Art is man's nature; nature is God's art.
With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance.
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.
History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.
If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, I will answer you: T am here to live out loud.'
Illustrations have as much to say as the text. The trick is to say the same thing, but in a different way. It's no good being an illustrator who is saying a lot that is on his or her mind, if it has nothing to do with the text. . . the artist must override the story, but he must also override his own ego for the sake of the story.
In any evolutionary process, even in the arts, the search for novelty becomes corrupting.
The cheap, no matter how charming, how immediate, does not wear so well. It has a way of telling its whole story the first time through.
A work of art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.
Art gropes, it stalks like a hunter lost in the woods, listening to itself and to everything around it, unsure of itself, waiting to pounce.
Man in Canadian art is rarely in command of his environment or ever at home in it.
What's an artist, but the dregs of his work - the human shambles that follows it around?
Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself.
Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is and what he says and when the source dries up the work withers and crumbles.
As an artist grows older, he has to fight disillusionment and learn to establish the same relation to nature as an adult as he had when a child.
Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.
Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
It is not in life but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.
An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
I am convinced it is a mistake to find an artist human outside his work. If you cannot find him human in and through his work, you are better not to know it when you come to formulate an opinion of his public value.
