Visual Artist Quotes

Over the last forty years, many educators, decision-makers, and even some parents have come to regard the arts as peripheral, and let’s face it, frivolous—especially the visual arts, with their connotation of ”the starving artist” and the mistaken concept of necessary talent

Anatomists today would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer or a mathematician - but they would recognize the brain of a professional musician without moment's hesitation.

Art doesn’t give rise to anything in us that isn’t already there. It simply stirs our curious consciousness and sparks a fire that illuminates who we have always wanted to be.

Allowing artist-illustrators to control the design and content of statistical graphics is almost like allowing typographers to control the content, style, and editing of prose.

About writing:The trick is to make sure you love what you've produced--to Believe..in order to convince.

When the topic of self-care came up, Eve, an academic, writer and visual artist said "There is no glory in a grind that literally grinds you down to dust".

I became an artist because I wanted to be an active participant in the conversation about art.

if you have the tools but do not have the visual concept, the tools do not work

Art is a visual language; I'm just perfecting my alphabet.

Every great artist gives birth to a new universe, in which the familiar things look the way they have never before looked to anyone.

Nothing can be imagined, nothing can be visualized in our minds, until we have a word for it. Therefore, when I give myself to the free flow of any words that trip off my tongue without predetermination, I am tapping into the primal creative power at the heart of the cosmos. Or maybe I'm just a bullshit artist.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but the way I paint I'm going to need to contact an editor. Even if I were to abstractly paint the phrase "I love you," it would be the visual equivalent of Joyce's Ulysses. -James Lee Schmidt and Jarod Kintz

Life. Life is a show. It's up to you how to make your own story, do your own show and how to live your show you are on. You choose who you need to meet, where you should have your scenes or which scenes you want to do. How awesome your mind can do right?

If you wait for a better time to create, better than this very moment, if you wait until you feel settled, divinely inspired, perfectly centered, unburdened of your usual worries, or free of your own skin, forget about it. You will still be waiting tomorrow and the next day, wondering why you never managed to begin, wondering

What also excites me is that the artist attempts with the visual what I attempt to do with words: stop time, create a moment, and celebrate the process.

Hiding from your fears does not make you safe it makes you live a life of fear that keeps growing in size, which is worse.

Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses? If you stop and think about it, it’s crazy. Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it? It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it. And how would you judge an artist who mutilated animals in a gallery because it was visually arresting? How riveting would the sound of a tortured animal need to be to make you want to hear it that badly? Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.

Victor-Marie Hugo (26 February 1802 — 22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights campaigner, and perhaps the most influential exponent of the Romantic movement in France. In France, Hugo's literary reputation rests on his poetic and dramatic output. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles stand particularly high in critical esteem, and Hugo is sometimes identified as the greatest French poet. In the English-speaking world his best-known works are often the novels Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris (sometimes translated into English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame). Though extremely conservative in his youth, Hugo moved to the political left as the decades passed; he became a passionate supporter of republicanism, and his work touches upon most of the political and social issues and artistic trends of his time. Source: Wikipedia

He spread out in his chair like a melting shard of Swiss cheese and informed us: “The only lies I’ll ever tell are: ‘I won’t come in your mouth’ and ‘I’ll just rub it around your ass.’” It wasn’t a pretty visual.

The artist (I suppose) usually pays for the privilege by some sort of partial insomnia, by the possession of one faculty that will not be controlled nor put to sleep. In a poet this must often be the visual imagination, bringing before his eyes a succession of images which he never summoned, and of which some (it is only too likely) will be ugly or pitiful.

Be a flower. Be a seed. Let your growth arouse curiosity. Let it fascinate and amaze. Let it inspire the artist and the scientist. Let it shock the doubters. Let it grant hope to the hopeless. Let it begin in silence, and end with a loud bang. Don’t be an open book - be mysterious. Be extraordinary, be undefinable, be a ball of fiery fire, and above all, grow in silence, and let your success do the talking.

Blog and written status updates are descendents of diaries, memoirs, commonplace books and autobiographies. Selfies are descendants of visual artists’ self-portraits, and the quantitative modes of lifelogs, personal maps, productivity records and activity trackers are descendants of genres such as accounting, habit tracking and to-do lists.

I feel very strongly that every artist has one central story to tell. The struggle is to tell and retell that story over and over again, visual form, and try to challenge that story. But at the core that story remains the same. It's like the defining story of who you are. -Gregory Crewdson, "Brief Encounters" http://www.gregorycrewdsonmovie.com/

An art prodigy of the 21st century has yet to be crowned. Or have they?

Seeing shapes and colours without the burden of thinking about what they are will liberate your creative mind, inform your visual resources and alleviate intellectual interference.

Very often, in the visual arts, if you take the first work of a visual artist, it already includes almost everything they do later.

To Marcel Duchamp’s blithe “There is no solution, because there is no problem,” the Japanese visual artist Shigeko Kubota replied, “There is no problem, because there is no solution.

He bought a couch that he adorned with silks of Tyrian purple. He lay her upon it and sang ballads to her. Like most great visual artists he was an incompetent musician and a deplorable poet.

Anatomists today would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer, or a mathematician—but they could recognize the brain of a professional musician without a moment’s hesitation.

I don't create my images as visual equations to be solved, but rather, i create them as internal landscapes that the viewer can explore. I enjoy sharing the why behind the what, of my creations... but my way, isn't the only way, to experience them. There is no correct way to interpret them. Perception is reality and yours may be different from mine and that's okay.

Musicians do not get on stage without hearing the song singing inside of them. Poets do not write as if they are jotting down a sermon, they see everything in their subconscious before presenting it to the conscious, which they later turn to  readable materials. Artist do not draw and paint without painting in dream states, trance, or see an art form that others do not see. Being creative does not calls for being any supernatural entity, but in creating with the entities inside of you.

Creation and Free Will are constantly moving, hand in hand, like children traveling along a path full of impulses and inspirations.Through the use of the Dragonflame philosophy they become superior artistic beings able to enjoy and share the fruits of creative labor.

To the child, as to the artist, everything is relevant, little is unseen. The artist seems to retain something of the child's visual strategy: how to look at the world before knowing (or without thinking about) the name or function of everything that catches the eye.

Whenever I listen to an artist or an art historian I'm struck by how much they see and how much they know--and how much I don't. Good art writing should therefore do at least two things. It should teach us how to look: at art, architecture, sculpture, photography and all the other visual components of our daily landscape. And it should give us the information we need to understand what we're looking at.

Making art depends upon noticing things — things about yourself, your methods, your subject matter. Sooner or later, for instance, every visual artist notices the relationship of the line to the picture’s edge. Before that moment the relationship does not exist; afterwards it’s impossible to imagine it not existing. And from that moment on every new line talks back and forth with the picture’s edge. People who have not yet made this small leap do not see the same picture as those who have — in fact, conceptually speaking, they do not even live in the same world.

No other field is closed to those who are not white and male as is the visual arts. After I decided to be an artist, the first thing I had to believe was that I, a black woman, could penetrate the art scene, and that, further, I could do so without sacrificing one iota of my blackness or my femaleness or my humanity.

To get from the tangible to the intangible (which mature artists in any medium claim as part of their task) a paradox of some kind has frequently been helpful. For the photographer to free himself of the tyranny of the visual facts upon which he is utterly dependent, a paradox is the only possible tool. And the talisman paradox for unique photography is to work "the mirror with a memory" as if it were a mirage, and the camera is a metamorphosing machine, and the photograph as if it were a metaphor…. Once freed of the tyranny of surfaces and textures, substance and form [the photographer] can use the same to pursue poetic truth" (Minor White, Newhall, 281).

The special calling of the artist is to call the world to a kind of rest or remind it of its restlessness

The artist said he was removing all visual clues to the known world so that the viewer could enjoy the “experience of non-objectivity . . . the supremacy of pure feeling.

The drinks were so perfect, so visually artistic. Virginia could honestly believe she would find her salvation in one.

Art appears in its best form when it is brought out from the boundaries of the rules, provided the artist knows the rules very well.

The twin aspects of genius, the passive and the active, are possessed by the fully realized artist; they also form the necessary equipment of the Adept. Yet in very few people are these twin aspects manifested. Nearly everyone has a capacity for the passive aspect, which involves some sort of appreciation of aesthetic values. There are few people totally unresponsive to the beauties of nature, and none at all that is not responsive to its ferocious manifestations.Fewer are able to respond profoundly to the beauty of natural phenomena, and fewer still to so-called works of art. It takes a degree of genius to respond to such manifestations the whole time. Artists in this category are among the saints, some of whom thrilled with rapture at the constant awareness of the total unity, harmony, and beauty of things. Such were Boehme, Ramakrishna, etc. Some yogis are immersed in an unsullied and vibrant bliss derived from the incessant contemplation of this 'world-bewitching maya'4-the breath-taking wonder of the great and glamorous illusion which surrounds us. On the other side of the fence, on the side of active or creative genius, there are yet fewer. Active or creative genius means nothing less than the ability to translate the wonder or the terror of the great lfla (the great play of life) in terms of visual, tactile, audible, olfactory, or some other sensual presentation of phenomena. But there is a third aspect of genius which is yet more rare. It is the ability to open the door of the theatre and admit the influences from outside, from the swarming gulfs beyond the grasp of the mind, and accessible only to the magical entity whose fantastic feelers can snare the most fugitive impulses as they flash through the holes in space, the kinks in time, to be reflected in the magic mirror of the artist's mind.

In the end, he settled on posting one picture every week of whatever personal art project he happens to be working on. “It’s a great way for me to have a visual archive of my projects,” he explained. He also follows only a small number of accounts, all of which belong to artists whose work inspires him—making the experience of checking his feed both fast and meaningful.

The fundamental category in Dostoevsky’s mode of artistic visualizing was not evolution, but coexistence and interaction. He saw and conceived his world primarily in terms of space, not time.

The task given to the artists was straightforward: create a visual identity for Communism. The Constructivists accepted the brief and in so doing forever associated avant-garde art with the left.

To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

You must be able to create in the middle of things, or else you will not create. You must learn to take whatever practical and psychological actions are necessary to combat the anticreating forces that surround you and live within you.

Each subsequent generation of artists eliminated yet more visual information in an attempt to capture atmospheric light (Impressionism), accentuate the emotive qualities of color (Fauvism), or look at a subject from multiple viewpoints (Cubism).

visual artist. My point is, it’s clear to me that any great artist—musician, painter, sculptor, a fine prose stylist—is on a subconscious level a mathematician and a carpenter and a mason and an engineer. A great artist intuitively understands how the world is built and how it works and how people best fit into it. That’s how they’re able to create beauty—because they know the truth of things. An artist is a mathematician who knows the formulas of the soul. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.

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.

These two developments throw light on what is perhaps the most fundamental difference between the Renaissance and all previous periods of art. We have repeatedly seen that there were these circumstances which could compel the artist to make a distinction between the "technical" proportions and the "objective;" the influence of organic movement, the influence of perspective foreshortening, and the regard for the visual impression of the beholder. These three factors of variation have one thing in common: they all presuppose the artistic recognition of subjectivity. Organic movement introduces into the calculus of artistic composition the subjective will and the subjective emotions of the thing represented; foreshortening the subjective visual experience of the artist; and those "eurhythmic" adjustments which alter that which is right in favor of what seems right, the subjective visual experience of a potential beholder. And it is the Renaissance which, for the first time, not only affirms but formally legitimizes and rationalizes these three forms of subjectivity.

It dawned on me that we were both artists at our core. We were visual people, and an image or a simple glance meant more than a thousand phrases could ever hope to. Spoken words would never be able to convey the full complexity of what we felt—for others, or even for each other.

The intellectual context in which Eliot began work on the "long poem" that was to become The Waste Land has much to tell us about formal aspects of his poem. Certainly it reveals something of the problem any artist would have had in finding a perspective on the twentieth century. Emphasis on context, however, should not be taken as an assertion of specific influence. It should not be assumed that Eliot was consciously trying to adjust his presentation of reality to conform with the presentations in science or in the visual arts or even that he was greatly influenced by any specific scientific theory or any aesthetic manifesto. Without a doubt, he was aware of what was happening in science, in philosophy, and in the other arts. And without a doubt, he created structures in art which show his sensitivity to his age and which are formally analogous to structures created by other artists. He arrived, however, not by following anyone but by trying to find his own way. He spent most of the decade before writing The Waste Land as a close student of philosophy, comparative religion, and Buddhism, and his understanding of these subjects is part of the basic context of his art.

When such a writer is at the height of her powers, everything seems significant; the merest everyday object becomes freighted with symbolic value and drenched in a strange kind of beauty. This is how writers and visual artists glimpse the latent value in everyday things. Objects transform before their eyes and reveal their true nature; the world unpeels itself. Meaning proliferates, so that to write a sentence is to touch on, allude to, all the possibilities of other sentences allied to it. The world takes on a heightened poignancy, which then destabilises emotion. This is the essence of the artist’s work.

There was almost certainly a genetic contribution to Einstein’s dopaminergic traits. One of his two sons became an internationally recognized expert on hydraulic engineering. The other was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of twenty, and died in an asylum. Large population studies have also found a genetic component of a dopaminergic character. An Icelandic study that evaluated the genetic profile of over 86,000 people discovered that individuals who carried genes that placed them at greater risk for either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder were more likely to belong to a national society of actors, dancers, musicians, visual artists, or writers.

It’s not visual. He’s not. You know him by his work, for one thing, and that part is visual, I suppose, isn’t it? The sky, moon, stars, and trees, all those exotic colors you’re apt to see in birds’ feathers. When you look at a painting, you don’t try to visualize the artist, do you? But you know somebody painted it or it wouldn’t be there.

A group of grandmothers is a tapestry. A group of toddlers, a jubilance (see also: a bewailing). A group of librarians is an enlightenment. A group of visual artists is a bioluminescence. A group of short story writers is a Flannery. A group of musicians is--a band. A resplendence of poets. A beacon of scientists. A raft of social workers. A group of first responders is a valiance. A group of peaceful protestors is a dream. A group of special education teachers is a transcendence. A group of neonatal ICU nurses is a divinity. A group of hospice workers, a grace. Humans in the wild, gathered and feeling good, previously an exhilaration, now: a target. A target of concert-goers. A target of movie-goers. A target of dancers. A group of schoolchildren is a target.

Some writers, even some poets, become famous public figures, but writers as such have no social status, in the way that doctors and lawyers, whether famous or obscure, have. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the so-called fine arts have lost the social utility they once had. Since the invention of printing and the spread of literacy, verse no longer has a utility value as a mnemonic, a devise by which knowledge and culture were handed on from one generation to the next, and, since the invention of the camera, the draughtsman and painter are no longer needed to provide visual documentation; they have, consequently, become “pure” arts, that is to say, gratuitous activities. Secondly, in a society governed by the values appropriate to Labor (capitalist America may well be more completely governed by these than communist Russia) the gratuitous is no longer regarded – most earlier cultures thought differently – as sacred, because, to Man the Laborer, leisure is not sacred but a respite from laboring, a time for relaxation and the pleasures of consumption. In so far such a society thinks about the gratuitous at all, it is suspicious of it – artists do not labor, therefore, they are probably parasitic idlers – or, at best, regards it as trivial – to write poetry or paint pictures is a harmless private hobby.

Although he was neither fully original nor correct in his description of a senso comune, he was right in his general view that the human brain receives visual and other stimuli, processes them into perceptions, then transmits reactions through the nervous system to the muscles. More important, his fascination with the connection between the mind and the body became a key component of his artistic genius: showing how inner emotions are manifest in outward gestures.

The possibility that all recognition of images is connected with projections and visual anticipations is strengthened by the results of recent experiments. It appears that if you show an observer the image of a pointing hand or arrow, he will tend to shift its location somehow in the direction of the movement. Without this tendency of ours to see potential movement in the form of anticipation, artists would never have been able to create the suggestion of speed in stationary images.

She was standing at the door, and the sheer visual delight, the sharp ache of happiness, something like the sight of fleeing moments of beauty that are so much a part of the life’s vanishing act, with its total absence of forever, filled him as usual with that greed, that tyrannical urge to seize, to keep and preserve and never lose again, which is perhaps how twenty thousand years ago the first image of an antelope came to be painted by an artist upon a rock. Then she put her blouse on and Time, the old robber baron, went by, carrying his loots away.

An interesting question is whether symmetry with respect to translation, and indeed reflection and rotation too, is limited to the visual arts, or may be exhibited by other artistic forms, such as pieces of music. Evidently, if we refer to the sounds, rather than to the layout of the written musical score, we would have to define symmetry operations in terms other than purely geometrical, just as we did in the case of the palindromes. Once we do that, however, the answer to the question, Can we find translation-symmetric music? is a resounding yes. As Russian crystal physicist G. V. Wulff wrote in 1908: "The spirit of music is rhythm. It consists of the regular, periodic repetition of parts of the musical composition...the regular repetition of identical parts in the whole constitutes the essence of symmetry." Indeed, the recurring themes that are so common in musical composition are the temporal equivalents of Morris's designs and symmetry under translation. Even more generally, compositions are often based on a fundamental motif introduced at the beginning and then undergoing various metamorphoses.

There is however, one reason why the arts so rarely accept a mission that IS within the power of the Church to alter. In the past, the densest or richest location of baptised art has been the Liturgy. The sacred use of the arts in the liturgical setting has provided inspiration for artists engaged in producing artworks for contexts outside the Liturgy, for consumption beyond the limits of the visible Church. In the modern West, the Muses have largely fled the liturgical amphitheatre, which instead is given over to banal language, poor quality popular music, and, in new and re-designed churches, a nugatory or sometimes totally absent visual art. This deprives the wider Christian mission of the arts of essential nourishment. Where would the poetry of Paul Claudel be without the Latin Liturgy? Or John Tavener's music without the Orthodox Liturgy? Where would be the entire tradition of representational art in the West without the liturgical art of which until the seventeenth century at least remained at its heart? We need today to summon back the Muses to the sacred foyer of the Church, to be at home again at that hearth.

What appears in the former statue of Apollo, however, cannot simply be equated with the Olympian of the same name, who had to ensure light, contours, foreknowledge and security of form in his days of completeness. Rather, as the poem's title implies, he stands for something much older, something rising from prehistoric sources. He symbolizes a divine magma in which something of the first ordering force, as old as the world itself, becomes manifest. There is no doubt that memories of Rodin and his cyclopian work ethic had an effect on Rilke here. During his work with the great artist, he experienced what it means to work on the surfaces of bodies until they are nothing but a fabric of carefully shaped, luminous, almost seeing 'places'. A few years earlier, he had written of Rodin's sculptures that 'there were endless places, and none of them did not have something happening in them'. Each place is a point at which Apollo, the god of forms and surfaces, makes a visually intense and haptically palpable compromise with his older opponent Dionysus, the god of urges and currents. That this energized Apollo embodies a manifestation of Dionysus is indicated by the statement that the stone glistens 'like wild beasts' fur'.

Never forget that all these people are primarily a visual people. They are designers, window dressers, models, photographers, graphic artists. They design the windows at Saks. Do you understand? They are a visual people, and they value the eye, and their sins, as Saint Augustine said, are the sins of the eye. And being people who live on the surface of the eye, they cannot be expected to have minds or hearts. It sounds absurd but it’s that simple. Everything is beautiful here, and that is all it is: beautiful. Do not expect anything else, do not expect nourishment for anything but your eye—and you will handle it all beautifully. You will know exactly what you are dealing with.

Cinematographer.” Such an ornate term, yet still so vague. I often wonder if that’s to blame for how overlooked we are as a profession. Or even worse, that dry title, “Director of Photography.” But we are the true artists. A director may quite literally call the shots, but it is the cinematographer that makes them. We choose the angles, the lighting, pretty much everything that you see on the screen. The camera is a brush, and we are the hand, the arm, the eye. The director’s basically just the mouth, making pointless noise while the hand does the actual work. Almost every famous director that you know who has a distinctive visual style has simply managed to lock down a talented DoP.

Hildebrand, too, challenged the ideals of scientific naturalism by an appeal to the psychology of perception: if we attempt to analyze our mental images to discover their primary constituents, we will find them composed of sense data derived from vision and from memories of touch and movement. A sphere, for instance, appears to the eye as a flat disk; it is touch which informs us of the properties of space and form. Any attempt on the part of the artist to eliminate this knowledge is futile, for without it he would not perceive the world at all. His task is, on the contrary, to compensate for the absence of movement in his work by clarifying his image and thus conveying not only visual sensations but also those memories of touch which enable us to reconstitute the three-dimensional form in our minds.

One argument of Uniqueness is that it is not any particular renaissance, revolution, or liberal institution that marks out the West, but its far higher levels of achievement in all the intellectual and artistic spheres of life. I relied on Charles Murray’s book, Human Accomplishment: Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, to make this argument.[1] This book is the first effort to quantify ‘as facts’ the accomplishments of individuals and countries across the world in the arts and sciences, by calculating the amount of space allocated to these individuals in reference works, encyclopaedias, and dictionaries. Murray concludes that ‘whether measured in people or events, 97% of accomplishment in the scientific inventories occurred in Europe and North America’ from 800 BC to 1950.[2] Murray also notes the far higher accomplishments of Europeans in the arts, particularly after 1400. Although Murray does not compare their achievements but compiles separate lists for each civilisation, he notes that the sheer number of ‘significant figures’ in the arts is higher in the West in comparison to the combined number of the other civilisations.[3] In literature, the number in the West is 835; whereas in India, the Arab World, China, and Japan combined, the number is 293. In the visual arts, it is 479 for the West as compared to 192 for China and Japan combined (with no significant figures listed for India and the Arab World). In music, ‘the lack of a tradition of named composers in non-Western civilization means that the Western total of 522 significant figures has no real competition at all’.

My mother defines collage as a combination of things unexpected. The artist can choose things that appeal to her visually, and put them together psychologically. Thus, she took photos of her beloved brother, cut out from the context of prison, and let him romp with the fairies. . Or a window in a tree... flowers growing in unlikely places, the way you might wish they would. In collage you can put whatever you want anywhere. You make your own order out of the real stuff you are given to work with. . My mother told me this, and then she called a few days later to amend her original statement. Mark's collages weren't like mine, she said. I choose disparate elements and see how they fit together, what they might make. Mark decided what he wanted to make and then chose the pieces specifically to make that preconceived picture.

I have again been asked to explain how one can "become a Daoists..." with all of the sad things happening in our world today, Laozi and Zhuangzi give words of advice, tho not necessarily to become a Daoist priest or priestess... " So many foreigners who want to become “Religious Daoists” 道教的道师 （道士） do not realize that they must not only receive a transmission of a Lu 籙 register which identifies their Daoist school, and learn as well how to sing the ritual melodies, play the flute, stringed instruments, drums, and sacred dance steps, required to be an ordained and functioning Daoist priest or priestess. This process usually takes 10 years or more of daily discipleship and practice, to accomplish. There are 86 schools and genre of Daoist rituals listed in the Baiyun Guan Gazeteer, 白雲觀志, which was edited by Oyanagi Sensei, in Tokyo, 1928, and again in 1934, and re-published by Baiyun Guan in Beijing, available in their book shop to purchase. Some of the schools, such as the Quanzhen Longmen 全真龙门orders, allow their rituals and Lu registers to be learned by a number of worthy disciples or monks; others, such as the Zhengyi, Qingwei, Pole Star, and Shangqing 正一，清微，北极，上请 registers may only be taught in their fullness to one son and/or one disciple, each generation. Each of the schools also have an identifying poem, from 20 or 40 character in length, or in the case of monastic orders (who pass on the registers to many disciples), longer poems up to 100 characters, which identify the generation of transmission from master to disciple. The Daoist who receives a Lu register (給籙元科, pronounced "Ji Lu Yuanke"), must use the character from the poem given to him by his or her master, when composing biao 表 memorials, shuwen 梳文 rescripts, and other documents, sent to the spirits of the 3 realms (heaven, earth, water /underworld). The rituals and documents are ineffective unless the correct characters and talismanic signature are used. The registers are not given to those who simply practice martial artists, Chinese medicine, and especially never shown to scholars. The punishment for revealing them to the unworthy is quite severe, for those who take payment for Lu transmission, or teaching how to perform the Jinlu Jiao and Huanglu Zhai 金籙醮，黃籙齋 科儀 keyi rituals, music, drum, sacred dance steps. Tang dynasty Tangwen 唐文 pronunciation must also be used when addressing the highest Daoist spirits, i.e., the 3 Pure Ones and 5 Emperors 三请五帝. In order to learn the rituals and receive a Lu transmission, it requires at least 10 years of daily practice with a master, by taking part in the Jiao and Zhai rituals, as an acolyte, cantor, or procession leader. Note that a proper use of Daoist ritual also includes learning Inner Alchemy, ie inner contemplative Daoist meditation, the visualization of spirits, where to implant them in the body, and how to summon them forth during ritual. The woman Daoist master Wei Huacun’s Huangting Neijing, 黃庭內經 to learn the esoteric names of the internalized Daoist spirits. Readers must be warned never to go to Longhu Shan, where a huge sum is charged to foreigners ($5000 to $9000) to receive a falsified document, called a "license" to be a Daoist! The first steps to true Daoist practice, Daoist Master Zhuang insisted to his disciples, is to read and follow the Laozi Daode Jing and the Zhuangzi Neipian, on a daily basis. Laozi Ch 66, "the ocean is the greatest of all creatures because it is the lowest", and Ch 67, "my 3 most precious things: compassion for all, frugal living for myself, respect all others and never put anyone down" are the basis for all Daoist practice. The words of Zhuangzi, Ch 7, are also deeply meaningful: "Yin and Yang were 2 little children who loved to play inside Hundun (ie Taiji, gestating Dao). They felt sorry because Hundun did not have eyes, or eats, or other senses. So everyday they drilled one hole, ie 2 eyes, 2 ears, 2 nostrils, one mouth; and on the 7th day, Hundun died.

... The influence of the Pre-Raphaelites was felt less through their paintings than through a book, The Poems of Tennyson, edited by Moxon and wonderfully illustrated by Rossetti and Millais. The influence on Maeterlinck stems less from the poems themselves than from the illustrations. The revival of illustrated books in the last two years of the century derives from this Tennyson, the books printed at William Morris' press, the albums of Walter Crane. These last two and the ravishing little books for children by Kate Greenaway were heralded by Huysmans as early as 1881. Generally speaking, it is the English Aesthetic Movement rather than the Pre-Raphaelites which influenced the Symbolists, a new life-style rather than a school of painting. The Continent, passing through the Industrial Revolution some fifty years after England, found valuable advice on how to escape from materialism on the other side of the Channel. Everything that one heard about the refinements practised in Chelsea enchanted Frenchmen of taste: furniture by Godwin, open-air theatricals by Lady Archibald Campbell, the Peacock Room by Whistler, Liberty prints. As the pressure of morality was much less pronounced in France than in England, the ideal of Aestheticism was not a revolt but a retreat towards an exquisite world which left hearty good living to the readers of the magazine La Vie Parisienne ('Paris Life') and success to the readers of Zola. If one could not write a beautiful poem or paint a beautiful picture, one could always choose materials or arrange bouquets of flowers. Aesthetic ardour smothered the anglophobia in the Symbolist circle. The ideal of a harmonious life suggested in Baudelaire's poem L' Invitation au Voyage seemed capable of realization in England, whose fashions were brought back by celebrated travellers: Mallarmé after 1862, Verlaine in 1872. Carrière spent a long time in London, as did Khnopff later on. People read books by Gabriel Mourey on Swinburne, and his Passé le Détroit ('Beyond the Channel') is particularly important for the artistic way of life ... Thus England is represented in this hall of visual influences by the works of Burne-Jones and Watts, by illustrated books, and by objets d'art ...

Before art school, I approached art as though it illustrated social relations and history, upholding or denouncing the political status quo. During my years in art school I increasingly concentrated on visual meaning, on how artwork looked—its composition, its color, its artist’s style, as separate from what it said about society. Critics call a preoccupation with appearance that ignores social meaning formalism, which carries a negative taint these days when formalism divorces art from the power relations surrounding its creation and circulation. Coming from the Left, I began as an anti-formalist. But as a maker of art, I moved toward formalism as I sought to discover processes of how art was made, a move prompted by the neglect of the formal qualities of the work of black artists, assumed to be important only according to the degree to which it critiqued American racism. Where Romare Bearden had figured in my mind as celebrating blackness and black Harlem, I now investigated how he made his work, step by step, how he decided what to depict and how to depict it. I was now seeing my father’s prized Sharecropper, by Elizabeth Catlett, which he bought from her in her studio in Mexico, less as a salute to black workers and more as a masterly lino print. From the opposite starting point, my relationship to Warhol encapsulated my trajectory.

Interestingly enough, creative geniuses seem to think a lot more like horses do. These people also spend a rather large amount of time engaging in that favorite equine pastime: doing nothing. In his book Fire in the Crucible: The Alchemy of Creative Genius, John Briggs gathers numerous studies illustrating how artists and inventors keep their thoughts pulsating in a field of nuance associated with the limbic system. In order to accomplish this feat against the influence of cultural conditioning, they tend to be outsiders who have trouble fitting into polite society. Many creative geniuses don’t do well in school and don’t speak until they’re older, thus increasing their awareness of nonverbal feelings, sensations, and body language cues. Einstein is a classic example. Like Kathleen Barry Ingram, he also failed his college entrance exams. As expected, these sensitive, often highly empathic people feel extremely uncomfortable around incongruent members of their own species, and tend to distance themselves from the cultural mainstream. Through their refusal to fit into a system focusing on outside authority, suppressed emotion, and secondhand thought, creative geniuses retain and enhance their ability to activate the entire brain. Information flows freely, strengthening pathways between the various brain functions. The tendency to separate thought from emotion, memory, and sensation is lessened. This gives birth to a powerful nonlinear process, a flood of sensations and images interacting with high-level thought functions and aspects of memory too complex and multifaceted to distill into words. These elements continue to influence and build on each other with increasing ferocity. Researchers emphasize that the entire process is so rapid the conscious mind barely registers that it is happening, let alone what is happening. Now a person — or a horse for that matter — can theoretically operate at this level his entire life and never receive recognition for the rich and innovative insights resulting from this process. Those called creative geniuses continuously struggle with the task of communicating their revelations to the world through the most amenable form of expression — music, visual art, poetry, mathematics. Their talent for innovation, however, stems from an ability to continually engage and process a complex, interconnected, nonlinear series of insights. Briggs also found that creative geniuses spend a large of amount of time “doing nothing,” alternating episodes of intense concentration on a project with periods of what he calls “creative indolence.” Albert Einstein once remarked that some of his greatest ideas came to him so suddenly while shaving that he was prone to cut himself with surprise.

Early in a career that began in 1912 when he was 19 years old, Romain de Tirtoff, the Russian-born artists who called himself Erté after the french pronunciation of his initials, was regarded as a 'miraculous magician,' whose spectacular fashions transformed the ordinary into the outstanding, whose period costumes made the present vanish mystically into the past, and whose décors converted bare stages into sparkling wonderlands of fun and fancy. When his career ended with his death in 1990, Erté was considered as 'one of the twentieth-century's single most important influences on fashion,' 'a mirror of fashion for 75 years,' and the unchallenged 'prince of the music hall,' who had been accorded the most significant international honors in the field of design and whose work was represented in major museums and private collections throughout the world. It is not surprising that Erté's imaginative designs for fashion, theater, opera, ballet, music hall, film and commerce achieved such renown, for they are as crisp and innovative in their color and design as they are elegant and extravagant in character, and redolent of the romance of the pre- and post-Great War era, the period when Erté's hand became mature, fully developed and representative of its time. Art historians and scholars define Ertés unique style as transitional Art Deco, because it bridges the visual gab between fin-de-siècle schools of Symbolism, with its ethereal quality, Art Nouveau, with its high ornament, and the mid-1920s movement of Art Deco, with its inspirational sources and concise execution.

Fractals are beautiful to look at when graphed and, thus, had been used in arts and the sciences.  It first appeared in art in the 19th century, at a painting of Mt. Fuji, which shows a great wave that threatens an open boat, wherein the dimension of the wave is the approximation of a circle’s diameter.  This is an example of a natural fractal, way before Felix Hausdorff first presented the theory of the fractal dimension in 1868.[viii]  They are used to incorporate nature into artistic elements and, thus, had been used to highlight pieces of visual arts.  It became well known when genetic programming entered the world in the 20th century, which optimized parameters of what is called “Mandelbrot sets” that are useful in generating certain biomorphs. 

Visual artists tend to like Tumblr, Instagram, or Facebook.

After reading this book, hopefully you will realize the challenges to be overcome in successfully marketing yourself and your artworks as a professional visual artist. All of this is taking place in a continually changing environment that requires watchfulness and feeding. For the few who venture forth, the rewards will more than justify the hard work needed.

Visual and performing artists produce art that lives in the present world. The art of the writer exists in another dimension. Through strings of words and phrases writers inspire their readers to imagine, to conjure images, to suspend disbelief, to enter a world visible only in their minds. It is in that unseen world where the art of the writer lives.

What does Duchamp's attack on traditional art forms mean for photography? First, it allows for the possibility that any photographic image, no matter how insignificant or visually uninspiring, can be assigned art value within an art context through the intention of the artist.

Having Simultanagnosia (object blindness), Prosopagnosia (face blindness) and Semantic Agnosia (meaning blindness) goes in my favour with regards to abstract art living in world full of fragmented pieces when I draw it is in real time no visual memory means no "pre-formatted" picture in my mind so I go where my hand takes it's like journey that is happening in the moment, hence why I drew these without my lenses on. When I was younger I would draw pictures by "route" which made it a appear that I had a visual memory (cobbling together things out of context and making a contextual image)

Freud did admit, though only grudgingly, that artists were not merely neurotics who used their gifts to evade reality. Art brings about a reconciliation between the two principles in a new way. An artist is originally a man who turns away from reality because he cannot come to terms with the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction which it at first demands, and who allows his erotic and ambitious wishes full play in the life of phantasy. He finds a way back to reality, however, from this world of phantasy by making use of special gifts to mould his phantasies into truths of a new kind, which are valued by men as precious reflections of reality. (SE, XII.224) This strange conception of art and artist implies that, although the artist may just escape falling into a neurosis, his art is still an indirect way of obtaining instinctual satisfactions which, if he were better adapted to reality, he would either enjoy or else renounce. In other words, art is primarily escapist. In an ideal world in which everyone had matured sufficiently to replace the pleasure principle by the reality principle, there would be no need for art. This conclusion, coming as it does from a brilliant writer who was deeply appreciative of both literature and the visual arts, will strike most readers as extremely odd. If Freud had lived long enough to become familiar with modern biological thinking, he might have revised his concepts.

The failure to engage the complexity of our existence can mar even the work of supremely gifted artists. The contemporary Christian artist Thomas Kinkade painted glowing, intricately detailed landscapes, often with cottages or rustic homes. As the art critic Daniel Siedell has written, the paintings invite Kinkade’s “clientele to escape into an imaginary world where things can be pretty good, as long as we have our faith, our family values, and a visual imagery that re-affirms all this at the office and at home.”19 Although the paintings are very popular, they deny a central dimension of our experience: the ugliness and horror that so often accompany beauty. (This wasn’t accidental; Kinkade once said, “I like to portray a world without the Fall.”)

The visual arts will one day be king. The pop stars and celebrities soon to be forgotten.

By the early 1980s, VCS development was still largely the same, although some changes were brewing. At Atari and Imagic, the first artist-programmer teams were created, allowing artists to focus on sprite and screen visuals.

To put this even more bluntly, one might think about the difference between adding traditional and contemporary Indigenous art to the National Gallery of Canada’s historical Canadian wing and imagining the entire gallery curated from an Indigenous perspective of what a “National Gallery of Canada” might mean.37 Put slightly differently, the project of Indigenous representation in the gallery in Canada has been defined as “bringing aboriginal art in to the history of Canadian art” rather than of incorporating settler history into the history of Aboriginal art.38 Would such reimaginings mean, for example, a move away from the primacy of a liberal politic and of the artist genius as a cultural application of that politic?

I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsman like but technological … I also blur out the excess of unimportant information” (fig. 1.6).30 The usual critical response to these works is to see the blurring as a reference to accidental effects in amateur photography, to the artlessness and thus authenticity of such “mistakes.” Hawker eloquently explains why Richter’s translation from photo to paint is significant: At the same time that the blur is able to evoke the medium of photography so effectively and economically, in using it as a sign of photography’s idiom, Richter fastens upon something incidental to and quite apart from the medium’s central unifying characteristics (whatever these might be). It is the double duty that the blur does for Richter – its ability to be incidental to photography at the same time as central to painting – that makes it such a powerfully affecting device in his painting.31

Wieland hosted a “quilt-in” at her New York City loft and invited friends, including Canadian expatriates, to help sew La raison avant la passion as a gift for Trudeau.58 The following year, she hosted a huge party attended by Canadian expatriates, various New York artists and writers, and Trudeau himself. Throughout the late 1960s, Wieland had both an artistic and personal relationship with Trudeau. This was unusual because very few artists, if any, had such a close relationship with the prime minister and because what appears to be Wieland’s fascination with Trudeau was, I would argue, far more complex than simple adoration. It seems clear that Wieland had initially been both fascinated by Trudeau-the-person and supportive of his campaign for Liberal leader. She formed a group in New York City, for example, called Canadians Abroad for Trudeau, and, in a 1986 interview, she told Barbara Stevenson that she had initially supported his leadership campaign.59 After Trudeau became prime minister in 1968, however, Wieland’s opinion shifted as she increasingly expressed skepticism towards him and his governing philosophy to the point that, by 1986, she referred to him as a “psychopath.”60 Wieland

Carnivalization is not an external and immobile schema which is imposed upon ready-made content; it is, rather, an extraordinarily flexible form of artistic visualization, a peculiar sort of heuristic principle making possible the discovery of new and as yet unseen things. By relativizing all that was externally stable, set and ready-made, carnivalization with its pathos of change and renewal permitted Dostoevsky to penetrate into the deepest layers of man and human relationships.

Stop thinking about drawing as an artistic process. Drawing is a thinking process. If

A rather controversial example of this is the idea that ancient humans had a vastly more muted visual spectrum than we do today. The color blue, for instance, was not something that ancient man could distinguish from other colors. Only a select few people were born with the ability to identify the color spectrum that we all accept today, but it wasn’t until the written word was developed that this became startlingly apparent. In ancient texts, oceans are referred to as great black or green swathes of liquid, not because the author took artistic liberties, but because they simply couldn’t see a difference. Then, when people with a wider color spectrum began to describe the color blue, and differentiate it, the rest of the world took notice. It wasn’t an evolutionary change, but a societal one. The human race altered their perception of a color based solely on the desire to experience what others knew as a truth. The next time you look at the blue sky above, realize that it is colored by your adherence to what you think is true. Truth and lies do more than simply guide us through our social lives; they literally shape the world around us. I wonder if those researchers ever got funding for their experiment.

Although earlier computers existed in isolation from the world, requiring their visuals and sound to be generated and live only within their memory, the Amiga was of the world, able to interface with it in all its rich analog glory. It was the first PC with a sufficient screen resolution and color palette as well as memory and processing power to practically store and display full-color photographic representations of the real world, whether they be scanned in from photographs, captured from film or video, or snapped live by a digitizer connected to the machine. It could be used to manipulate video, adding titles, special effects, or other postproduction tricks. And it was also among the first to make practical use of recordings of real-world sound. The seeds of the digital-media future, of digital cameras and Photoshop and MP3 players, are here. The Amiga was the first aesthetically satisfying PC. Although the generation of machines that preceded it were made to do many remarkable things, works produced on them always carried an implied asterisk; “Remarkable,” we say, “. . . for existing on such an absurdly limited platform.” Even the Macintosh, a dramatic leap forward in many ways, nevertheless remained sharply limited by its black-and-white display and its lack of fast animation capabilities. Visuals produced on the Amiga, however, were in full color and could often stand on their own terms, not as art produced under huge technological constraints, but simply as art. And in allowing game programmers to move beyond blocky, garish graphics and crude sound, the Amiga redefined the medium of interactive entertainment as being capable of adult sophistication and artistry. The seeds of the aesthetic future, of computers as everyday artistic tools, ever more attractive computer desktops, and audiovisually rich virtual worlds, are here. The Amiga empowered amateur creators by giving them access to tools heretofore available only to the professional. The platform’s most successful and sustained professional niche was as a video-production workstation, where an Amiga, accompanied by some relatively inexpensive software and hardware peripherals, could give the hobbyist amateur or the frugal professional editing and postproduction capabilities equivalent to equipment costing tens or hundreds of thousands. And much of the graphical and musical creation software available for the machine was truly remarkable. The seeds of the participatory-culture future, of YouTube and Flickr and even the blogosphere, are here. The

Good brainstorms are extremely visual. They include sketching, mind mapping, diagrams, and stick figures. You don’t have to be an artist to get your point across with a sketch or diagram.

But, Mr. Harrison, did you never consider a career in music or, perhaps, as a visual artist?" the interviewer persisted. "I have a high school diploma. Guys like me, we don't consider careers. We get a job," Corny said. You're asking him the wrong questions. Ask about the sound of granulated sugar being poured into a stainless-steel bowl, the whirring motor of an electric mixer, or his fist punching down bread dough. A flat, B minor, or C sharp? Or did he prefer music made by others when he worked? If yes, then ask what songs and colors moved this man to make the lightest cakes, the chewiest cookies, breads with tender crusts?

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.

Androgyny was a subject of some interest in Balzac’s time. The Girodet painting of Endymion for which the castrato Zambinella served, in Balzac’s fiction, as a far-off model offers a visual androgyny. And perhaps androgyny is a metaphor for the artist who creates life from his sole self and body.

I went for a walk behind the studio where I go to write. I have what’s essentially a cupboard in an old farm building, one otherwise populated with visual artists. I can’t really justify any more space. A cupboard is all I need, and a narrow shelf on which to perch my laptop. In any case, I tend to spend more time walking than actually writing, striking off through the farm and into the fields beyond, where I can join onto the North Downs Way and walk to Canterbury in an hour if I want to. If I head the opposite way, there is a string of little country pubs, where I can sit for a while and pretend I’m gathering my wits about me.

The Church of Contentment and Prosperity Now offering the best stage shows in America declaring peace with the enemies of God. With flashing lights, stage smoke, visualizing tantalizing sights of women dancing on stage, flags waving, artist painting, preachers more like ringmasters of the ventriloquists' dummies taking it all in like a rock 'n' roll show for a fee of actors and celebrities called deacons and elders all in the name of some manmade Jesus!

Wagner looked back to what in a primordial past had held people together in communities, a selflessness that had to be left behind so that human beings could become more and more conscious. He had an intuitive presentiment about the future; he felt that once individual freedom and independence had been attained, humans would have to find the way back to fellowship and caring relationships. Selflessness would have to be consciously regained, and loving kindness once more would have to become a prominent factor of life. For Wagner the present linked itself with the future, for he visualized as a distant ideal the existence of selflessness within the arts. Furthermore, he saw art as playing a significant role in evolution. Human development and that of art appeared to him to go hand in hand; both became egoistical when they ceased to function as a totality. As we see them today, drama, architecture and dance have gone their independent ways. As humanity grew more and more selfish, so did art. Wagner visualized a future when the arts would once more function in united partnership. Because he saw a commune of artists as a future ideal, he was referred to as 'the communist.' . . . In older works of art, where dance, rhythm and harmony still collaborated, he recognized something of the musical-dramatic element of the artistic works of antiquity. He acquired a unique sense for harmony, for tonality in music, but insisted that contributions from related arts were essential. Something from them must flow into the music. One such related art was dance, not as it has become, but the dance that once expressed movements in nature and movements of the stars. In ancient times, dance originated from a feeling for laws in nature. Man in his own movements copied those in nature. Rhythm of dance was reflected in the harmony of the music. Other arts, such as poetry, whose vehicle is words, also contributed, and what could not be expressed through words was contributed by related arts. Harmonious collaboration existed among dance, music and poetry. The musical element arose from the cooperation of harmony, rhythm and melody. This was what mystics and also Richard Wagner felt as the spirit of art in ancient times, when the various arts worked together in brotherly fashion, when melody, rhythm and harmony had not yet attained their later perfection. When they separated, dance became an art form in its own right, and poetry likewise. Consequently, rhythm became a separate experience, and poetry no longer added its contribution to the musical element. No longer was there collaboration between the arts. In tracing the arts up to modern times, Wagner noticed that the egoism in art increased as human beings egoism increased.

My [art]work attempts to recapture a history never written or narrated visually before. I reaffirm my identity as a Mexica-Tejana and assert a new system of existence through visual manifestations of the oral history, myths, legends, and more of the borderlands.

Drawing isn't an artistic process; drawing is a thinking process.