"The true nature of time may forever remain a mystery. Apart from the clang of it, it's by getting things done that we measure it. The job of art is to turn time into things." Robert Genn

"Images are living things. The come from a place of imagination, and in this realm there are special ways to communicate with images that resonate with the creative process and reflect the truth of artistic expression." Cathy Malchiodi

"Where there is rhythm, there is grace.Where there is grace, there is efficiency." Christopher Bergland

"There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun." Pablo Picasso

"Gardens are the result of a collaboration between art and nature." Penelope Hobhouse

"The role of art is to make a world which can be tolerated." William Saryoan

"We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth." John F. Kennedy (October 26, 1963)

"The desire to make a mark is ancient. It seems that many species communicate through marking. My dog walks with me every day before we go to the studio. He continues to 'mark' on trees outside the post office after sniffing around for several minutes to sense what other dog has been there before. I retrieve my mail, I read it, I look through the catalogs and colorful junk mail, and he checks the tree. We are both receiving communication through marks." Annette Carroll Compton, Drawing from the Mind, Painting from the Heart

"Art is not what you see, but what others make you see." Edgar Degas

"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. " Thomas Merton

"The soul never thinks without an image." Aristotle

"Happy are the painters for they shall not be bored." Winston Churchill

"Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination." Daniel Bell

"Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self." Jean Luc Goddard

"For art to nourish the roots of culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him." John F. Kennedy

"We must not be too ambitious. We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paint box. And, for this, Audacity is the ticket." Winston Churchill, "Painting as a Pastime"

“Collage makes poetry with the prosaic fragments of dailiness.” Donald B. Kuspit

"Art is our one true global language. It knows no nation, it favors no race, and it acknowledges no class. It speaks to our need to reveal, heal, and transform. It transcends our ordinary lives and lets us imagine what is possible." Richard Kamler,

“To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.” Giorgio de Chirico

“Humans alone among animals habitually alter their natural appearances, through costume or cosmetic, ornament, tattoo, scarification, filing teeth, or cutting and shaping hair.” Peter Steinhart

“Let proportion be found not only in numbers and measures, but also in sounds, weights, times, and positions, and what ever force there is.” Leonardo DaVinci

“Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.” Keith Haring

“Life without industry is guilt, industry without art is brutality.” John Ruskin, author, art critic, and social reformer (1819-1900)

“Humans are the only animals that draw. While showmen and hucksters have gotten elephants and chimpanzees to drag paint brushes across paper and canvas, so far as we know the animals are simply manipulating materials and not making representations of things. As rare as the ability in other species, drawing is almost universal among humans; it is as human a quality as speech and bipedal locomotion. Practically every human being draws at some time in childhood. As adults, we draw maps to direct people to our houses, diagram schemes for eating guests at a dinner, party. Sketch plans for bookshelves we intend to build, make graphs of corporate performance.” Peter Steinhart, The Undressed Art: Why We Draw

“Drawing is a selective process. One can’t get it all down. The artist literally draws his own conclusions.” Rex Brandt

“To draw, you must close your eyes and sing.” Pablo Picasso

“Art is a wound turned into light.” Georges Braque

“It is possible that scientists, poets, painters [artists] and writers are all members of the same family of people whose gift it is by nature to take those things which we call common-place and to ‘re-present’ them to us (the world) in such ways that our self-imposed limitations are expanded.” Gary Zukav "The Dancing Wu Li Masters"

“Art is inextricably tied to man’s survival—not to his physical survival, but to that on which his physical survival depends: to the preservation and survival of his consciousness.” Ayn Rand

“As I write this, for example, I am sitting comfortably in my rose garden and typing on my new computer. Each rose represents a story, so I'm never at a loss for what to type. I just look deep into the heart of the rose, read its story, and then write it down.” Steve Martin

“An artist is paid for his vision, not his reporting.” Tom Lynch

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” Ernest Hemingway

“Art is the signature of a civilization.” Beverly Sills

“A painting is always about two things: the dancing pairs—sea and sky, light and dark, warm and cool. Only the painting itself is a single thing.” Rex Brandt

“The mind stands in the way of the eye.” Arthur Stern

“Dance is the movement of the universe concentrated in an individual.” Isadora Duncan

“Without art, your soul suffers; you lack a chance to express who you are, to hone your own point of view, to make your life your own. You are less than human, no matter how many Super Bowl rings you’re wearing.” Danny Gregory

“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way -- things I had no words for.” Georgia O'Keeffe

“Either a soul is cheerful by nature, or is made cheerful by work, love, art and knowledge.” Friedrich Nietzsche

“Create like a god, command like a king, work like a slave.” Constantin Brancusi

“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.” Pablo Picasso

“The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness. Max Eastman

“If we look at the Japanese artist, we see a man who is undoubtedly wise. What does he spend his time doing? Studying a single blade of grass.” Vincent van Gogh

“Great photographs have the power to inform by presenting in isolation and with clarity that which is lost in the web of familiarity. They can expand our consciousness by showing us things we have never seen, closed our eyes to, or forgot to notice.” Carol Ehlers, Curator, LaSalle Bank Photography Collection

“I’m absolutely positive it’s in our human nature to want to know about the past. . . . I think it probably has something to do with our survival as a species. For nine-tenths of the time that human beings have been on earth, knowledge that was essential to survival was transmitted from one generation to the next by the vehicle of story.” David McCullough: The Danger of Historical Amnesia, 2002

“A painting is a symbol for the universe. Inside it, each piece relates to the other. Each piece is only answerable to the rest of that little world. So, probably in the whole universe, there is that kind of total harmony, but we get only little tastes of it.” Corita Kent

“Artists are magical helpers. Evoking symbols and motifs that connect us to our deeper selves, they can help us along the heroic journey of our own lives.” Joseph Campbell

“One of the strongest motives that lead to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness.” Albert Einstein

“What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?” Rollo May

“Every artist wants his work to be permanent. But what is? The Aswan Dam covered some of the greatest art in the world. Venice is sinking. Great books and pictures were lost in the Florence floods. In the meantime we still enjoy butterflies.” Romare Bearden

“All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.” Federico Fellini, film director, and writer (1920-1993)

“We look at a painting to know the painter; it's his company we are after, not his skill.” James McNeill Whistler

“The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all.” Pablo Casals, cellist, conductor, and composer (1876-1973)

“Architecture is inhabited sculpture.” Constantin Brancusi

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” Edgar Degas

“If you hear a voice within you say "you cannot paint," then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” Vincent Van Gogh

"The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep." Paul Strand

“The two most engaging powers of a photographer are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.” William Thackerary

“Art is supposed to wake you up. It’s supposed to make you say, ‘Wait a minute. I can think about everything differently than I thought about it one second ago.’” Sarah Lorge Butler

“Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one." Stella Adler

“Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.” Jimmy Carter (An Outdoor Journal)

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life." William Faulkner

“The purpose of art is to delight us; certain men and women (no smarter than you or I) whose art can delight us have been given dispensation from going out and fetching water and carrying wood. It's no more elaborate than that.” David Mamet

“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.” William Faulkner

“What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the soul.” Joseph Addison

“The greatest masterpieces were once only pigments on a palette.” Henry S. Hoskins

“Any form of art is a form of power, it has impact, it can effect change--it can not only move us, it makes us move.” Ossie Davis

“[The artist] speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation—and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear…which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.” Joseph Conrad