Being an Artist Quotes

Alli-K

Artist
“I always get tongue-tied when people ask me what I do.
I feel I can’t just say artist, plus I like the idea or being MORE”

Angie Wojak

Director of Career Development – School of Visual Arts in NY
“Make sure you seek out and nurture mentors. Successful artists work closely with other artists and have not one but often numerous mentors to guide them through their careers.”

Ann Hamilton

“What does it mean to make by hand, to make with a single body, when the influence and the impact of distance in the proximity of our daily lives have changed everything?”

Integrating criticism

“People, especially on the Internet, are so open about their feelings. You will never say that to somebody’s face, but the whole criticism is integrated into my mind because I read the comments. This is true for everyone on the Internet, everyone is gonna get trolled or bullied or whatever “

Negativity and positivity

“I am gonna choose to take a positive direction on it. And then still even after that, I get bombarded by those polarizing comments. And then, it’s a kind of poison to listen to negativity but it’s also a little bit of poison to listen to positivity as well. Because they can get into your head, and that’s a kind of a pitfall of an artist as well.”

Fake art

“So now I am kind of thinking the direction is “Fake Art”. And that’s kind of weird to say my art is fake art puts that idea out there, for me obviously, I don’t think it’s fake art but a lot of people do, and so, to address that and to put that as a leading statement I think it’s kind of interesting because it’s almost like we gonna start to talk about this before you even have talked about it.”
✒ Callen Schaub

Caro Arévalo

Artist
“Our society is so lost. While I’m here painting and being inspired by how beautiful our planet is, it’s all just burning down. Yesterday I spent the day hiding feeling incapable of understanding:

• why are corporate agendas more important than the lung of our world,
• why do we protect profit instead of natural resources,
• why we see ourselves as individuals separate from other living organisms in our shared home when actually we are all of them.

In order to look for what is more convenient for ourselves we have to think of what is more convenient for all of us, and that is work under ethical and sustainable manners that don’t harm others, it’s just common sense.”

Christian van Minnen

“It was a bittersweet but critical realization that I wasn’t an artist that would be embraced by the art world as it existed at the time. I would have to find a niche.”
✒ Christian van Minnen – Artwork “Harder Darker Freer Lover” (detail)

David Salle

Artist
“In a way, I’ve been making the same painting ever since I was fourteen”

Elise R Peterson

Artist, writer
“That’s part of the artist mindset, that you’re always looking for things that don’t exist. It’s maddening. But when you get to a place you didn’t even expect to exist, it’s the most satisfying, fulfilling feeling that I’ve had next to having a child.”

Emily Nussbaum

Critic and journalist
“During the plague, Newton spent full-time on the studies and experiments that would lead him to develop his theories on calculus, optics and gravity.”

Frederic Clad

Digital strategist
“The entrepreneurial artist does not fit into a system of legitimation already established. He seeks to create his own promotion matrix. In another term, it’s a hacker artist”

Howard Sherman

Artist
“I realized that as simple as this notion sounds, there’s actually a real challenge involved. Why? Because you have to risk failure and embarrassment to show who you are within the thing you’re making”

Indira Cesarine

Artist

“You need to be a self-starter and part of that is not having a fear of promoting your own work or believing in yourself as much as others. I encourage artists all the time to stage their own exhibits or open their own galleries. It’s a huge waste of time to sit around and wait to be “discovered” ✒ Interview The New York Optimist – Photo Daniela Federici

Jan Hakon Erichsen

Artist
“Before I started posting my videos on Instagram my audience was quite small to put it mildly, putting up art shows seen by less than a hundred people wasn’t unusual. Now my videos have been seen by millions. It’s quite bizarre. If anything, it has strengthened my belief that what I’m doing is worthwhile.”
✒ Interview The Yale Politic

Julian Schnabel

Artist
“I’m the closest thing you’ll get to Picasso in this life”
✒ -Article The Guardian, Photo: Nathaniel Welch/Corbis Outline

Lisa Hanawalt

Artist

“I’m a bad artist. I’m lazy and I’m untalented and bad. That’s not really true, but it’s how I feel a lot of the time. And when I’m looking back at my favorite projects over the last decade, I’ve noticed how often they were preceded or motivated by really negative emotions like this. I get something similar to creative block, but I would just call it paralysis. I’m just afraid to make anything at all. I’m afraid it will be shitty. And when other people ask me for advice on making stuff, I say stuff like…”
✒ BoJack Horseman – XOXO Festival – 2015

Malia James

Artist
“Maybe I could have been more successful earlier on if I’d focused on one medium, but I wouldn’t trade it for the myriad of experiences I’ve had along the way. I like to do it all, but it doesn’t come without sacrifice.”

✒ Interview by Armine Iknadossian, 2013

Marshall Vandruff

Artist
“Best people to get criticism from are the people who have a stake in your success and failure. They are not going to flippantly lob criticisms because if they do that and it damages you it damages them. But if they see that there’s something you’re really doing wrong here, they will come to you with criticism because it’s a matter of extended protection, self-protection… yeah. So those are the people who have a stake if they have a stake in your success and failure.”
✒ Draftsmen S2E25 – Stan Prokopenko and Marshall Vandruff

Matty Mo

Artist
“The Kaplan Twins are two really sexy girls that I found online I got this space and asked them if they wanted to move in, they said yes. This is effectively an art incubator. Almost immediately we started to think of ideas of how we can monetize their brands in the environment which is direct-to-consumer part sales on Instagram. They made this interesting observation which was that they got a lot more likes on photos of themselves than they did on their artwork. So we got to think about how we can integrate an art object into their lives and tell the stories of their involvement with the art object. Then sell it directly to consumers.”

Molly Crabapple

Artist
“Getting started as an artist is wildly unsustainable unless you already have a financial cushion, which might come from a trust fund or sex work or a rich spouse.”

Nadia Nizamudin

“I resisted self-promotion and branding for the longest time until one day I realized that although the idea of being ‘discovered’ is romantic, in reality, especially in this day and age, you have to do the dirty work yourself. No one is going to see your work and appreciate it unless you push it out there. And the moment I went in that direction, good things started coming my way”
✒ Interview Sarahk Benning

Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Artist
“This is what I’m trying to do with my painting: work within the tradition I inherited, but make moves that signal my difference from it.” ✒ Interview by Erica Ando on Bomb magazine, 2016

RJ Palmer

Concept artist
“Being an artist on Social Media is just constantly trying to find new ways to say ‘thank you’”

Roberta Smith

Art critic
“I think people don’t quite realize how much work it takes to be a good artist—the drive and determination and self-criticism. You have to be harder on your work than anybody. But you’re always going to find people like that in every generation.”
✒ “Roberta Smith with Jarrett Earnest” Brooklyn Rail

Sarah Thornton

Writer
“I was really interested in artists’ belief in themselves. I think that when Duchamp gave artists the godlike right to designate something as art, he puts artists in a very difficult position. How do you command that authority? To do that is really a real shift and I don’t think it’s any accident that Duchamp started experimenting with his persona. He started crafting identities at the same time as crafting ideas.” ✒ Sarah Thornton “33 Artists in 3 Acts” Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago 2014

Sarah Urist Green

Art curator
“If it’s artists being referred to as pretentious, then Yeah, artists do regularly attempt to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, and culture that is actually possessed.”

Takashi Murakami

Artist
“When I post images on Instagram showing staff members other than myself painting of assisting with the installations, from some corner of the world inevitably arrives the criticism.”

Sally Mann

“Henry James, he was on his deathbed, he is at the peak of his career, he has never made a misstep, everything he has done is perfectly… he begs, he begs for one more chance to do something good. And he has this wonderful… it’s my mantra:
“We work in the dark,
We do what we can,
Our doubt is our passion,
and our passion is our task.”
And it’s like this military march that I march to. I think of it all the time.”

Shirazeh Houshiary

“I really want to get to the core of what I don’t know. And what I don’t know fascinates me more than what I know, even about myself.”
✒ “As Tensions Rise With Iran, So Does Interest in Art It Inspired”
NY Times, 2020

Tehching Hsieh

Artist
“I was an illegal immigrant in the States for fourteen years, and most of my One Year Performances were done during this time. We could use the Panama Canal as an example: when a ship comes from a lower to a higher water level or the other way around, the ship can pass through only when the two different water levels meet. The water level of my art and life need to be the same, so I can sail into art from life, and transfer lifetime to art time.”

Ulay

“For two egocentric driving artists, it is not easy to join forces. To create one and the same work together and authorize the work as one. And that was the difficulty actually”
✒ Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen) 2020
“Ulay Interview: Under My Skin” Louisiana Channel

Wilson Miner

Software designer
“We choose where to live, what to surround ourselves with, what to spend our time and energy on.
We make our world what it is and we become the kind of people who live in it.
When we’re gone all that’s left of us is what we’ve made.
The things you and I make may not leave a visible footprint on the earth but everything we make takes up space, creates noise, competes for attention.”

✒ 2011 Build Conference in Belfast

William Fisk

“I’m not an easy person to live with. Because, you know, I’m married to my work, in a way. But your partner, your wife or spouse, is completely understanding that you need to do that or to be the person you want to be. And that’s an incredible gift.”

Zaria Forman

Artist
“When you really care about what you are doing and it really matters on a personal level, it comes through the quality of the work. I think that’s what viewers respond to most.”