age or of any fixed country; it is a constant state of the artistic mind. It is a temper of security and satisfaction and patience. — James Joyce

When I start doing a body of work I feel vulnerable, fearful. If I stopped trusting the process, I would stop doing art. — Wanda Koop

If the image was sketched onto the canvas and spontaneously drawn, colour would often be restrained and unfree ... The most important and the most difficult liberation process we went trough, the one that has distinguished our art, was the freeing of colour, the transition to a painterly spontaneity. — Asger Jorn

I can certainly throw out some observation about the process of creating which may be of use. Firstly, it's the best & the worst of worlds, because the only fuel you have to make the fire blaze on the page / screen is the stuff of your own being. An artist consumes his or herself in the act of making art. I can feel that consumption even now, sitting here at my desk at the end of a working day. In order to generate the ideas that I have set on the page for the last 10 or 11 hours I have burned the fuel of my own history. This is, obviously a double-edged sword. In order to give, the artist must take from himself. That's the deal. And it's very important to me that the work I do is the best I can make it, because I know what is being burned up to create. As the villain of Sacrament says: living & dying, we feed the fire. — Clive Barker

There seem to be two causes of the deterioration of the arts. What are they? Wealth, I said, and poverty. How do they act? The process is as follows: When a potter becomes rich, will he, think you, any longer take the same pains with his art? Certainly not. He will grow more and more indolent and careless? Very true. And the result will be that he becomes a worse potter? Yes; he greatly deteriorates. — Plato

To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experiences of shaping that artwork. The viewers' concerns are not your concerns (although it'd dangerously easy to adopt their attitudes.) Their job is wahtever it is: to be moved by art, to be entertained by it, to make a killing off it, whatever. Your job is to learn to work on your work. — David Bayles

If 'formulaic' is somebody who is unlikely to succeed starting down a process and succeeding - then isn't that what most films are about? And art films are about people who aren't likely to succeed and then don't succeed. — Ridley Scott

What we also need to have a discussion on the philosophy of art: so we must ask what is it that we want in the first place? Is it just about saying and doing whatever you want, or is it about something more? We should let the artist be free, but we must also question how exactly he deals with freedom. Is it arts for elevation or arts for destruction? Is there dignity in the process? — Tariq Ramadan

As an artist, one doesn't know what is real. And so there's a search and a process of trying to locate something that feels or appears or somehow resonates with us on a deeper level. This is why art is such an interesting business to be in. — Chris Martin