John Cage
(1912-1992)

If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.

John Cage

Art is a sort of experimental station in which one tries out living.

Albert Camus
(1913-1960)

Without culture . . . society, even when perfect, is no more than a jungle.     This is why every creation is a gift to the future.

Al Capp
(1909-1979)

Abstract Art:  A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Degas was right when he said something like ‘You must copy, copy before you are entitled to paint a radish from nature.’  He meant you have to learn from others, from the past. . . You need a sense of culture to cultivate yourself.  [quoted in New York Times Aug 20, 1995]

Jules-Antoine Castagnary

There is no need to return to history, to take refuge in legends, to summon powers of imagination - Beauty is before the eyes - not in the brain - in the present not in the past - in truth not in dreams.

Paul Cézanne
(1839-1906)

I am not altogether displeased with the shirt-front.  [Comment made as he abandoned a portrait of Ambrose Vollard after 115 sittings]

Paul Cézanne 

Right now a moment of time is fleeting by!  Capture its reality in paint!  To do that we must put all else out of our minds.  We must become that moment, make ourselves a recording plate . . . give the image of what we actually see, forgetting everything that has been seen before our time.

Surely, a single bunch of carrots painted naively just as we personally see it, is worth all the endless banalities of the Schools, all those deary pictures concocted out of tobacco juice according to time-honored formulas?  The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution. [Quoted in Norman Gutterman, ed., The Anchor Book of French Quotations: With English Translations, 1963]

Paul Cézanne 

You should sit like an apple.  Whoever saw an apple fidgeting?  
[Ambrose Vollard, Recollections of a Picture Dealer, 1936]

Paul Cézanne 

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to an object God made like a tree or flower.  If it clashes, it is not art.

Paul Cézanne 

Art is a harmony that runs parallel to nature--what is one to think of those imbeciles who say that thr artist is always inferior to nature?
[Letter to Emile Bernard, 1897]

Paul Cézanne 

A work of art that did not begin in emotion is not art.

Paul Cézanne 

Chatter about art is almost always useless.

Paul Cézanne 

The Louvre is the book in which we all learn to read.

Paul Cézanne 

I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature.

Marc Chagall
(1887-1985)

Great art picks up where nature ends.

G.K. Chesterton
(1874-1936)

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

Cicero
(106 BCE-43 BCE)

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Chuck Close

I always thought problem solving was greatly overrated - and that the most important thing was problem creation.

Jean Cocteau
(1889-1963)

Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time.  Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.

Jean Cocteau

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture. 

Jean Cocteau

When a work appears ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.

Robert Colescott

The way that one serves [the black community] is to serve art first; the way you serve art is by being true to yourself.  
[Answer when asked if he did not feel an obligation to serve the black community]

R. G. Collingwood

As a child growing up among artists I learned to think of a picture not as a finished product exposed for the admiration of the virtuosi, but as the visible record, lying about the house, of an attempt to solve a definite problem in painting.  [Autobiography, 1939]

John Constable

It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the key note, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment.
[Letter to Archdeacon Fisher, 1821]

John Constable

I do not consider myself at work unless I am before a six-foot canvas.
[Letter to Archdeacon Fisher, 1821]

Alistair Cooke

I prefer radio to TV because the pictures are better.

Camille Corot

Never lose the first impression that has moved you.

Camille Corot

I always entreat the good Lord to give me my childhood back, that is to say, to grant that I may see nature and render it like a child, without prejudice.

Holland Cotter

Art is by nature promotional, pushing beliefs, broadcasting status, aggrandizing personalities. [New York Times, July 4, 2008]

Louis Croquer
(director Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit)

Artists are visionaries.  When you are in touch with work that helps you think outside of the box, you become enlightened and liberated in a way. [Quoted in Detroit Free Press, February 2009]

Gustave Courbet
(1819-1877)

To be able to represent the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my own era as I see them, in a word, to create a living art, this has been my aim.

Gustave Courbet

When I am no longer controversial, I will no longer be important.

Gustave Courbet

Show me an angel, and I'll paint one!