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The little dissatisfaction which every artist feels at the completion of a work forms the germ of a new work. (Berthold Auerbach)
The true gourmet, like the true artist, is one of the unhappiest creatures existent. His trouble comes from so seldom finding what he constantly seeks: perfection. (Ludwig Bemelmans)
I think I have made just one picture that I really like... (Ingmar Bergman)
Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't. (Elizabeth Bowen)
As an artist, it is central to be unsatisfied! This isn't greed, though it might be appetite. (Lawrence Calcagno)
Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is. (Albert Camus)
You always feel when you look it straight in the eye that you could have put more into it, could have let yourself go and dug harder. (Emily Carr)
I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses. I have not the magnificent richness of colouring that animates nature. (Paul Cezanne)
I could paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing. (Paul Cezanne)
Art is basically made by dissatisfied people who are willing to find some means to relieve the dissatisfaction. (John Chamberlain)
There will always be a barrier between what I see and what I am able to portray. This barrier keeps bringing me back to the canvas, carrying on a never-ending desire to express, in paint, what moves me inside. (Scott L. Christensen)
Weeds and nettles, briars and thorns, have thriven under your shadow, dissettlement and division, discontentment and dissatisfaction, together with real dangers to the whole. (Oliver Cromwell)
Whenever I'm asked to identify my best work, or my favorite, my answer has always been the same - "My next one!" (Ken Danby)
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self. (Joan Didion)
We artists find great fulfillment in pursuing our craft, but we are always dissatisfied with the results, which pushes us toward growth and excellence. (Steve Easterwood)
All human toil is for the mouth, and yet the appetite is not satisfied. (Ecclesiastes)
There are three wants which never can be satisfied: that of the rich, who wants something more; that of the sick, who wants something different; and that of the traveler, who says, ''Anywhere but here.'' (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of
art. The promise of it is felt in the act of creation but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then the painter realises that it is only a picture he is painting. Until then he had almost dared
to hope the picture might spring to life. (Lucian Freud)
Were it not for this [dissatisfaction], the perfect painting might be painted, on the completion of which the painter could retire. It is this great insufficiency that drives him on. The process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than it is in the picture. The process is in fact habit-forming. (Lucian Freud)
I find that as I get into a painting I have high hopes, then little by little I begin to see that it is not going to be the masterpiece I thought it would be, and I start putting my hopes into the next work. (Robert Genn)
Man is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animal that is never satisfied. (Henry George)
The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone, / All centuries but this, and every country but his own. (W. S. Gilbert)
The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction. (Allen Ginsberg)
I come back dissatisfied - I put it away, and when I have rested a little, I go and look at it with a kind of fear. Then I am still dissatisfied, because I still have that splendid scene too clearly in my mind to be satisfied with what I have made of it. But I find in my work an echo of what struck me... (Vincent van Gogh)
No artist is pleased. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others. (Martha Graham)
Sometimes I scrape off a lot. You have on the floor, like cow dung in the field, this big glob of paint... and it's just a lot of inert matter, inert paint. Then I look back at the canvas, and it's not inert - it's active, moving and living. (Philip Guston)
Monet was known to visit the Louvre in his old painting smock and, when the guards would look the other way, he would fix his paintings with paint brushes he had hidden. Even the master is never quite satisfied. (Andrew Hamilton)
Naturally we would prefer seven epiphanies a day and an earth not so apparently devoid of angels. (Jim Harrison)
The world is nothing but a great desire to live and a great dissatisfaction with living. (Heraclitus)
The chemistry of dissatisfaction is as the chemistry of some marvelously potent tar. In it are the building stones of explosives, stimulants, poisons, opiates, perfumes and stenches. (Eric Hoffer)
Since the age of six I have had the habit of sketching forms of objects. Although from about fifty I have often published my pictorial works, before the seventieth year none is worthy. (Katsushika Hokusai)
Dissatisfaction with possession and achievement is one of the requisites to further achievement. (John Hope)
Change occurs in direct proportion to dissatisfaction, but dissatisfaction never changes. (Doug Horton)
It takes more time to rework a painting than it takes to fill in the canvas in the first place. I wish I could get them all right with the first coat like many of the old masters could, but seem destined to have to rework to make them even passable. (E. J. Hughes)
If there is dissatisfaction with the status quo, good. If there is ferment, so much the better. If there is restlessness, I am pleased. Then let there be ideas, and hard thought, and hard work. If man feels small, let man make himself bigger. (Hubert Humphrey)
No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. (Martin Luther King, Jr.)
How can we eliminate the deepest source of all unsatisfactory experience? Only by cultivating certain qualities within our mindstream. (Dalai Lama)
My best painting is always my next painting. May it always be so. (Mark Larson)
We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not. (Audre Lorde)
-sketching at Lake O'Hara...
Made a sketch later on the cabin verandah, but it was impossible to keep up with the changes. Oh the difficulties of mountain art for too little genius. (J. E. H. MacDonald)
A fierce unrest seethes at the core of all existing things: it was the eager wish to soar that gave the gods their wings. (Don Marquis)
I do not repudiate any of my paintings, but there is not one of them that I would not redo differently. (Henri Matisse)
Youth is not enough. And love is not enough. And success is not enough. And, if we could achieve it, enough would not be enough. (Mignon McLaughlin)
Paradoxically, I have found peace because I have always been dissatisfied. My moments of depression and despair turn out to be renewals, new beginnings. If I were once to settle down and be satisfied with the surface of life, with its divisions and its cliches, it would be time to call in the undertaker... So, then, this dissatisfaction which sometimes used to worry me and has certainly, I know, worried others, has helped me in fact to move freely and even gaily with the stream of life. (Thomas Merton)
-remark before stripping a whole section of the Sistine Chapel he was working on...
If the wine is not good, then throw it out! (Michelangelo)
My illusions didn't have anything to do with being a fine actress. I knew how third rate I was. I could actually feel my lack of talent, as if it were cheap clothes I was wearing inside. But, my God, how I wanted to learn, to change, to improve! (Marilyn Monroe)
If you don't like the road you're walking, start paving another one. (Dolly Parton)
Another thing that escapes me is HOW to give substance to the forms. One day they look solid and 'real' and they seem to hinge upon each other and splinter and creak, fall with a thud to the bottom of the canvas and drag across the surface, and the next day they are like dust, all lightweight and just stuck there. (Paula Rego)
Less is even less, and more is still not quite enough. (Faith Ringgold)
-letter to Dr. James MacCallum...
The maples are about all stripped of leaves now, but the birches are very rich in colour... the best I can do does not do the place much justice in the way of beauty. (Tom Thomson)
But that's what being an artist is - feeling crummy before everyone else feels crummy. (The New Yorker)
If you don't like something, make it better. (Rachel Zacharias)
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