Art- christiansquoting.org.uk

Buy old masters. They fetch a better price than old mistresses. -- attributed to Lord Beaverbrook(1879-1964)

Abstract art? A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. Al Capp

Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers -- and never succeeding. ~ Marc Chagall

The theory of the unmorality of art has established itself firmly in the strictly artistic classes. They are free to produce anything they like. They are free to write a _Paradise Lost_ in which Satan shall conquer God. They are free to write a _Divine Comedy_ in which heaven shall be under the floor of hell. And what have they done? Have they produced in their universality anything grander or more beautiful than the things uttered by the fierce Ghibelline Catholic, by the rigid Puritan schoolmaster? ... Milton does not merely beat them at his piety, he beats them at their own irreverence. In all their little books of verse you will not find a finer defiance of God than Satan's. Nor will you find the grandeur of paganism felt as that fiery Christian felt it who described Faranata lifting his head as in disdain of hell. --G. K. Chesterton, _Heretics_, 1905

..no nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow -and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals ~ Kenneth Clark, The Nude

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) A: "Orthodoxy," 1908. A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul. -- Goethe (1749-1832)

Matisse's painting "Le Bateau" hung upside down in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for forty-seven days before anyone noticed (October 18 to December 4, 1961). In that period 116,000 people had visited the gallery. --Jean Cocteau (1890-1963) _Past Tense: Diaries_, Volume 1 [1987]

Pablo Picasso resisted school stubbornly and seemed completely unable to learn to read or write. To other students grew used to seeing him come late with his pet pigeon -- and with the paintbrush he always carried as if it were an extension of his own body. -- Mildred & Victor Goertzel

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed. - David Hockney (1937 &endash; )

Painting consumes labour not disproportionate to its effect; but a fellow will hack half a year at a block of marble to make something in stone that hardly resembles a man. The value of statuary is owing to its difficulty. You would not value the finest head cut upon a carrot. -- Samuel Johnson (Boswell: Life of Johnson)

If God is and remains Sovereign, then art can work no enchantment except in keeping with the ordinances which God ordained for the beautiful, when He, as the Supreme Artist, called this world into existence. And further, if God is and remains Sovereign, then He also imparts these artistic gifts to whom He will, first even to Cain's, and not to Abel's posterity; not as if art were Cainitic, but in order that he who has sinned away the highest gifts, should at least, as Calvin so beautifully says, in the lesser gifts of art have some testimony of the Divine bounty."
Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987), pp. 155-156.

All art worthy of the name is religious. -- Henri Matisse

Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers - and never succeeding. - Giancarlo Menotti (1911 &endash; )

Secondly, pictures of Christ are in principle a violation of the second commandment. A picture of Christ, if it serves any useful purpose, must evoke some thought or feeling respecting him and, in view of what he is, this thought or feeling will be worshipful. We cannot avoid making the picture a medium of worship. But since the materials for this medium of worship are not derived from the only revelation we possess respecting Jesus, namely, Scripture, the worship is constrained by a creation of the human mind that has no revelatory warrant. This is will worship. For the principle of the second commandment is hat we are to worship God only in ways prescribed and authorized by him. It is a grievous sin to have worship constrained by a human figment, and that is what a picture of the Saviour involves. -- John Murray

The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do? ~ Pablo Picasso 1881-1973

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

It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.
Jackson Pollock (1912-1956)

Jack the Dripper --sobriquet of Pollock

The learned understand the theory of art, the unlearned its pleasure. -- Quintilian (35-90 A.D.) De Institutione Oratoria

If I am walking in an art gallery and see a beautiful painting, it may be good to praise the Lord, and to thank Him for that great gift. The thing is beautiful, and therefore a joy and spiritually rich . . . But more than likely it will not even occur to us, for we place the arts out of the context of life, making them something autonomous; or say that the gift is just 'natural,' so opposing nature to grace, forgetting that there is no 'nature' that is out of God's creation. No: let us give praise to God for every manifestation of His gifts.H.R. Rookmaaker, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994), p. 244.

An art work has value as a creation because man is made in the image of God, and therefore man not only can love and think and feel emotion, but also has the capacity to create. Being in the image of the Creator, we are called upon to have creativity. In fact, it is part of the image of God to be creative, or to have creativity. We never find an animal, non-man, making a work of art. On the other hand, we never find men anywhere in the world or in any culture in the world who do not produce art. Creativity is a part of the distinction between man and non-man. All people are to some degree creative. Creativity is intrinsic to our „mannishness.
But we must be careful not to reverse this. Not everything that man makes is good intellectually or morally. So, while creativity is a good thing in itself, it does not mean that everything that comes out of man‚s creativity is good. For while man was made in the image of God, he is fallen. Furthermore, since men have various gifts and talents, everyone cannot create everything equally well. However, the main point is that creativity as creativity is a good thing as such.--F A Schaeffer

I am sick of shit masquerading as art. Brian Sewell on The Turner Prize, 1998, Evening Standard

Art is the signature of civilization.-Beverly Sills (1929-____): Interview - 1985

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
Tom Stoppard (1937-____) "Artist Descending a Staircase." The creation and sale of most art today is pure prostitution. The comparison is true in every detail. Real art can only rarely be created even by a real artist; like a child in a mother's womb, it is the ripened fruit of his prior life. False art, though, can be ceaselessly produced by craftsmen, according to the dictates of a market. Like a faithful wife who loves her husband, real art does not need any excess decoration; like a prostitute, false art demands to be decorated. True art comes out of an artist's urgent need to express the feelings that have formed inside him, just as a mother needs to give birth to her baby. False art answers only to profit. Real art brings new feelings into our life, as a woman brings a new person into the world. False art corrupts; it makes a person dissipated, distracts him, weakens his spiritual power. Everyone must understand this, in order that they shun the terrible proliferation of this dirty, dissipated type of art which is, on its face, prostitution.--Leo Tolstoy, "A Calendar of Wisdom"

One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever come to sit by it. Passers by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on the way.- Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) "Artists in Quotation," by Donna Ward La Cour, 1989.

To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano. James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903)

If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies," "Propositions," 1890.

You shouldn't say it is not good. You should say you do not like it; and then, you know, you're perfectly safe.James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) In "Whistler Stories," by D. C. Seitz, 1913.