I found the answer [to how and what to paint] when I joined a school of painters in Paris after the war who called themselves neomeditationists. . . . They believed an artist had to wait for inspiration, very quietly, and they did most of their waiting at the Cafe du Dome or the Rotonde with brandy. It was then that I realized that all the really good ideas I'd ever had came to me while I was milking a cow. So I went back to Iowa.

- Grant Wood

(thanks to The Sun Magazine's "Sunbeams" column for this and the previous post, both in the November 1998 issue)

on Maturity

The test of maturity, for nations as well as individuals, is not the increase in power, but the increase of self-understanding, self-control, self direction and self-transcendance.  For in a mature society, man himself, and not his machines or his organizations, is the chief work of art.

- Lewis Mumford

quote by George Sand

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

The Preface, from The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde (first published in 1891)

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

The critic is he who can translate into another manner or
a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming.  This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated.  For these there is hope.  They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but
the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

No artist desires to prove anything.  Even things that are true can be proved.

No artist has ethical sympathies.  An ethical sympathy in an artist is
an unpardonable mannerism of style.

No artist is ever morbid.  The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.

Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician.  From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.

All art is at once surface and symbol.

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbols do so at their peril.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it.  The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art if quite useless.