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Salvador Dali

A prolific and controversial Spanish artist, Salvador Dali's name is synonymous with the Surrealist art movement. His cutting edge, avant-garde style, which included prints, drawings, sculpture, book illustration, and theater set designs, puzzled and intrigued the art world. Along with fellow Spaniards Pablo Picasso and Miro, he is considered one of the greatest masters of twentieth century art.  A skilled draftsman, he was best known for the striking and bizarre images that were executed in a nearly photorealistic style. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Sometimes called Soft Watches or Melting Clocks, the painting suggests Albert Einstein's theory that time is relative and not fixed. It is Dali’s personal use of the world of the unconscious, based on the theories of Freud that made him famous and recurring images of burning giraffes, melting watches and other dream-like images became the artist’s surrealist trademarks.

His artistic repertoire also included film, fashion, and photography. He collaborated with Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock, Elsa Schiaparelli, Christian Dior, Man Ray, Brassaï, and Cecil Beaton, among others.

When World War II started in Europe, Dalí and his wife, Gala moved to the United States where he went on to become a success and a celebrity, using his attention seeking comments and eccentric appearance to attract media attention (and pave the way for media savvy artists like Pop Artist Andy Warhol). In 1948 he and Gala returned to his homeland where Dali spent his remaining years. Salvador Dali was a wealthy artist during his lifetime and his works continue to fetch increasingly high prices in art auction houses throughout the world today.

“Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.”

“Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.”

“One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.”

“At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon.  And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.”

“Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.”

“The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.”

“It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.”

“I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.”

“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.”

“I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.”

“The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.”

“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”

“Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.”

“I am not strange, I am just not normal.”

“You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.”

“Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.”

“The problem with the youth of today is that one is no longer part of it”.

“The only thing that the world will not have enough of is exaggeration.”

“Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.”

“I shall be so brief that I have already finished.”

- Salvador Dali  (1904-1989)

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Andre Gide was a French author, humanist, and moralist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947. Gide has always appealed to different audiences: a traditional psychological novelist to some and an innovative modern writer to others; he was a major literary critic, social crusader, and spokesperson for homosexual rights, at a time in our social history when doing so was extremely controversial.

“The color of truth is gray.”

                         

“Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.”

“Art is collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.”

“Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself - and thus make yourself indispensable.”

“Nothing excellent can be done without leisure.”

- Andre Gide  (1869-1951)

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Diane Arbus

Bonne and I have had my brother Greg’s Diane Arbus book of photographic portraits, An Aperture Monograph, in our possession for many years now. We really ought to give it back to him. Greg wrote his name and the date he acquired the book, May 20th 1974, in the inside cover. It’s an odd book of photography for a high school senior to have owned, as its portraiture subjects were primarily of people on the fringes of mainstream society. Every few years, Bonne or I take it out and look through it. And the effect from doing so reminds us of how connected we are to our fellow humans, despite wide divergences of vocation, physical looks and lifestyle. 

We just watched the movie Fur – An imaginary portrait of Diane Arbus, which is a fictionalized portrait of a brief period of her life, highlighting her transformation from being her husband’s assistant in the New York City photography studio owned by Arbus and her husband, to becoming the brilliant photography artist that she soon became. It stars Nicole Kidman as Arbus, and Robert Downey, Jr. We found the cinematography and the settings to be hauntingly beautiful. Arbus photographed the CNN journalist Anderson Cooper, (son of Gloria Vanderbilt), when he was a baby. He goes out of his way to let people know that his photo was not her famous one of the child holding the toy hand-grenade.

Not Anderson Cooper

“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”

“Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”

“My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.”

“The Chinese have a theory that you pass through boredom into fascination and I think it’s true. I would never choose a subject for what it means to me or what I think about it. You’ve just got to choose a subject, and what you think about it, what it means, begins to unfold if you just plain choose a subject and do it enough.”

“Regardless of how you feel inside, always try to look like a winner. Even if you are behind, a sustained look of control and confidence can give you a mental edge that results in victory.”

“The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.”

“What moves me about...what’s called technique...is that it comes from some mysterious deep place. I mean it can have something to do with the paper and the developer and all that stuff, but it comes mostly from some very deep choices somebody has made that take a long time and keep haunting them.”

“I’m very little drawn to photographing people that are known or even subjects that are known. They fascinate me when I’ve barely heard of them and the minute they get public, I become terribly blank about them.”

“I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don’t like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.”

- Diane Arbus  (1923-1971)

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Frank Lloyd Wright

One of the world’s most prominent architects, Frank Lloyd Wright developed a series of highly individual styles over his extraordinarily long architectural career. And in doing so, he influenced the entire course of architecture and building internationally. The modern rambler style home, which is so common today, was his innovation. He often built his houses and buildings using locally available organic materials and volunteer help. His colorful personal life, filled with fights, fires, infidelities, and murders, frequently made news headlines. To this day, he remains America’s most famous architect.

“Organic architecture seeks superior sense of use and a finer sense of comfort, expressed in organic simplicity.”

“The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind.”

“Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day’s work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.”

“Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.”

“The architect must be a prophet . . . a prophet in the true sense of the term . . . if he can’t see at least ten years ahead don’t call him an architect.”

“Art for art’s sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.”

“No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.”

- Frank Lloyd Wright  (1867-1959)

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Andy Goldsworthy

The art of Andy Goldsworthy has personally inspired Bonnett and me. We have repeatedly watched his DVD film documentary, ‘Rivers and Tides’, to gain inspiration for the work we have done with arranging rocks in our own yard. While an art student at Bradford College and the University of Central Lancashire he was drawn to using nature itself as the material for and medium in which to build and display art. Because so much of his art could not be captured in any other way, Goldsworthy’s work is chronicled in photography, which often has a surreal quality, as we see his art, made with and hauntingly surrounded by the leaves, thorns, rocks, twigs and ice from which it arose...and like all of life and death, including our own, will inevitably be reabsorbed.

“As with all my work, whether it’s a leaf on a rock or ice on a rock, I’m trying to get beneath the surface appearance of things. Working the surface of a stone is an attempt to understand the internal energy of the stone.”

“A stone is ingrained with geological and historical memories.”

“Ideas must be put to the test. That’s why we make things, otherwise they would be no more than ideas. There is often a huge difference between an idea and its realization. I’ve had what I thought were great ideas thatjust didn’t work.”

 “A lot of my work is like picking potatoes; you have to get into the rhythm of it.”

“The relationship between the public and the artist is complex anddifficult to explain. There is a fine line between using this critical energy creatively and pandering to it.”

“The difference between a theatre with and without an audience is enormous. There is a palpable, critical energy created by the presence of the audience.”

- Andy Goldsworthy (1956- )

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As a teenager, Jeff Koons was very influenced by the work of Salvador Dali, and in terms of blurring what exists in the world of commercial art and gallery art, has followed Dali’s lead. After attending the Maryland Institute College of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, Koons worked as a Wall Street commodities broker while building his reputation as an artist. Like Andy Worhal of New York and the glass artist Dale Chihuly in Seatle, he has worked from large city loft spaces. Both Koons and Chihuly use other artists to do much of the actual 'hands on' work while the famous artist provides the vision and direction. His deliberately controversial and colorful personal life has helped him remain in the public consciousness, fueling his commercial success as an artist.

“Art to me is a humanitarian act and I believe that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to effect mankind, to make the word a better place.”

“I'm always trying to create work that doesn't make viewers feel they're being spoken down to, so that they feel open participation.”

“I love the gallery, the arena of representation. It’s a commercial world, and morality is based generally around economics, and that’s taking place in the art gallery.”

“It’s always wonderful to come to an event. I know how in my life art has come in and really changed it, so to give these children that opportunity just to come into contact with art.”

- Jeff Koons  (1955- )

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A major figure in art since the 1920’s, Georgia O’Keefe is typically associated with Southwest, She is known for her large paintings of flowers, rocks, animal bones and landscapes, often transforming them into powerful abstract images.

“So I said to myself – I’ll paint what I see - what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking the time to look at it - I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.”
 
“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way - things I had no words for.”

“Nobody sees a flower - really - it is so small it takes time - we haven’t time - and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”

- Georgia O’Keefe  (1887-1986)

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This quotation is by the cubist sculptor and contemporary of Pablo Picasso, Jacques Lipchitz. He was of Jewish heritage and escaped from Nazi occupied France to the United States in the early 1940s.

“All my life as an artist I have asked myself: What pushes me continually to make sculpture? I have found the answer. Art is an action against death. It is a denial of death.”

- Jacques Lipchitz  (1891-1973)

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Michelangelo was an Italian Renaissance painter and sculptor. He is the best-documented artist of the 16th century.

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

                         - Michelangelo  (1475-1564)

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The British artist and sculptor, Henry Moore, is well known for his large, abstract bronze and marble sculptures, usually of the human form.  He decided to become a sculptor at the age of eleven, when he discovered Michelangelo.

“There's no retirement for an artist, it's your way of living so there's no end to it.”

- Henry Moore (1898-1986)

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Born in Berlin, Lucien Freud and family moved to the U.K. in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism. He became a British citizen in 1939. He is the grandson of Sigmund Freud, the famed psychoanalyst.

“I paint people, not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be.” 

“The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.”

- Lucien Freud  (1922-)

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Michelangelo was an Italian Renaissance painter and sculptor. He is the best-documented artist of the 16th century.

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."

- Michelangelo  (1475-1564)

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Jeff Koons is a contemporary American artist who is known for his use of ‘kitsch’ a style that uses commercially produced items that are trite or crass. He worked as a Wall Street Commodities broker while establishing himself as an artist.

“I believe in advertisement and media completely. My art and my personal life are based in it. I think that the art world would probably be a tremendous reservoir for everybody involved in advertising.”

- Jeff Koons  (1955-)

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Roy Lichtenstein was a prominent American artist, the first to use large-scale comic book styles and themes.

“I'm interested in what would normally be considered the worst aspects of commercial art. I think it's the tension between what seems to be so rigid and cliched and the fact that art really can't be this way.”

“I think we're much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it.”

- Roy Lichtenstein  (1923-1997)

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Michelangelo was an Italian Renaissance painter and sculptor. He is the best-documented artist of the 16th century.

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."

- Michelangelo  (1475-1564)

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Three Quotations by Frank Lloyd Wright, perhaps the world’s most influential architect, also had a colorful personal life that often made the headlines.

“An idea is salvation by imagination."

“The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes.”

“A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his client to plant vines.”

- Frank Lloyd Wright  (1867-1959)

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American psychologist, Abraham Maslow, is most widely known for his proposal that there is a hierarchy of human needs ranging from basic physical needs to what he called “self actualization.” Many therapists consider him to be the father of ‘humanistic psychology’.

“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What one can be, one must be.”

 - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)

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Pablo Picasso was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. The Guinness Book of World Records names Picasso as the most prolific painter who ever lived. Here are two of his inspiring quotes:

“Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.”

“I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”

- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

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Ansel Adams was an American photographer best known for his black and white nature portraits. Originally trained as a concert pianist, at age 17 Adams joined the Sierra Club, a group dedicated to preserving natural resources and beauty. Standing in exactly the right place, he brought environmentalism to light throughout his lifetime.

“A good photograph is knowing where to stand.”

- Ansel Adams (1902-1984)

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From Federico Fellini, one of the most influential and widely revered filmmakers of the 20th century.

“All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.”

- Federico Fellini (1920-1984)

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More Art and Artist Quotations Here   

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