Quotes & Sayings About Drawing Art

There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it. — Margaret Atwood

I have learned that what I have not drawn I have never really seen, and that when I start drawing an ordinary thing, I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle. — Frederick Frank

I've been very influenced by Inuit art especially some drawings and watercolors I've seen. — Marcel Dzama

Drawing is the true test of art. — Horace

Drawing is the cornerstone of the graphic, plastic arts. Drawing is the coordination of line, tone, and color symbols into formations that express the artist's thought. — John French Sloan

When I was three or four, I was really good at drawing and painting, and everyone used to say, "You're going to go to art college." I didn't really know what that meant. — Noel Fielding

I design all my sets. With my tour and my album artwork, I co-design that with people who are better at drawing than me. But I've got a good imagination. I went to art school so I understand how to communicate my ideas. — Paloma Faith

It was amazing what an hour with her sketchpad could do for her mood. She was sure that the lines she drew with her black marker were going to save her years of worry lines in the future. — Victoria Kahler

I sometimes set myself thinking and imagining that I find amongst men but one single art or science, and that is drawing or painting, all others being members proceeding therefrom. — Michelangelo

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence. — Henri Matisse

Instead of chasing the idea of truth, what we should be doing is embracing the medium of drawing and using it for a purpose that fulfils our needs as an artist or designer. — Peter Stanyer

There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing. — Toni Morrison

In every art we are always obliged to return to the accepted means of expression, the conventional language of the art. What is a black-and-white drawing but a convention to which the beholder has become so accustomed that with his mind's eye he sees a complete equivalent in the translation from nature? — Eugene Delacroix

When I was young, I wanted to be a writer or painter. I was always writing stories, and I excelled at drawing. My teachers encouraged my art work. When I was 9 or 10, I began learning piano and started writing music. — Bat For Lashes

The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards. — William Butler

I was always interested in drawing and creating, but it never really occurred to me that I could pursue art as my profession until my mid twenties. From all I had heard from other people, art was just something you do as a hobby in between your real work and real jobs. — Julie Dillon

She was a drawing that hadn't been colored. — Lauren DeStefano

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere. — G.K. Chesterton

Drawing is the art of being able to leave an accurate record of
the experience of what one isn't, of what one doesn't know. A
great drawer is either confirming beautifully what is commonplace
or probing authoritatively the unknown.
::: Brett Whiteley ::: — Brett Whiteley

Let every young man and woman be warned by my example, and understand that good handwriting is a necessary part of education. I am now of the opinion that children should first be taught the art of drawing before learning how to write. Let the child learn his letters by observation as he does different objects, such as flowers, birds, etc., and let him learn handwriting only after he has learnt to draw objects. He will then write a beautifully formed hand. — Mahatma Gandhi

What follows is the sum and substance of a remarkable year in a great artist's life -
Alexander Wainwright. He was at the pinnacle of his career when his art took a strange turn and I began to fear he had become possessed by some devil. But I was only beginning to understand the power of his passionate and hungry spirit, which nearly devoured him in his search for his new art - and his new life.

James Helmsworth, [art dealer for Alexander Wainwright] in The Drawing Lesson.

Enter for the giveaway of ten autographed copies of The Drawing Lesson, the first in The Trilogy of Remembrance starting on July 31st until August 31st, 2014. — Mary E. Martin

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating: It is either good or bad. — Salvador Dali

The modern tendency towards increasing specialization in all branches of research and scholarship has discouraged comparative studies of the arts; and what we seldom do we generally distrust. But our distrust of analogies was not shared by the sixteenth century, which inherited from antiquity a habit of drawing parallels as a matter of course. — John Shearman

Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature. — O. Henry

Drawing is the honesty of the art. — Salvador Dali

And after drawing comes composition. A well-composed painting is half done — Pierre Bonnard

Music isn't just for professionals. We delegate all of our music and our dancing and our art to professionals. It's silly. We should be doing our own dancing and drawing. — Linda Ronstadt

There are no bad drawings.
Drawings are experiences.
The more you draw, the more experienced you'll get.
In fact, you'll learn more from bad or unpredictable or weird experiences than from those that go exactly as you'd hoped and planned.
So let it go.
Release your ego's desire for perfection.
Take risks.
Stretch.
Grow.
Create as much as you can, whenever you can. — Danny Gregory

To spend time observing, without drawing, thinking, without drawing, or feeling, without drawing, is the misfortune of nonartists. — Nick Meglin

The first things to study are form and values. For me, these are the things that are the basics of what is serious in art. — Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Technique should be taught, not as an end in itself, but as something
related to individual expression, as a means toward an end. One cannot
separate technique from expression. There is only expression. — Kimon Nicolaides

I like a girl with a substantial bottom,' said Renoir, drawing in the air the size bottom he preferred. — Christopher Moore

Every society and religion has rules, for both have moral laws. And the essence of morality consists, as in art, of drawing the line somewhere. — Huston Smith

To forestall misunderstandings: there is value in creating and enjoying art. To many people, drawing, painting, sculpting, singing, and playing a musical instrument are vital forms of self-expression, and their lives would be poorer without them. People produce art in all cultures and in all kinds of situations, even when they cannot satisfy their basic physical needs. Other people enjoy seeing art. In a world in which everyone had enough to eat, basic health care, adequate sanitation, and a place at school for each of their children, there would be no problem about donating to museums and other institutions that offer an opportunity to see original works of art to all who wish to see them, and (more important, in my view) the opportunity to create art to those who lack opportunities to express themselves in this way. Sadly, we don't live in that world, at least not yet. — Peter Singer

I paint; I'm a woman but I don't paint china. The first time I got a canvas I felt free. Art is overreaction to life. I love these early drawings; they show my innocent beginnings in a small town. Life is a sentence
you live it out. Maybe these portraits jump out at you too much. People like things that conform. — Alice Neel

I paint; I draw and paint - I've been doing that since I was in third grade, drawing realistically and then changing to abstract art. That was my first creative thing before guitar or comedy. — Steven Wright

Because fashion essentially is art, and as an artist and someone who is also a musician and an artist in regards to drawing and painting, anything I can do that expresses my feelings is something I'm really drawn to. — Ruby Rose

All art should have a certain mystery and should make demands on the spectator. Giving a sculpture or a drawing too explicit a title takes away part of that mystery so that the spectator moves on to the next object, making no effort to ponder the meaning of what he has just seen. Everyone thinks that he or she looks but they don't really, you know. — Henry Moore

I started drawing comics, and at first I was very influenced by the whole pop art movement, you know, Batman was on TV and all that pop art stuff? But then my next influence was in 1966, or maybe it was '65, I don't know. Somebody showed me a copy of the "East Village Other", which was an underground newspaper.And ... it had comics in it! And they weren't superhero comics. — Trina Robbins

This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution. — Edvard Munch

Making art requires a degree of intentionality. All works of art require a contemplative individual drawing from their bank of knowledge and immersion into the realms of memory and imagination in order to make an outward, communicative expression. Only human beings can draw upon the dialectical tension between memory and imagination to create artistic renderings. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Art isn't about drawing; it's about learning to see. What organization doesn't need this ability? — Edwin Catmull

I like charcoal drawing a lot. I'm not very good, but I always find myself buying canvases and paints whenever I'm on location, because I always have this ambition to fill the hotel room I'm in and turn it into an art studio. — Ben Schnetzer

Provided with a case of pencils, and some sheets of paper, I used to take a seat apart from them, near the window, and busy myself in sketching fancy vignettes representing any scene that happened momentarily to shape itself in the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of imagination: a glimpse of sea between two rock; the rising moon, and a ship crossing its disc; a group of reeds and water-flags, and a naiad's head, crowned with lotus-flowers, rising out of them; an elf sitting in a hedge-sparrow's nest, under a wreath of hawthorn bloom. — Charlotte Bronte

THE ART OF DRAWING YOU
In a bed by the Gulf of Corinth, a woman contemplates by firelight the profile of her sleeping lover.
On the wall, his shadow flickers.
The lover, who lies by her side, will leave. At dawn he will leave to war, to death. And his shadow, his traveling companion, will leave with him and with him will die.
It is still dark. The woman takes coal out of the embers and draws on the wall the outline of his shadow.
Those lines will not leave.
They will not embrace her, and she knows it. But they will not leave. — Eduardo Galeano

The neutrality and clarity of an engineering drawing is a better model for teaching about art than all the uncontrollable drivel about the cabbala and metaphysics and the ecstasy of sainthood. — George Grosz

I think there were some programs but in those days art programs were kind of basic. You would do drawing and simple collage type work. But at home I was beginning to get interested in doing my own thing as well. I'm not sure what inspired this, but I became very interested in decorating things. — Paul Smith

The whole point of art school is that you're going to be able to have nudes all day long and a teacher who is there to move you. It's great. I did a tiny bit in the one school in Paris, and it was wonderful because you'd have a nude taking a crazy position, and you'd have 10 seconds to do a drawing. Then you'd do a one-minute drawing. — Lou Doillon

Art was always my thing. I had an art scholarship before I had a football scholarship. I'm a left-handed, right-brained, painting-drawing guy. That was always my skill. — Terry Crews

Magic happens when the wand of language strikes a stone and makes it melt, touches a spindle and turns it into gold, or taps a trunk and makes it fly. By drawing on a syntax of enchantment that conjures fluidity, ethereality, flimsiness, and transparency, writers turn solidity into resplendent airy lightness to produce miracles of linguistic transubstantiation.

What is the effect of that beauty? How do readers respond to words that create that beauty? In a world that has discredited that particular attribute and banished it from high art, beauty has nonetheless held on to its enlivening power in children's books. It draws readers in, then draws them to understand the fictional worlds it lights up. — Maria Tatar

The art of drawing which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing ... should be taught to every child just as writing is. — John Ruskin

A critic in my house sees some paintings. Greatly perturbed, he asks for my drawings. My drawings? Never! They are my letters, my secrets. — Paul Gauguin

Writing, like drawing is an art, and whatever conveys the meaning is justified. — Maxwell Perkins

You know, when I was younger I was into all kinds of art - drawing, painting, all that stuff. But I played drums, played piano forever. — Shooter Jennings

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser. — John W. Gardner

On the Rules of Perspective
A bad trick. Mistake. Dishonesty. These are the views of Braque. Why? Braque rejected perspective. Why? Someone who spends his life drawing profiles will end up believing that man has one eye, Braque felt. Braque wanted to take full possession of objects. He said as much in published interviews. Watching the small shiny planes of the landscape recede out of his grasp filled Braque with loss so he smashed them. Nature morte, said Braque. — Anne Carson

I say that the art of sculpture is eight times as great as any other art based on drawing, because a statue has eight views and they must all be equally good. — Benvenuto Cellini

Many museums are drawing audiences with art that is ostensibly more entertaining than stuff that just sits and invites contemplation. Interactivity, gizmos, eating, hanging out, things that make noise - all are now the norm, often edging out much else. — Jerry Saltz

As Oscar Wilde once wrote, "Morality, like art, means drawing a line somewhere." The question is: where is the line? — Dan Ariely

A drawing is a translation. That is to say each mark on the paper is consciously realted, not only to the real or imagined "model", but also to every mark and space already set out on the paper. Thus a drawn or painted image is woven together by the energy (or the lassitude, wen the drawing is weak) of countless judgements [sic]. Every time a figuration is evoked in a drawing, everything about it has been mediated by consciousness, either intuitively or systematically. — John Berger

Do you know that drawing with words is also an art ... ? — Vincent Van Gogh

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow. — Kurt Vonnegut

When I get to the drawing, I really enjoy taking a big chunk of time and working on the drawing and nothing else. That allows me to make sure that I'm really challenging the art, making each picture as interesting as I can. — Bill Watterson

I enjoy the art, and I enjoy drawing. I think my printing to this day looks like the printing right out of a comic book. — Nathan Fillion

Express yourself through your art - whether it's your drawings in a sketchpad, tattoos on your skin, the shade of your lipstick, or the clothes that you wear. — Kat Von D.

Just draw 'cause you love it, you know, I think that's why you should be doing it. You should always be doing art for the right reasons, um, and with the best intentions. Anything at all is completely possible and I think that's what I like about drawing. I think it's just really fun. You can do anything you want. And that's part of, like, what's really enjoyable about it ... is kind of losing yourself in it. — Gerard Way

Like art, political action gives shape and expression to the things we fear as well as to those we desire. It is a creative process, drawing on the power to imagine as well as to act. — Madeleine M. Kunin

Ruskin's interest in beauty and in its possession led him to five central conclusions. First, beauty was the result of a number of complex factors that affected the mind both psychologically and visually. Second, humans had an innate tendency to respond to beauty and to desire to possess it. Third, there were many lower expressions of this desire for possession (including, as we have seen, buying souvenirs and carpets, carving one's name on a pillar and taking photographs). Fourth, there was only one way to possess beauty properly, and that was by understanding it, by making oneself conscious of the factors (psychological and visual) responsible for it. And last, the most effective means of pursuing this conscious understanding was by attempting to describe beautiful places through art, by writing about or drawing them, irrespective of whether one happened to have any talent for doing so. — Alain De Botton

... she wore a masterpiece smile with smudges of paint and graphite across her cheek, and her eyes were a Jackson Pollock painting. — Ellie Lieberman

Drawing is the basis of art. A bad painter cannot draw. But one who draws well can always paint. — Arshile Gorky

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises. — Samuel Butler

I am now of the opinion that children should first be taught the art of drawing before learning how to write. — Mahatma Gandhi

Relationships are as much a work of art as a drawing. It takes time. It takes a lot of erasing, smudging, and redoing. In the end, it's usually worth it. Sometimes, it's not. — R.K. Ryals

It would be mistaken to suppose that any of the best photography is come at by intellection; it is like all art, essentially the result of an intuitive process, drawing on all that the artist is rather than on anything he thinks, far less theorizes about. — Helen Levitt

My aim is to communicate with the last man in the audience. Art minus communication is meaningless. The term 'abhinaya' is not just facial expressions. It means drawing the spectator to an idea. Look at the modern advertisements. It's contemporary abhinaya. But one who creates should know what has to be completely and what has to be suggestively portrayed. That is ethical aesthetics. The Natyasastra says a production must be such that a family should be able to watch it together. — Padma Subrahmanyam

Drawing is the necessary beginning of everything [in Art], and not having it, one has nothing. — Giorgio Vasari

This is not exactly what I had in mind when I agreed to miss lunch," Alex said grumpily forty minutes later. He shifted uncomfortably and tried to see what I was doing.
I stared him back into submission. "Wait."
The art room is usually empty Thursday afternoons except for me. Ms. Evers leaves early to teach her UArts class and looks up.Of course, I am one of the few entrusted with the Secret Location of the Key.
A few feet away from where I sat perched on a stool,Alex was posed on the anchient chaise we use for figure drawing. It's a relic, probably from the Palladinetti years: chipped mahogany and dusty velvet, what little remaining stuffing pokes out from a century of holes. I was probably luxurious once. Now it's like sitting on a slightly smelly board. But I'd wanted to sketch Alex as I so often saw him, reclining with his head propped on one hand,listening or talking or coaxing me to put down the glass, already,Ella,and come here. — Melissa Jensen

If we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear - but the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented. — Edgar Allan Poe

I sketch the faces upside down because it's like drawing from the left side of the brain or the right side of the brain. I never took an art lesson in my life. — Stevie Nicks

'The Next Wave' started as a drawing for a new silkscreen fine art print. I ended up doing the prints digitally because the water-based inks were better for the environment than the oil based inks. So, I learned about the Epson digital printers to get the image I wanted. — John Van Hamersveld

In children's art class we sat in a ring of kindergarten chairs and drew three daffodils that had just been picked out of the yard; and while I was drawing, my sharpened yellow pencil and the cup of the yellow daffodil gave off wiffs just alike. That the pencil doing the drawing should give off the same smell of the flower it drew seemed part of the art lesson - as shouldn't it be? Children, like animals use all their sense to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way, all over again. Here and there, it's the same world. Or now and then we'll hear from an artist who's never lost it. — Eudora Welty

Fucking is an art. The mere fact of introducing the cock in the cunt and moving it in and out until the ejaculation of spunk is not art. True, it is fucking, but the difference between that way of doing it and the way it should be done, is like the difference between a child's first drawing and a picture by the world's greatest painter. — Anais Nin

We struggle against easel painting not because it is an aesthetic form of painting, but because it is not modern, for it does not succeed in bringing out the technical side, it is a redundant, exclusive art, and cannot be of any use to the masses. Hence we are struggling not against painting but against photography carried out as if it were an etching, a drawing, a picture in sepia or watercolor. — Alexander Rodchenko

I was always most interested in drawing - most of my childhood drawings are black-and-white line work. And when I kind of abandoned comics, through college and art school, I was doing a lot of painting. But once I started doing comics again, everything else just fell by the wayside. — Jeffrey Brown

Things like anatomy and drawing and design and color had pretty much been drop-kicked out of the curriculum in the '70s, when I was studying art, in favor of abstraction and minimalism. — David Small

I got into underground comics fairly early on and kind of wandered away from the superhero stuff, but I was an art student and I was drawing a lot as a kid. — Jonathan Lethem

want you, it's their loss," Grandma said. "Why don't we just wait and see what they say?" Ms. Donatello told me. "I have to go to the bathroom," Georgia said. I didn't want to talk anymore, so I just made like Leonardo the Silent and kept my mouth shut after that. Finally, the office door opened, and Mr. Crawley, the director of the school, came over to talk to us. I tried not to look like I wanted to disappear. Or self-destruct. Or both. "First of all, Rafe," he said, "you should know there are three things we look for in an applicant. One of those is experience. A lot of the students at Cathedral have been studying art since before they could write." "Sure," I said. "I get it. No problem." But he wasn't done yet. "The other two things we look for are talent and persistence," he said. "Not only is that portfolio of yours full of artistic promise, it's also just full. When I see that, I see a boy who would probably keep drawing whether anyone was paying attention or not. — James Patterson

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art) is never really finished; it is abandoned. — Brooke McEldowney

For centuries the writing-desk has contained sheets fit precisely for the communication of friends. Masters of language, poets of long ages, have turned from the sheet that endures to the sheet that perishes, pushing aside the tea-tray, drawing close to the fire (for letters are written when the dark presses around a bright red cave), and addressed themselves the task of reaching, touching, penetrating the individual heart. — Virginia Woolf

( ... ) photography opened up quite a little Pandora's box, kiddies. ( ... ) Once we no longer had to depend on drawing and painting to record our existence - once they became an option - they mutated ... into a form of expression. And Art for its own sake, God help us, was born. — Chip Kidd

I've always loved pinup art, and I've always enjoyed drawing women. I think it was a conscious decision that has resulted in me getting almost exclusive work on comics where the main character is female. — Adam Hughes

I think making a movie is like drawing or creating an art piece. The artwork reflects part of your personality, but not all. — Tony Jaa

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.
Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives ... .
You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what's inside you, and you have made your soul grow. — Kurt Vonnegut

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 Dali

Drawing is the art of taking a line for a walk. — Paul Klee

Did the great Creator first draw her in a masterpiece, (9) And then touch life into his art? Or did he make her in his mind alone, Drawing on beauty's every part? No - considering her singular perfection And her maker's true omnipotence, I suppose her some quite unique creation In femininity's treasure house. — Kalidasa

Do not fail, as you go on, to draw something every day, for no matter how little it is, it will be well worthwhile, and it will do you a world of good. — Cennino Cennini

And still, still, there is more to describe-
we paint because drawing breath is an agony
and exhaling an ecstasy
and somewhere in the space in-between
we think we once found a truth;
and the eternal part of us desires
to share this truth at all costs
only it's never quite how we pictured it,
and it's never quite received the way we want
and the paint drips with our own blood
the handles of our brushes are our own bones
our own tears become the words to our most beautiful love songs
and we know we'll never get it right before we die-

getting up every morning and facing our own limited truth
is a courage so divine
most men quell and women stay enslaved in silence. — Marie Anzalone

What attracted me was less art itself than the artist's life and all that it meant for me: the idea of creativity and freedom of expression and action. I had been attracted to painting and drawing for a long time, but it was not an irresistible passion; what I wanted, at all costs, was to escape the monotony of life. — Pierre Bonnard

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace. — Oscar Wilde