Quotes & Sayings About Traditional Art

My mom is a painter, so I've been doing drawings and paintings as early as I can remember. Then there was this gap where I was doing graffiti in high school and making as much [traditional] art. — Alec Monopoly

I wanted to make a traditional record that had a lot of art and showed my vulnerable side and showed things I'm passionate about. — Joe Nichols

Beautiful and minimalist, the traditional Japanese art of ikebana - arranging bouquets of cut flowers and leaves using very few elements - ideally corresponded to a form of expression I could transpose in a perfume. The smell of a rose early in the morning, damp, sprinkled with dew, delicate and light. — Jean-Claude Ellena

It is necessarily so, since every traditional art obeys a particular spiritual economy that limits its themes and means of expression, so that an abandonment of that economy almost immediately releases new and apparently unlimited artistic possibilities. — Titus Burckhardt

As Mayor, I will fully support my Arts Commission and its professional selection committees so that they can commission a full range of public art that is daring and, when appropriate, daringly traditional. — Gavin Newsom

Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned. — William Butler Yeats

In sharp contrasts to traditional art, modern art does not hide the fact that it is something made and produced: on the contrary, it underscores the fact. — Theodor Adorno

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

Great art - or good art - is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don't think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different. — Damien Hirst

The reason I fight for the arts as well as against hunger is because the arts are the qualitative way, are the effective way, are the traditional way we learn to make value decisions about who and what we are. — Harry Chapin

It isn't a club," I said calmly. "It's a walking stick."
"Six feet long."
"It's traditional Ozark folk art."
"With dents and nicks all over it."
I thought about it for a second. "I'm insecure?"
"Get a blanket." He held out his hand. I signed and passed my staff over to him. "Do I get a receipt?"
He took a notepad from his pocket and wrote on it. Then he passed it over to me. It read: Received, one six foot tall traditional Ozark walking club from Mr. Smart-Ass. — Jim Butcher

When I talk of primordial innocence, I hear it in Sufi music with the nay flute. I see it in Coptic icons, in most traditional art, particularly art of the American Indian. I find the texts extraordinarily beautiful and very childlike and very simple. I've been particularly interested in American Indian texts. — John Tavener

Bernard undoubtedly was truly concerned with the well-being of the poor ... but the approach here is again largely from a monastic standpoint. It is not just a question of art or the care of the poor. It is also a question of debunking the traditional social justification of excessive art - that it was somehow similar to almsgiving ... In the same way that art for the honor of God is not the business of the monk since the monk has already offered the most precious gift one can to God, so there is no need for a rationale which sees these lesser gifts as a worthy form of honor for a monk to convey, a form of honor which as a spiritual undertaking is ultimately contradictory to the dictates of charity. — Conrad Rudolph

I didn't have any interest in traditional art. — Cindy Sherman

As far as art's concerned, I probably like modern art more than traditional art. — Paul McCartney

I think digital media is a valid tool, one that has it's own strengths and weaknesses. So often I see people dismissing digital art as somehow cheating or not as valid or important as traditional art, but the computer is just another tool. — Julie Dillon

The traditional difficulty of balancing the mechanical with the imaginative schools of photography still operates. In schools of photography meaningful art education is often lacking and on the strength of their technical ability alone students, deprived of a richer artistic training, are sent forth inculcated with the belief that they are creative photographers and artists. It is yet a fact that today, as in the past, the most inspiring and provocative works in photography come as much (and probably more) from those who are in the first place artists. — Aaron Scharf

We recognize the distinctness of Asian art when we turn to its traditional forms, recognize it as Japanese, Chinese and Indian, even Balinese or Thai. — F. Sionil Jose

Good stuff!" [Knud] said. "All organic, of course! All fresh! We take care of the earth here! You like smoked herring? You will. Of course you will! I work in iron, though I have also done some of these wood carvings. All of my work is based on traditional Danish art. I am a Viking! Eat! — Maureen Johnson

A community united by the ideals of compassion and creativity has incredible power. Art of all kinds
music, literature, traditional arts, visual arts
can lift a community. — Martin O'Malley

A major triumph of mathematical imagination: the use of visual imagery to condense a large quantity of information into a single comprehensible picture ... Mathematicians are just beginning to understand these basic building blocks of change and to analyze how they combine. The methodology involved has a very different spirit from traditional modeling with differential equations: it is more like chemistry than calculus, requiring careful counterpoint between analysis and synthesis. — Ian Stewart

Magic is a combination of art and science. It's an art because of the traditional parts of things, the graceful gestures, the sonorous invocations, the use of colour, sight, sound, all of these things make it very much an art form. Yet it is also a science as well because we expect something to come of what we do. Using and creating these almost dreamlike inner landscapes in which we can live, move, and have our being. — Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki

Whatever experimental film aromas cloaked my movies were because I'm a gleefully clumsy, primitive filmmaker. I really like traditional pleasingly narrative films, but I also just couldn't resist throwing in the disruptive. It seems to me that art-house film is at its glorious zenith right now, maybe it can even get better? There's just so many good films, you know Cemetery Of Splendour, Arabian Nights, Miguel Gomes, just so much great work coming out. — Guy Maddin

I'd like to see the comics' style expanded. I'd like to see artists synthesize traditional comics arts style with fine-arts styles or whatever. I like to see innovation. I don't like it when an art form becomes stagnant. — Harvey Pekar

Allowing for exceptions, there is still one basic difference between the traditional arts and the mass-media arts: in the traditional arts, the artist grows; in a mass medium, the artist decays profitably. — Pauline Kael

If photos can reproduce the world more perfectly than any painter, can capture an instant, a look, a gesture, then what makes a painting good anymore? Painting subverts this subversion of its traditional nature by redefining itself - art is idea, not simply skillful execution. So, a work can be crudely made, or even machine made - but it has to be practically and functionally useless. — David Byrne

I am bothered by poems I don't understand. — Joyce Rachelle

'The Art Student's War' is, at its core, a traditional American wartime love story. As such, it is timely and engrossing. By the end, all its principal characters 'have been to Hell and back.' — Floyd Skloot

Regardless of the importance of known evidence to the contrary, the arts are generally regarded as being so much entertaining fluff, a commodity that isn't a priority in the traditional program of learning. This is unacceptable in a so-called 'enlightened' society. — Ken Danby

Oh, aye, it's grand! Last week I saw Swan on a Hot Tin Lake, a reinterpretation of a traditional theme by one of our up-and-coming young performance artists; and the day after that, of course, there was a reworking of Die Flabbergast at the Opera House; and ye ken, they had a whole week of porcelain at the Royal Art Museum, with a free thimble of sherry. — Terry Pratchett

All the traditional models for doing things are collapsing; from music to publishing to film, and it's a wide open door for people who are creative to do what they need to do without having institutions block their art. — Ava DuVernay

Jiu Jitsu opened up doors in my mind that public education had bolted shut. In hindsight, I see just how superficial my thoughts had been prior to this art. It is no coincidence that my efforts in reading and writing have run parallel with this craft. I began training Jiu Jitsu at twenty-two, and at the time of this writing I am about to turn thirty. I have learned more in the past eight years than the previous twenty-two, and have no doubts that Jiu Jitsu opened up my mind in a way traditional organized education never could. Jiu Jitsu gave me a life when I didn't know how to live. It is the best thing I have ever done, and is the foundation upon which all I will do. — Chris Matakas

The sweet traditional art of Seduction has been replaced with the weird spirit of hit and run' - Love Isn't For Cowards: Just Let love Be — Francis Otieno

To be bound by traditional martial art style or styles is the way of the mindless, enslaved martial artist. But to be inspired by the traditional martial art and to achieve further heights is the way of genius. — Bruce Lee

Look around the martial arts," Lee continued, "and witness the assortment of routine performers, trick artists, desensitized robots, glorifiers of the past. Life is constant movement - rhythmic as well as random. Life is continual change, not stagnation. Instead of choicelessly flowing with this process of change, many 'masters', past and present, rigidly subscribe to traditional concepts and techniques of the art, solidfiying the everflowing, dissecting the totality. — Davis Miller

Culture jamming is enjoying a resurgence, in part because of technological advancements but also more pertinently, because of the good old rules of supply and demand. Something not far from the surfaces of the public psyche is delighted to see the icons of corporate power subverted and mocked. There is, in short, a market for it. With commercialism able to overpower the traditional authority of religion, politics and schools, corporations have emerged a the natural targets for all sorts of free-floating rage and rebellion. The new ethos that culture jamming taps into is go-for-the-corporate-jugular. — Naomi Klein

For me, this is when the act of watching transforms into the act of witnessing.
To witness something implies a responsiveness, the response/ability of the viewer toward the performer. It is radically different from what we might call the 'consuming' gaze that says 'here, you entertain me, I bought a ticket, and I'm going to sit back and watch.' This traditional gaze doesn't want to get involved, doesn't want to give anything back. — Ann Cooper Albright

If some of the greats had followed the traditional ways we would be missing so much fine art. — Gene Black

To put all this in the form of another traditional metaphor, aesthetic styles - patterns for communicating feeling and thought - become dull with use, like carving knives, and since dullness is the chief enemy of art, each generation of artists must find new ways of slicing the fat off reality. — John Gardner

New artists have been obtained. These do not object to, and indeed argue enthusiastically for, the rationalization process. Production is up. Quality-control devices have been installed at those points where the interests of artists and audiences intersect. Shipping and distribution have been improved out of all recognition. (It is in this area, they say in Paraguay, that traditional practices were most blameworthy.) The rationalized art is dispatched from central art dumps to regional art dumps, and from there into the lifestreams of cities. Each citizen is given as much art as his system can tolerate. — Donald Barthelme

He was the first to conceive of movies as an art form. His belief was that if the traditional art form would not find room for him, then he would make an art form of his own. — Richard Schickel

I don't have one specific tattooing specialty. I enjoy doing full-color new school, portraits, neo-traditional, realistic, black and gray, ultra detailed art, etc ... but always custom. — William Webb

Right-wing propagandists like Limbaugh and Coulter are essentially entertainers, entertainers who stimulate prejudice, selfishness and meanness the way a comedian works for laughs or a tragedian plays for tears. Theirs is a new art form, exclusive to America and bewilderingly successful. In place of traditional conservative ideology, they offer their audience partisan belligerence and a complete package of mail-order hatreds, designed for the conceptually and ethically impaired. — Hal Crowther

Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top; Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace. For the Cro-Magnons, space is a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances. — John Berger

And luckily, therefore the good old days return. The traditional art of driving counts again, and it is all about good tactics, skills and reflexes instead of simple power. — Jacky Ickx

Avant garde has become a ubiquitous label, eclectically applied to any type of art that is anti-traditional in form. At its simplest, the term is sometimes taken to describe what is new at any given time: the leading edge of artistic experiment, which is continually outdated by the next step forward. — C. D. Innes

Diversity matters. Not only in what we look like, or what religion we practice, or in whom we love, but also in how we live our lives, including the order in which we go about things, the seasons in which we are able to create art. Those who are engaged in the arts should be the last to send any other message, because when artists endorse the traditional order of a society, it suggests that they have forgotten their own true role within it. — Robin Black

Sir," said the guard from behind me. "I'd appreciate it if you left your club here."
I paused and looked over my shoulder, He had a gun. His hand wasn't exactly resting on it, but he'd tucked his thumb into his belt about half an inch away.
"It isn't a club," I said calmly. "It's a walking stick."
"Six feet long."
"It's traditional Ozark folk art."
"With dents and nicks all over it."
I thought about it for a second. "I'm insecure?"
"Get a blanket. — Jim Butcher

Movies, far more than the traditional arts, are tied to big money. Without a few independent critics, there's nothing between the public and the advertisers. — Pauline Kael

There are very few good writers about art, and you either get art-fashion writing with trendy views or you get very traditional writing. Occasionally, you get people who can write in an interesting way. Really, I think in a sense art writing needs to be renewed as well. It's in a pretty bad condition. — Marc Quinn

A work of art rests its merits in traditional qualities. It may constitute a remarkable feat in craftsmanship; it may be a searching study of psychological states; it may be a nostalgic glance backward; it may be any one of an infinite number of concepts, none of which may have any possible bearing upon its degree of newness. — Ben Shahn

I came up, I suppose, a fairly traditional way. I went to art college. I always wanted to be a stills photographer, really, when I was younger, and I briefly worked as a stills photographer. — Roger Deakins

To put this even more bluntly, one might think about the difference between adding traditional and contemporary Indigenous art to the National Gallery of Canada's historical Canadian wing and imagining the entire gallery curated from an Indigenous perspective of what a "National Gallery of Canada" might mean.37 Put slightly differently, the project of Indigenous representation in the gallery in Canada has been defined as "bringing aboriginal art in to the history of Canadian art" rather than of incorporating settler history into the history of Aboriginal art.38 Would such reimaginings mean, for example, a move away from the primacy of a liberal politic and of the artist genius as a cultural application of that politic? — Lynda Jessup

Architecture is involved with the world, but at the same time it has a certain autonomy. This autonomy cannot be explained in terms of traditional logic because the most interesting parts of the work are non-verbal. They operate within the terms of the work, like any art. — Thom Mayne

So the emergence of art as Art creates room to expand unbelief; unbelief has somewhere to go without settling for the mechanism of a completely flattened universe but also without returning to a traditional religion that is now implausible. — James K.A. Smith

Any form of art can only develop by means of single mutations by individual creators. If only traditional conventions are used an art will die, and the widening of an art form is bound to seem strange at first, and awkward. Any growing thing must go through awkward stages. The creator who is misunderstood because of his breach of convention may say to himself, 'I seem strange to you, but anyway I am alive. — Carson McCullers

The arts not only imbue our sense of sight, balance, movement, touch and hearing, they also lift our logical minds - the traditional focus of modern education - into the reaches of possibility, invention and genius. — Eugene Schwartz

I love art, I love music. I can listen to Stockhausen and a very experimental, avant-garde approach, and I can listen to Beethoven and have a more classical, traditional approach. Why not be able to do that with film performance? — Nicolas Cage

We didn't, after all, sing "Another One Bites The Dust" as the coffin was carried out; Hazel and the vicar had settled instead on the more traditional "How Great Thou Art". And Aunty Rose's old adversary the mayor was pressed into service as a coffin bearer to replace Matt.
Rose Adele Thornton, born in Bath, England, died in Waimanu, New Zealand, a mere fifty-three years later. Adept and compassionate nurse, fervent advocate of animal welfare, champion of correct diction and tireless crusader against the misuse of apostrophes. Experimental chef, peerless aunt, brave sufferer and true friend. She had the grace and courage to thoroughly enjoy a life which denied her everything she most wanted. The bravest woman I ever knew. — Danielle Hawkins

In some Arab art exhibitions that have happened, there's always this idea that the East is more traditional; they show a lot of works on calligraphy and religion. — Massimiliano Gioni

Evolution explains our biological evolution, but human beings are very unique creatures. As the Dobzhansky said, all animals are unique; humans are the uniquest. And that uniqueness of being human, language, art, culture, our dependency on culture for survival, comes from the combination of traditional biological evolution. — Donald Johanson

Having studied art history, as opposed to political history, I tend to incorporate found objects into my books. Just as Pablo Picasso glued a fragment of furniture onto the canvas of Still Life with Chair Caning, I like to use whatever's lying around to paint pictures of the past--traditional pigment like archival documents but also the added texture of whatever bits and bobs I learn from looking out bus windows or chatting up people I bump into on the road. — Sarah Vowell

Our hankering for a state of leisure or leisure state is the proof of the fact that most of us are working at a task to which we could never have been called by anyone but a salesman, certainly not by God or by our own natures. Traditional craftsmen whom I have known in the East cannot be dragged away from their work, and will work overtime to their own pecuniary loss.
"Why Exhibit Works of Art? — Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Once A. K. Coomaraswamy, the great twentieth-century Indian expert on traditional metaphysics and art, said that in modern society the artist is a special kind of person, while in traditional society every person is a special kind of artist. — Seyyed Hossein Nasr

People whom live in a world dominated by science and technology are losing belief in God and turning away from religion. Science eliminated the traditions that formerly made living an art form including the rain celebration of spring and traditional harvest festivals. — Kilroy J. Oldster

We live in an age when the traditional great subjects - the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism - are daily devalued by commercial art. — Andy Warhol

Not only has photography so thoroughly saturated our visual environment as to make the invention of visual images seem archaic, but it is also clear that photography is too multiple, too useful to other discourses, ever to be wholly contained within traditional definitions of art. — Douglas Crimp

When we teach a child to sing or play the flute, we teach her how to listen. When we teach her to draw, we teach her to see. When we teach a child to dance, we teach him about his body and about space, and when he acts on a stage, he learns about character and motivation. When we teach a child design, we reveal the geometry of the world. When we teach children about the folk and traditional arts and the great masterpieces of the world, we teach them to celebrate their roots and find their own place in history. — Jane Alexander

In the past, traditional art was based on making manifest what is enduring in man, like love, jealousy, hatred, envy, and greed ... Today art has to look again at these unchanging qualities, because society is no longer unchanging. It is up to art today to show us what has become of these unchanging qualities in a world which is moving and changing. — Tawfiq Al-Hakim

In the traditional Islamic world, the hierarchy of the arts was not based on whether they were "fine" or "industrial" or "minor". It was based upon the effect of art on the soul of the human being. — Seyyed Hossein Nasr

[The Edwardian era] was a time of booming trade, of great prosperity and wealth in which the pageant of London Society took place year after year in a setting of traditional dignity and beauty. The great houses - Devonshire, Dorchester, Grosvenor, Stafford and Lansdowne House - had not yet been converted into museums, hotels and flats, and there we danced through the long summer nights till dawn. The great country-houses still flourished in their glory, and on their lawns in the green shade of trees the art of human intercourse was exquisitely practised by men and women not yet enslaved by household cares and chores who still had time to read, to talk, to listen and to think. — Violet Bonham Carter

Though simple and obvious as an act of art, the drawing portrayed the silly, helpless tendency of fundamental things to get way off course and turn into nonsense, illustrated the church's grotesque pearling around its traditional heart, explained the pernicious extrapolating rules and observances of governments - implicated all of us in a gradual apostasy from every perfect thing we find or make. — Denis Johnson

This is the kind of touch they like: folk art, archaic, made by women, in their spare time, from things that have no further use. A return to traditional values. Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want? On — Margaret Atwood

The very act of representation has been so thoroughly challenged in recent years by postmodern theories that it is impossible not to see the flaws everywhere, in any practice of photography. Traditional genres in particular-journalism, documentary studies, and fine-art photography-have become shells, or forms emptied of meaning. — Richard Misrach