Picasso Artist Quotes

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

What do you think an artist is? ...he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.

When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.

Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal

We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.

Sure, I can talk like you, but I choose not to, It's like an art, you know? Picasso had to prove to the world he could paint the right way, before he goes putting both eyes on the side of a face... See if you paint wrong because that's the best you can do, you just a chump. But you do it because you want to? Then you're an artist...You can take that to the grave and dig it up when you need it.

Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction." ― Pablo Picasso

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.

Good artists copy; great artists steal.

What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes, if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet, or even, if he is a boxer, just his muscles? Far from it: at the same time he is also a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.

Memories are like a still life painted by ten different student artists: some will be blue-based; others red; some will be as stark as Picasso and others as rich as Rembrandt; some will be foreshortened and others distant. Recollections are in the eye of the beholder; no two held up side by side will ever quite match.

Whatever the source of emotion that drives me to create, I want to give it a form which has some connection with the visible world, even if it is only to wage war on that world....I want my paintings to be able to defend themselves to resist the invader, just as though there were razor blades on all surfaces so no one could touch them without cutting his hands.

The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it means nothing. I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist. Why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?" -Pablo Picasso.

A creator is not in advance of his generation but he is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what is happening to his generation.

Art is theft.

As Pablo Picasso (no slouch at theft himself) put it, “Good artists borrow. Great artists steal.

If Melissa Miller were an artist, she would have painted the world in vicious streaks of red. Nothing like Picasso's rose period, all soft and cheerful and so optimistic that it made you want to puke. Missy's red phase would have been brutal and bright enough to cut your eyes. Missy's art would have been honest.

I am a woman. Every artist is a woman and should have a taste for other women. Artists who are homosexual cannot be true artists because they like men, and since they themselves are women they are reverting to normality.

Stay hungry. It worked for Michelangelo, it worked for Picasso, and it works for a hundred thousand artists who do it not for love (although that might play a part) but in order to put food on the table. If you want to translate the world, you need to use your appetites. Does this surprise you? It shouldn’t. There’s no creation without talent, I give you that, but talent is cheap. Talent goes begging. Hunger is the piston of art.

An I Q cannot measure artistic ability. A potential Picasso may be a flop at objective vocabulary or number tests. An I Q does not measure a capacity for love...How do we teach a child - our own, or those in a classroom to have compassion: to allow people to be different; to understand that like is not equal; to experiment; to laugh: to love.

NO MUSE IS GOOD MUSE To be an Artist you need talent, as well as a wife who washes the socks and the children, and returns phone calls and library books and types. In other words, the reason there are so many more Men Geniuses than Women Geniuses is not Genius. It is because Hemingway never joined the P.T.A. And Arthur Rubinstein ignored Halloween. Do you think Portnoy's creator sits through children's theater matinees--on Saturdays? Or that Norman Mailer faced 'driver's ed' failure, chicken pox or chipped teeth? Fitzgerald's night was so tender because the fender his teen-ager dented happened when Papa was at a story conference. Since Picasso does the painting, Mrs. Picasso did the toilet training. And if Saul Bellow, National Book Award winner, invited thirty-three for Thanksgiving Day dinner, I'll bet he had help. I'm sure Henry Moore was never a Cub Scout leader, and Leonard Bernstein never instructed a tricycler On becoming a bicycler just before he conducted. Tell me again my anatomy is not necessarily my destiny, tell me my hang-up is a personal and not a universal quandary, and I'll tell you no muse is a good muse unless she also helps with the laundry.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. PABLO PICASSO

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” —Pablo Picasso

Picasso said “good artists copy but great artists steal.

Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success. —Pablo Picasso artist

Jobs was a strong-willed, elitist artist who didn't want his creations mutated inauspiciously by unworthy programmers. To him it would be as if someone off the street added some brush strokes to a Picasso painting or changed the lyrics to a Dylan song.

Picasso wasn’t in conflict, you can bet your bottom dollar on that. He said, Scram! I need to work, and his mistresses and their spawn ran for the hills. Dickens wasn’t in conflict. He had ten children and wrote as many novels in almost as many years, because it was both understood and appreciated that he was gifted, famous, and rich. The male artist has always been respected.

Recognizing Pablo Picasso in a train compartment, a man inquired of the artist why he did not paint people “the way they really are.” Picasso asked what he meant by that expression. The man opened his wallet and took out a snapshot of his wife, saying, “That’s my wife.” Picasso responded, “Isn’t she rather small and flat?” 5

Learn the rule like a pro so you can break them like an artist.

learn the rules like a professional, so you can break them like an artist.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. PABLO PICASSO

If you look at true artists, if they get really good at something, it occurs to them that they can do this for the rest of their lives, and they can be really successful at it to the outside world, but not really successful to themselves. That’s the moment that an artist really decides who he or she is. If they keep on risking failure they’re still artists. Dylan and Picasso were always risking failure.

Learn the rules like a pro, So you can break them like an artist.

You know what Picasso says. ‘Bad artists copy, good artists steal.

Picasso had a saying—“Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. —Steve Jobs, misattributing a quote to Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso once said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” Lauren

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” ― Pablo Picasso

I am fascinated that no one I have read seems to have noticed that the literature on Picasso continually turns grown-up women into girls.

Every child is an artist. The problem is staying an artist when you grow up. —Pablo Picasso

Picasso says. ‘Bad artists copy, good artists steal.

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist. —PABLO PICASSO

there was a sort of embarrassment about storytelling that struck home powerfully about one hundred years ago, at the beginning of modernism. We see a similar reaction in painting and in music. It's a preoccupation suddenly with the surface rather than the depth. So you get, for example, Picasso and Braque making all kinds of experiments with the actual surface of the painting. That becomes the interesting thing, much more interesting than the thing depicted, which is just an old newspaper, a glass of wine, something like that. In music, the Second Viennese School becomes very interested in what happens when the surface, the diatonic structure of the keys breaks down, and we look at the notes themselves in a sort of tone row, instead of concentrating on things like tunes, which are sort of further in, if you like. That happened, of course, in literature, too, with such great works as James Joyce's Ulysses, which is all about, really, how it's told. Not so much about what happens, which is a pretty banal event in a banal man's life. It's about how it's told. The surface suddenly became passionately interesting to artists in every field about a hundred years ago. In the field of literature, story retreated. The books we talked about just now, Middlemarch, Bleak House, Vanity Fair -- their authors were the great storytellers as well as the great artists. After modernism, things changed. Indeed, modernism sometimes seems to me like an equivalent of the Fall. Remember, the first thing Adam and Eve did when they ate the fruit was to discover that they had no clothes on. They were embarrassed. Embarrassment was the first consequence of the Fall. And embarrassment was the first literary consequence of this modernist discovery of the surface. "Am I telling a story? Oh my God, this is terrible. I must stop telling a story and focus on the minute gradations of consciousness as they filter through somebody's..." So there was a great split that took place. Story retreated, as it were, into genre fiction-into crime fiction, into science fiction, into romantic fiction-whereas the high-art literary people went another way. Children's books held onto the story, because children are rarely interested in surfaces in that sort of way. They're interested in what-happened and what-happened next. I found it a great discipline, when I was writing The Golden Compass and other books, to think that there were some children in the audience. I put it like that because I don't say I write for children. I find it hard to understand how some writers can say with great confidence, "Oh, I write for fourth grade children" or "I write for boys of 12 or 13." How do they know? I don't know. I would rather consider myself in the rather romantic position of the old storyteller in the marketplace: you sit down on your little bit of carpet with your hat upturned in front of you, and you start to tell a story. Your interest really is not in excluding people and saying to some of them, "No, you can't come, because it's just for so-and-so." My interest as a storyteller is to have as big an audience as possible. That will include children, I hope, and it will include adults, I hope. If dogs and horses want to stop and listen, they're welcome as well.

Most striking about the traditional societies of the Congo was their remarkable artwork: baskets, mats, pottery, copper and ironwork, and, above all, woodcarving. It would be two decades before Europeans really noticed this art. Its discovery then had a strong influence on Braque, Matisse, and Picasso -- who subsequently kept African art objects in his studio until his death. Cubism was new only for Europeans, for it was partly inspired by specific pieces of African art, some of them from the Pende and Songye peoples, who live in the basin of the Kasai River, one of the Congo's major tributaries. It was easy to see the distinctive brilliance that so entranced Picasso and his colleagues at their first encounter with this art at an exhibit in Paris in 1907. In these central African sculptures some body parts are exaggerated, some shrunken; eyes project, cheeks sink, mouths disappear, torsos become elongated; eye sockets expand to cover almost the entire face; the human face and figure are broken apart and formed again in new ways and proportions that had previously lain beyond sight of traditional European realism. The art sprang from cultures that had, among other things, a looser sense than Islam or Christianity of the boundaries between our world and the next, as well as those between the world of humans and the world of beasts. Among the Bolia people of the Congo, for example, a king was chosen by a council of elders; by ancestors, who appeared to him in a dream; and finally by wild animals, who signaled their assent by roaring during a night when the royal candidate was left at a particular spot in the rain forest. Perhaps it was the fluidity of these boundaries that granted central Africa's artists a freedom those in Europe had not yet discovered.

The desire to make art begins early. Among the very young this is encouraged (or at least indulged as harmless) but the push toward a 'serious' education soon exacts a heavy toll on dreams and fantasies....Yet for some the desire persists, and sooner or later must be addressed. And with good reason: your desire to make art -- beautiful or meaningful or emotive art -- is integral to your sense of who you are. Life and Art, once entwined, can quickly become inseparable; at age ninety Frank Lloyd Wright was still designing, Imogen Cunningham still photographing, Stravinsky still composing, Picasso still painting. But if making art gives substance to your sense of self, the corresponding fear is that you're not up to the task -- that you can't do it, or can't do it well, or can't do it again; or that you're not a real artist, or not a good artist, or have no talent, or have nothing to say. The line between the artist and his/her work is a fine one at best, and for the artist it feels (quite naturally) like there is no such line. Making art can feel dangerous and revealing. Making art is dangerous and revealing. Making art precipitates self-doubt, stirring deep waters that lay between what you know you should be, and what you fear you might be. For many people, that alone is enough to prevent their ever getting started at all -- and for those who do, trouble isn't long in coming. Doubts, in fact, soon rise in swarms: "I am not an artist -- I am a phony. I have nothing worth saying. I'm not sure what I'm doing. Other people are better than I am. I'm only a [student/physicist/mother/whatever]. I've never had a real exhibit. No one understands my work. No one likes my work. I'm no good. Yet viewed objectively, these fears obviously have less to do with art than they do with the artist. And even less to do with the individual artworks. After all, in making art you bring your highest skills to bear upon the materials and ideas you most care about. Art is a high calling -- fears are coincidental. Coincidental, sneaky and disruptive, we might add, disguising themselves variously as laziness, resistance to deadlines, irritation with materials or surroundings, distraction over the achievements of others -- indeed anything that keeps you from giving your work your best shot. What separates artists from ex-artists is that those who challenge their fears, continue; those who don't, quit. Each step in the artmaking process puts that issue to the test.

The important thing is to recognize that our gift, no matter what the size, is indeed something given us, for which we can take no credit, but which we may humbly serve, and, in serving, learn more wholeness, be offered wondrous newness. Picasso says that an artist paints not to ask a question but because he has found something and he wants to share—he cannot help it—what he has found.

We find a giant like Picasso shifting in his own lifetime from style to style, partly as a reflection of the shifting character of the last four decades in Western society, and partly like a man dialing a ship’s radio on the ocean, trying vainly to find the wave length on which he can talk to his fellow men. But the artists, and the rest of us too, remain spiritually isolated and at sea, and so we cover up our loneliness by chattering with other people about the things we do have language for—the world series, business affairs, the latest news reports. Our deeper emotional experiences are pushed further away, and we tend, thus, to become emptier and lonelier.

The artist Pablo Picasso said, “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.

The only real geniuses are artists: Yeats, Picasso, Garcia, Marquez- geniuses.

Good artists borrow, great artists steal" —attributed to Pablo Picasso, unverified.

by Picasso: ‘Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once one grows up.

Jobs quoted Picasso: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” He added, “And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

Opium had artistic significance, you know. Picasso smoked. He said the scent of opium was the least stupid smell in the world, except for that of the sea.

Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal.

Pablo Picasso said that “all children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.

Picasso Good authors copy, great artists steal"-Picassco

To judge God solely by the present world would be a tragic mistake. At one time, it may have been “the best of all possible worlds,” but surely it is not now. The Bible communicates no message with more certainty than God’s displeasure with the state of creation and the state of humanity. Imagine this scenario: vandals break into a museum displaying works from Picasso’s Blue Period. Motivated by sheer destructiveness, they splash red paint all over the paintings and slash them with knives. It would be the height of unfairness to display these works—a mere sampling of Picasso’s creative genius, and spoiled at that—as representative of the artist. The same applies to God’s creation. God has already hung a “Condemned” sign above the earth, and has promised judgment and restoration. That this world spoiled by evil and suffering still exists at all is an example of God’s mercy, not his cruelty.

We artists are indestructible, even in a prison cell or a concentration camp I would be all right in my own world of art. Even if I had to paint my pictures with my tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.

If you believe in the lone genius myth, creativity is an antisocial act, performed by only a few great figures — mostly dead men with names like Mozart, Einstein, or Picasso. The rest of us are left to stand around and gawk in awe at their achievements. Under the "scenius" model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals — artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers — who make up an “ecology of talent.” Being a valuable part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are, but about what you have to contribute—the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you start. If we forget about genius and think more about how we can nurture and contribute to a scenius, we can adjust our own expectations and the expectations of the worlds we want to accept us. We can stop asking what others can do for us, and start asking what we can do for others. Think about what you want to learn, and make a commitment to learning it in front of others. Find a scenius, pay attention to what others are sharing, and then start taking note of what they’re not sharing. Be on the lookout for voids that you can fill with your own efforts, no matter how bad they are at first. . . . Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you.

She’d once read a biography of the artist René Magritte that Agatha had edited. It claimed that during his early years, when critics had scoffed at his odd, unconventional paintings, he’d supported himself by forging works by Picasso and Braque.

This is a great turtle, Katie.” “James.” Millie brings the waffles to the table. “Are you blind?” Yeah, you tell him, Millie. Some people just can’t appreciate good art. Millie holds her folded napkin up proudly. “It’s a frog.” True artists (like Picasso or me) are always misunderstood.

What do you think an artist is? ...he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.” ― Pablo Picasso

Steve Jobs said creativity is “just connecting things.” Salvador Dali said “those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.” Picasso said “good artists copy but great artists steal.” Mark Twain said “all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.” No magnificent product of the imagination—whether a machine, painting, or philosophy—was created in a complete vacuum. The invention of the telegraph took the efforts of a thousand, but the last man, who added that final inspired touch, got the credit. When you start viewing

I must also leave you to analyze the cultural decline of Western art and literature. In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as a priest and ends as a clown or buffoon. Examples of buffoonery in twentieth-century art, literature and music are many: Dali, Picasso, John Cage, Beckett.

Look at that magic. Light mattered to Monet, to Cezanne, to Manet, and now Matisse is moving into almost flat color, and everyone is following. And Picasso? He doesn't care about light at all. But you can't have beauty without light, and beauty is the only worthwhile quest. Don't lose your way trying to become popular.

It's like art, you know? Picasso had to prove to the world he can paint the right way, before he goes putting both eyes on one side of a face, and noses stickin' outta kneecaps and stuff. See, if you paint wrong because that's the best you can do, you just a chump. But you do it because you want to? Then you're an artist.

You know what Picasso says. ‘Bad artists copy, good artists steal.’ Still with real greatness, there’s a jolt at the end of the wire. It doesn’t matter how often you grab hold of the line, or how many people have grabbed hold of it before you. It’s the same line. Fallen from a higher life. It still carries some of the same shock.

I’m not in the advice business. However, people have been sending increasing amounts of books / videos / manuscripts / poems / photographs / artworks / long raving emails describing plans for certain masterpieces. Mostly this is a pleasure, but I would like to take the opportunity to offer one piece of advice to young artists and writers. Be disciplined. Be hard on yourself. Remember that you are competing with some of the greatest minds in history. If you are a painter, for example, you are entering into a race where Michelangelo and Picasso already have leads. Ask yourself if you have done everything you can, everything in your power, to compete with those guys. It’s not a matter of painting like them or of conceiving of art like them. You can do your own thing. It’s a matter of pushing yourself, the way they pushed themselves, to do in art what no one else could do. Why accept anything less of yourself? Wittgenstein: “What you have achieved cannot mean more to others than it does to you. Whatever it has cost you, that’s what they’ll pay.

Part of the problem [with Picasso's fame] lies with the artist himself - at that point when Picasso stopped making art and began making Picassos...it is a potentially fatal side-effect of success for any artist... Would it be a parody of modernism's self-referentiality to describe this point as one where the artist stops thinking like an artist and starts [painting] like an art historian?

Art needs a proper climate. The average Frenchman is no more artistic than the average American, that's for sure. But the French climate is good for art, because in France an artist isn't expected to earn as much as a stockbroker. He is justified in his existence even if he is just a little artist. He doesn't have to be Picasso. he counts as a necessary human factor although he hasn't reached the very top.

The line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox a hundred times. [...] You know what Picasso says. 'Bad artists copy, good artists steal.' Still with real greatness, there's a jolt at the end of the wire. It doesn't matter how often you grab hold of the line, or how many people have grabbed hold of it before you. It's the same line. Fallen from a higher life. It still carries some of the same shock.

The line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox machine a hundred times. [...] You know what Picasso says. 'Bad artists copy, good artists steal.' Still with real greatness, there's a jolt at the end of the wire. It doesn't matter how often you grab hold of the line, or how many people have grabbed hold of it before you. It's the same line. Fallen from a higher life. It still carries some of the same shock.

Where visual artists are concerned, the Baroque sculptor and architect Bernini and the painter and sculptor Picasso were clearly adept at both experiential and instrumental attending, says Tellegen, as is the modern architect Frank Gehry. Choosing a literary example, he says that F. Scott Fitzgerald once admitted to "wrapping one of his romantic flings in cellophane" for later artistic use and notes that "this kind of heartless but honest professionalism is not uncommon among creative people.

Freud's convictions about the importance of infantile developments also colored his view of creative activity. Freud was impressed by the parallels between the child at play, the adult daydreamer, and the creative artist. As he once phrased it: Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him?....The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously-that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion-while separating it sharply from reality.

Albert Einstein, considered the most influential person of the 20th century, was four years old before he could speak and seven before he could read. His parents thought he was retarded. He spoke haltingly until age nine. He was advised by a teacher to drop out of grade school: “You’ll never amount to anything, Einstein.” Isaac Newton, the scientist who invented modern-day physics, did poorly in math. Patricia Polacco, a prolific children’s author and illustrator, didn’t learn to read until she was 14. Henry Ford, who developed the famous Model-T car and started Ford Motor Company, barely made it through high school. Lucille Ball, famous comedian and star of I Love Lucy, was once dismissed from drama school for being too quiet and shy. Pablo Picasso, one of the great artists of all time, was pulled out of school at age 10 because he was doing so poorly. A tutor hired by Pablo’s father gave up on Pablo. Ludwig van Beethoven was one of the world’s great composers. His music teacher once said of him, “As a composer, he is hopeless.” Wernher von Braun, the world-renowned mathematician, flunked ninth-grade algebra. Agatha Christie, the world’s best-known mystery writer and all-time bestselling author other than William Shakespeare of any genre, struggled to learn to read because of dyslexia. Winston Churchill, famous English prime minister, failed the sixth grade.

Mothers are artists, in their way, wouldn’t you say? They’re like symphony conductors of entire lives. They’re painters or sculptors. And not only is it really hard to shape clay into something really good, but that piece of clay is changing dramatically, all the time, even if you never touch it. A painting won’t get painted if you just leave the canvas alone but a child will still develop into something even if you neglect it. Each mom and each dad has to adapt to what they’re trying to make, hoping to make, and Mom and Dad also have to let that child turn into the creation he or she wants to be. Oh, and then lots and lots of moms and dads have to do this with two or three separate creations, simultaneously. Or, in the case of you, Ora Zella, with eleven creations. How is that not way more impressive than anything a great painter does? Picasso, Shmicasso.

And then, I met him , Malay Roychoudhury, and a strange fear gripped me. Frankly, I am dead scared of such people. There is a community of artists who’re too real in their artistry. This class that charts names like, Allen Ginsberg, Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain and many others are Art Extremists, a term I’ve coined for them. They exert an irresistible attraction towards the opposite sex, who’re drawn to the edgy and dangerous involvement they have with their art and times. Pablo Picasso is often compared to the Minataur, the half man-half monster. Like the Minataur he demanded women to be ‘sacrificed’ to him, a view that is corroborated in his tumultuous personal life, that left behind a trail of agonized wives, mistresses and children. Malay Roychoudhury told me of a woman who was 20 years his junior and who had threatened him with suicide if he didn’t marry her. She kept her promise and drank toilet-acid.

Quite unpredictable things happen when the bulk of the population attains what we think of as a high cultural level... This, I think, is because the effort of a Schoenberg or a Picasso…or a William Faulkner or an Albert Camus…has nothing to do, at bottom, with physical comfort, or indeed with comfort of any other kind. But the aim of the people who rise to this high cultural level...is precisely comfort for the body and the mind. The artistic objects by which they are surrounded cannot possibly fulfill their original function of disturbing the peace...which is still the only method by which the mind can be improved...they bear witness instead to the attainment of a certain level of economic stability and a certain thin measure of sophistication. But art and ideas come out of the passion and torment of experience: it is impossible to have a real relationship to the first if one’s aim is to be protected from the second.

I imagine you not telling me to whisper. I imagine you not saying oh don't say this literally. You want me to evoke as opposed to mere describing. You want me to be an invisible scribe that an octoepoose was hiding. I'm not sure if my facial features are an autograph that your Picasso smile is signing. Infamous for the mirror I shook when my sock puppets were pining? I am not just a fish that you gave wings to! I don't simply flop in the air whenever you brush some mannequinn's hair. There is a reason for the bad timing. Exquisite imbalances. A child enjoying the pink sky. I won't say that is my clue! Playing The Beatles on a kazoo is beautiful oooh ooooh Your laughter is a woman with alot of eyeballs on her stomach that pretends that she doesn't see the colors of all them songs. In the pre dawn hours we dance with delusions and illusions. The eternal seamstress does not care for Frakenstein's dress(she still loves our unique caress ) She loves and laughs despite some so-called scientist. Where is that emperor and his nakedness! Darling, our atoms need never split. We compliment in so many ways that all our night's and days have become one swirling sunrise/sunset that only true lovers can scoff at(those who shhhhh) The flower is not passive or apologetic. It blooms through the fractured net. Floating magnetic(eep eeep) You are not just some seductress. You are the leader of an elite group of intergalactic seductress impersonators who reveal corruption but then choose to love. We embrace conclusions that make the puddle heart awake with ethereal drum beat gongs. You think of a heroic poodle in the dark. We both know that the trapeze artist that followed us was not a cliche. He smelled differently. He had never met a floating lady that showed him how to appreciate a symphony without taking away his love for a good rock n roll melody. I am not sure I can only whisper of such realities. I am not sure I can only whisper of such realities.-

Einstein served as a source of inspiration for many of the modernist artists and thinkers, even when they did not understand him. This was especially true when artists celebrated such concepts as being “free from the order of time,” as Proust put it in the closing of Remembrance of Things Past. “How I would love to speak to you about Einstein,” Proust wrote to a physicist friend in 1921. “I do not understand a single word of his theories, not knowing algebra. [Nevertheless] it seems we have analogous ways of deforming Time.”54 A pinnacle of the modernist revolution came in 1922, the year Einstein’s Nobel Prize was announced. James Joyce’s Ulysses was published that year, as was T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. There was a midnight dinner party in May at the Majestic Hotel in Paris for the opening of Renard, composed by Stravinsky and performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Stravinsky and Diaghilev were both there, as was Picasso. So, too, were both Joyce and Proust, who “were destroying 19th century literary certainties as surely as Einstein was revolutionizing physics.” The mechanical order and Newtonian laws that had defined classical physics, music, and art no longer ruled.

During the ceremony celebrating the unveiling of Chicago’s huge outdoor Picasso sculpture in the plaza across from City Hall, I happened to be standing next to a personal-injury lawyer with whom I was acquainted. As the inaugural speech droned on, I noticed a look of intense concentration on his face, and that his lips were moving. Asked what he was thinking, he answered that he was trying to estimate the amount of money the city was going to have to pay to settle suits involving children who got hurt climbing the sculpture. Was this lawyer lucky, because he could transform everything he saw into a professional problem his skills could master, and thus live in constant flow? Or was he depriving himself of an opportunity to grow by paying attention only to what he was already familiar with, and ignoring the aesthetic, civic, and social dimensions of the event? Perhaps both interpretations are accurate. In the long run, however, looking at the world exclusively from the little window that one’s self affords is always limiting. Even the most highly respected physicist, artist, or politician becomes a hollow bore and ceases to enjoy life if all he can interest himself in is his limited role in the universe.

NO MUSE IS GOOD MUSE -by Rochelle Distelheim To be an Artist you need talent, as well as a wife who washes the socks and the children, and returns phone calls and library books and types. In other words, the reason there are so many more Men Geniuses than Women Geniuses is not Genius. It is because Hemingway never joined the P.T.A. And Arthur Rubinstein ignored Halloween. Do you think Portnoy's creator sits through children's theater matinees--on Saturdays? Or that Norman Mailer faced 'driver's ed' failure, chicken pox or chipped teeth? Fitzgerald's night was so tender because the fender his teen-ager dented happened when Papa was at a story conference. Since Picasso does the painting, Mrs. Picasso did the toilet training. And if Saul Bellow, National Book Award winner, invited thirty-three for Thanksgiving Day dinner, I'll bet he had help. I'm sure Henry Moore was never a Cub Scout leader, and Leonard Bernstein never instructed a tricycler On becoming a bicycler just before he conducted. Tell me again my anatomy is not necessarily my destiny, tell me my hang-up is a personal and not a universal quandary, and I'll tell you no muse is a good muse unless she also helps with the laundry. -Rochelle Distelheim ===============================

Catch Either/Or Thinking Anxious perfectionists will typically think “I need to perform flawlessly at all times,” with their underlying assumption being “or else it will result in disaster.” This is a common type of thinking trap termed either/or thinking. In this case, the either/or is this: Either there is flawless performance or complete and utter failure, and nothing in between. Not only can this style of thinking make you feel crushed when you don’t meet your own ideal standards, but it also often leads to perfectionism paralysis. Take, for example, an artist who sees his future career prospects as becoming either the next Picasso or a penniless flop; this person doesn’t see other possible outcomes in between. You can see how this would give the artist a creative block. For other folks, their hidden assumption may be slightly different: “Either I need to perform flawlessly at all times, or other people will reject me.” When I look back at my clinical psychology training, I realize I had this belief at that time. At a semiconscious level, I thought that the only way to prevent getting booted out of the program was to score at the top of the class for every test or assignment. Ultra-high standards often arise because a person is trying to hide imagined catastrophic flaws. In this scenario, people often think that if their flaws get revealed they’ll be shunned, and so the only way to conceal their defects is by always excelling. When people who have this belief do excel, their brain jumps to the conclusion that excelling was the only reason they managed to avoid catastrophe. This then perpetuates their belief that excelling is necessary for preventing future disasters. Researchers have used the term clinical perfectionism to describe the most problematic kind of perfectionism. When clinical perfectionists manage to meet their ultra-high standards, they often conclude that those standards must not have been high enough and revise them upward, meaning they can never feel any sense of peace. All this being said, I’m not suggesting you shoot for “acceptable” performance standards if you’re capable of excellence. Most of the anxious perfectionists I’ve worked with would hate that. It’s not in their nature to feel comfortable with mediocre performance.

Building upon existing ideas and inventions is another way to foster innovation. In fact, when you ask artists of all types where they get their inspiration, they can usually list others before them who set the stage for their work. Painters draw upon the tools, techniques, and approaches of other artists; musicians build upon the styles of other musicians they have heard; writers are influenced by literature they have read; and inventors build upon the creations of others. As Pablo Picasso is claimed to have said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.

In fact, as Paul suspected, Braque, Matisse, and Picasso showed no sympathy for the Germans. Other artists, like André Derain, Otto Friesz, van Dongen, Paul Belmondo, and de Vlaminck, did not hesitate to go on tour in Germany. Some even returned as propagandists, so in thrall were they with the Nazi regime.

Modern art always projects itself into a twilight zone where no values are fixed. It is always born in anxiety, at least since Cézanne. And Picasso once said that what matters most to us in Cézanne, more than his pictures, is his anxiety. It seems to me a function of modern art to transmit this anxiety to the spectator, so that his encounter with the work is--at least while the work is new-- a genuine existential predicament. Like Kierkegaard's God, the work molests us with its aggressive absurdity [...]. It demands a decision in which you discover something of your own quality; and this decision is always a "leap of faith," to use Kierkegaard's famous term. And like Kierkegaard's God, who demands a sacrifice from Abraham in violation of every moral standard: like Kierkegaard's God, the picture seems arbitrary, cruel, irrational, demanding your faith, while it makes no promise of future rewards. In other words, it is in the nature of original contemporary art to present itself as a bad risk. And we the public, artists included, should be proud of being in this predicament, because nothing else would seem to us quite true to life; and art, after all, is supposed to be a mirror of life.

A wealthy man and his son loved to collect works of art. They had in their collection works ranging from Picasso to Raphael and Rembrandt. When the Vietnam War broke out, the son was drafted and sent to fight in ’Nam. He was very courageous and died in battle. The father was notified and grieved deeply for his only son. About a month later, a young lad appeared at the door to his house and said, “Sir, you don’t know me, but I am the soldier for whom your son gave his life that fateful day. He was carrying me to safety when a bullet struck him in the heart. He died instantly. He used to often talk about you and your love for art. Here’s something for you,” he added, holding out a package. “It is something that I drew. I know I am not much of an artist, but I wanted you to have this from me as a small measure of memory and thanks.” It was a portrait of his son, painted by the young man. It captured the personality of his son. The father’s eyes welled up with tears as he thanked the young man for the painting. He offered to pay for the picture, but the man replied, “Oh! No, sir. I could never repay what your son did for me. It is my gift to you.” The father hung the portrait over his mantel and showed it proudly to all his visitors along with all of the great works of art he possessed. Some time later, the old man died. As decreed in his will, his paintings were all to be auctioned. Many influential and rich people gathered together, excited over the prospect of owning one of the masterpieces. On a platform nearby also sat the painting of his son. The auctioneer pounded his gavel. “Let’s start the bidding with the picture of his son. Who will bid for this picture?” There was silence. A voice shouted from the back, “Let’s skip this one. We want the famous masters.” But the auctioneer persisted. “Ten dollars, twenty dollars, what do I hear?” Another voice came back angrily, “We didn’t come here for this. Let’s have the Picassos, the Matisses, the van Goghs.” Still the auctioneer persisted. “The son. Anyone for the son? Who’ll take the son?” Finally a quavering voice came from the back. It was the longtime gardener of the house. “I’ll take the son for ten dollars. I am sorry, but that’s all I have.” “Ten dollars once, ten dollars twice, anybody for twenty dollars? Sold for ten dollars.” “Now let’s get on with the auction,” said a wealthy art aficionado sitting in the front row. The auctioneer laid down his gavel and spoke. “I am sorry, but the auction is over.” “But what about the other paintings? The masters?” “The auction is over,” said the auctioneer. “I was asked to conduct the auction with a stipulation, a secret stipulation that said that only the painting of the son would be auctioned. Whoever bought that painting would inherit the entire estate, paintings and all. The one who took the son gets everything.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” Pablo Picasso Venn

The exact opposite is the case in poetry and the other creative arts. There metaphor is everything. The creative writer, composer, or visual artist conveys, often obliquely by abstraction or deliberate distortion, his own perceptions and the feelings he hopes to evoke—about something, about anything, real or imagined. He seeks to bring forth in an original way some truth or other about the human experience. He tries to pass what he creates directly along the channel of human experience, from his mind to your mind. His work is judged by the power and beauty of its metaphors. He obeys a dictum ascribed to Picasso: art is the lie that shows us the truth.

Like a good many men, artists or not, Stone liked to go out with ravishing women who were some kind of crazy, but preferred to go home to somebody sane. With the possible exception of Pablo Picasso, this pattern of behavior is not sustainable for anyone in the long term.

eight different cities before he was sixteen years old. Georgia O’Keeffe lived in the shadow of her “perfect” older brother Francis. And Jean-Michel Basquiat triumphed over poverty to become one of the world’s most influential artists. Kid Artists tells their stories and more with full-color cartoon illustrations on nearly every page. Other subjects include Claude Monet, Jacob Lawrence, Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Beatrix Potter, Yoko Ono, Dr. Seuss, Emily Carr, Keith Haring, Charles Schulz, and Louise Nevelson.

From the vantage point of creating something useful (to maintaining and developing civilization), beautiful or true, Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) artistic philosophy involved rejecting the idea that art should create beauty and a road to transcendence. His purpose was to challenge the accepted way of doing art and so challenge all that was established, including that which is useful. In so-doing, his art created a sense of shock, confusion, and meaninglessness and contributed to anarchy.34 The novels and stories of James Joyce (1882-1941) share much of this philosophy. The Dubliners, for example, horrified audiences with its detailed depictions of depraved behaviour and these actually occurring in real (named) streets and pubs. The stories take the reader into a world of nihilism and Finnegan’s Wake simply creates a sense of ‘profound’ confusion.35 As for Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), he shunned musical harmony and tradition in favour of a highly-structured but incomprehensible kind of music which most people find it actively-unpleasant to listen to . . . a world in which nothing makes sense, there is no meaning, there is negativity, there is the Void.

Pablo Picasso famously said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” There is truth in that thought. Considering my own experience, I tailored it a little: every child is a runner. The problem is how to remain a runner once we grow up.

The bad artists imitate, the great artists steal.

All the art experts, all the big galleries, if not maybe quite all of the humble folk who look at them, agree Jackson Pollock’s splatter paintings do indeed count as great art. And JP intended it to be art too. But what’s curious about most of the most radical artists of the post-Second World War period is that they came from nowhere to prominence with the support of . . . the CIA! Yes, the American secret services actively promoted (through books, funding schemes, newspapers and of course galleries) radical art as part of a labyrinthine strategy to undermine the Soviet Union. This was all part of a special strategy to win over intellectuals – including philosophers – described as ‘the battle for Picasso’s mind’ by one former CIA agent, Thomas Braden, in a television interview in the 1970s. Tom Braden was responsible for dispensing money under the heading Congress for Cultural Freedom. Naturally, most of the people he gave money to had no idea that the funds, and hence the artistic direction, actually came from the CIA. Intellectuals and great artists, after all, hate being told what to think. And what was the communist empire doing meanwhile? They were promoting, through galleries, public funding and so on, a very different kind of art supposedly reflecting communist political values. ‘Soviet realism’ was a kind of reaction to ‘Western Impressionism’ (all those dotty – pointilliste the art-experts call them – landscapes and swirling, subjective shapes) and ensured that people in the paintings looked like people, decent, hard-working types too, and what’s more were doing worthy things – like making tractors or (at least) looking inspirationally at the viewer. When Soviet art wasn’t figurative (as this sort of stuff is called), it was very logical and mathematical, full of precise geometrical shapes and carefully weighted blocks of colour.