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.