Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.
Jasper Johns

Creativity is that marvellous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition.
Max Ernst

In a successful painting everything is integral – all the parts belong to the whole. If you remove an aspect or element you are removing its wholeness.
Richard Diebenkorn

Art.  Its definitions are legion, its meanings multitudinous, its importance often debated.  But amid the many contradictory definitions of art, one has always stood the test of time, from the Upanishads in the East, to Michelangelo in the West: art is the perception and depiction of the sublime, the transcendent, the beautiful, the spiritual.
Art is a window to The Infinite, and opening to the goddess, a portal through which you and I, with the help of the artist, may discover depths and heights of our soul undreamed of by the vulgar world. Art is the eye of the spirit, through which the sublime can reach down to us, and we up to it, and be transformed, transfigured in the process.
Art, at its best, is the representation of your very own soul, a reminder of who and what you truly are and therefore can become."
Ken Wilber

Pro Hart's art is like MacDonald's - an invented product that no one needs.
It's got to be said that they're the ugliest things you've ever seen.  They are visual pollutants.
They reflect the averaging of Australia that has become so much part of John Howard's era.
We have sunk to such a low sate of self-esteem that people have been celebrating the fact that he made a s---load of money from paintings that are totally unworthy.
Now Ken Done has come out in support of Pro Hart, which is the blind defending the bland.
Ray Hughes, leading Sydney art dealer,
as reported by the Sun-Herald 9/4/06

In painting I want to say something comforting
in the way that music is comforting.
Vincent Van Gogh

Do not copy nature too much.  Art is an abstraction.
Paul Gauguin

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Pablo Picasso

Painting is an extension of man's means of communication. As such, it's pure, difficult, and wonderful.
Sidney Nolan

 Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
Jean Cocteau

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.
Jackson Pollock

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

No great artist ever sees things as they really are.
If He did, he would cease to be an artist.
Oscar Wilde

Art is not made for anybody and is, at the same time,
for everybody.
Piet Mondrian

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.
Paul Cezanne

Never trust an art dealer who'll sit in a room for more than ten minutes with a crooked picture.
Brett Whiteley

Art should be something like a good armchair
in which to rest from physical fatigue
Henri Matisse

Art for art's sake makes no more sense than
gin for gin's sake.
W Somerset Maugham

Creativity takes courage.
Henri Matisse

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.
Albert Einstein