If you’re like most artists I know, the task of writing your Artist’s Statement feels like torture. You may question, why doesn’t the work speak for itself? But, you’ve probably also learned that throughout your art career you will be frequently asked to provide one. A well-written Artist’s Statement is essential and is one of the most powerful art marketing tools you will have.

Enjoy browsing the art and reading the following statements written by famous artists. They have influenced multitudes of artists and art enthusiasts and perhaps their words might resonate with you. They may comfort you to know they also probably suffered from writer’s block when writing about their art.

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Joan Mitchell

“I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me – and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I could certainly never mirror nature. I would more like to paint what it leaves with me.”

Henri Matisse

“I don’t paint things; I paint only the differences between things… I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me. What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter – a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.”

Claude Monet

“For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life.. the air and the light which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.”

Gustav Klimt

“I have never painted a self-portrait. I am less interested in myself as a subject for a painting than I am in other people, above all women… There is nothing special about me. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night… Who ever wants to know something about me… ought to look carefully at my pictures.”

Marcel Duchamp

“I wanted to create a static image of movement: movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn’t descending an equally real staircase. I have drawn people’s attention to the fact that art is a mirage. A mirage, just like the oasis that appears in the desert. It is very beautiful, until the moment when you die of thirst, obviously. But we do not die of thirst in the field of art. The mirage has substance.”

Berthe Morisot

“It is important to express oneself… provided the feelings are real and are taken from your own experience… My ambition is limited to capturing something transient and yet, this ambition is excessive.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

“I have neither rules nor methods… I look at a nude and I see myriads of infinitely  small tones. I must find those that will make the flesh on my canvas alive and vibrate.”

Piet Mondrian

“Everything is expressed through relationship. Colour can exist only through other colours, dimension through other dimensions, position through other positions that oppose them. That is why I regard relationship as the principal thing.”

Leonardo da Vinci

“The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow.”

He also said “Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.”

Georgia O’Keeffe

“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else… Nobody really sees a flower – really – it is so small – we haven’t time – and to see takes time… 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 time to look at it.”

She also stated, “Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.”

Wassily Kandinsky

“Color directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul.”

Edward Hopper

“It’s to paint directly on the canvas without any funny business, as it were, and I use almost pure turpentine to start with, adding oil as I go along until the medium becomes pure oil. I use as little oil as I can possibly help, and that’s my method.”

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Amadeo Modigliani

“What I am seeking is not the real and not the unreal but rather the unconscious, the mystery of the instinctive in the human race.”

Grandma Moses

“I paint from the top down. From the sky, then the mountains, then the hills, then the houses, then the cattle, and then the people. I look out the window sometimes to seek the color of the shadows and the different greens in the trees, but when I get ready to paint I just close my eyes and imagine a scene. I’ll get an inspiration and start painting; then I’ll forget everything, everything except how things used to be and how to paint it so people will know how we used to live.”

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

“(People) want me to finish things. But I see them in such a way and paint them accordingly… Nothing is simpler than to complete pictures in a superficial sense. Never does one lie so cleverly as then.”

Edvard Munch

“I was walking along a path with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.”

Pierre Bonnard

“I’m trying to do what I have never done – give the impression one has on entering a room: one sees everything and at the same time nothing.”

More Statements

Philip Guston

“Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again… I am a night painter, so when I come into the studio the next morning the delirium is over… Usually I am on a work for a long stretch, until a moment arrives when the air of the arbitrary vanishes, and the paint falls into positions that feel destined.”  He also advised artists,  “Let your 3rd hand do the painting.”

Mark Rothko

“I don’t express myself in my painting. I express my not-self. The dictum ‘Know Thyself’ is only valuable if the ego is removed from the process in search for truth… The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions… the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.”

Jackson Pollock

“I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them. It doesn’t matter how the paint is put on, as long as something is said. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. When I’m painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It’s only after a get acquainted period that I see what I’ve been about. I’ve no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.”

Judy Chicago

“Because we are denied knowledge of our history, we are deprived of standing upon each other’s shoulders and building upon each other’s hard earned accomplishments. Instead we are condemned to repeat what others have done before us and thus we continually reinvent the wheel. The goal of ‘The Dinner Party’ is to break this cycle.”

Alice Aycock

“I tried to visualize the movement of wind energy as it flowed up and down the Avenue creating random whirlpools, touching down here and there and sometimes forming dynamic three-dimensional massing of forms. One of the works, in particular, references the expressive quality of wind through drapery and the chaotic beauty of fluid/flow dynamics. As much as the sculptures are obviously placed on the mall, I wanted the work to have a random, haphazard quality – in some cases, piling up on itself, in others spinning off into the air.” (Source: Press release announcing Alice Aycock’s public art installation, received from Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY) ~ Alice Aycock www.aaycock.com

Louise Bourgeois

“I’ve drawn my whole life. My parents were in the tapestry restoration business, and as a young girl, I would draw in the missing parts of the tapestry that needed to be re-woven. My ability to draw made me indispensable to my parents.

I came from a family of repairers. The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it. ‘The Spider’ is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. . . Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.”

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