Katia Kapovich

In a 2010 interview with Marc Vincenz for Open Letters Monthly, [Bilingual Russian poet Katia] Kapovich stated, 

 “When we are young, it’s our passions that take command of us; we follow them fearlessly and sometimes win, because passions know shortcuts. That’s been good enough for many years. Now it’s experience and lots of thinking that I want to guide me and guard me. No more haste. In poetry hastiness is inappropriate. A lyrical poem is a small thing that can travel a long way. I slow myself down; I measure and weigh it in the palm again and again. Here’s my only chance, I tell myself. I have one arrow, so it better be perfect.”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/katia-kapovich

Rembrandt van Rijn

“A Painting is complete when it has a Shadow of a God”

Joseph Brodsky

“[t]he poet has one more duty that explains his devotion to form: his debt to his predecessors, to those who created the poetic language he has inherited.”

“A poet’s attitude toward his predecessors is more than a question of genealogy. We do not choose our parents: it is they who choose us by giving us life.… Whatever we may think of ourselves, we are they, and they must be able to understand us if we want to understand ourselves. The more they leave to us, the richer is our language, the freer we are in the choice of means, the finer is our ear—our method of cognition—and the more nearly perfect is the world we create by ear.” 

Our Valley

“You have to remember this isn’t your land. It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside and thought was yours. Remember the small boats that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men who carved a living from it only to find themselves carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home, so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust, wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.”

— Excerpt from Our Valley, by Philip Levine

Walking

St Francis of Assisi said ‘Solvitur ambulando’– it can be solved by walking.
— Excerpt from Pathlands, by Peter Owen Jones

Travel

“In front of the canvas, I have no ideas whatever,” [Matisse] wrote to his daughter, Marguerite, in 1929.

The French Modernist found aesthetic sustenance in Morocco, which he visited twice between 1912 and 1913. Indeed, Matisse often turned to travel whenever he felt stymied as a painter. 

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20151023-joseph-cornell-the-man-who-put-the-world-in-a-box?ocid=global_culture_rss&ocid=global_bbccom_email_26102015_culture

To Paint Is To Love Again

“To paint is to love again. It’s only when we look with eyes of love that we see as the painter sees. His is a love, moreover, which is free of possessiveness. What the painter sees he is duty-bound to share. Usually he makes us see and feel what ordinarily we ignore or are immune to. His manner of approaching the world tells us, in effect, that nothing is vile or hideous, nothing is stale, flat and unpalatable unless it be our own power of vision. To see is not merely to look. One must look-see. See into and around.”

— Henry Miller

Saul Bellow, from Herzog

"Unexpected intrusions of beauty. That is what life is."

Street art celeb Banksy

“I’m lucky because what I make either succeeds or fails. Some people undoubtedly would tell you that’s why it’s crap art, but that’s the way it is. I feel sorry for Abstract Expressionists—how do they know when to go home?”

- Street art celeb Banksy in an interview with Juxtapoz magazine about his new show, Dismaland

http://gawker.com/banksy-on-aesthetics-1725323846

John Cage to Philip Guston

When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you're lucky, even you leave.

pp 171-172 Night Studio, A Memoir of Philip Guston, by Musa Mayer, Da Capo Press 1997

Vincent Van Gogh

Everyone who works with love and with intelligence finds in the very sincerity of his love for nature and art a kind of armor against the opinions of other people.

Gustave Flaubert

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

Frank Lloyd Wright

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.

Mies van der Rohe

My thoughts are guiding my hand, and my hand reveals the value of the thought.

Matisse Cutouts

At first, Matisse worried that working with cut paper was cheating—a shortcut to painting—and he kept it a secret. “It is necessary not to say anything about this,” he wrote to his son Pierre, in 1931. 
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/moma-cutouts-sophie-matisse?int-cid=mod-latest

Cecily Brown

Something that’s just glimpsed seems more real than something that’s fully described.

Sherwood Anderson

The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.

Jack Chambers

Painting is a calculated response to perception.

http://www.aci-iac.ca/jack-chambers/biography

Randall Jarrell

What a pity we didn't live in an age when painters were still interested in the world.

John Cleese

John Cleese on Creativity