Top 100 Art School Quotes

James Thurber was an inspiration because his drawings were so primitive. I am self-taught – I didn’t go to art school – so I thought when I started doing them, ‘If James Thurber can be a cartoonist, I can,’ because his stuff is very raw.

If you ever have a kid who doesn’t know what to do, stick him in art school. It’s amazing what evolves.

I left school at 16 and my mother got me a job as a trainee wine taster. But one day I followed some girls into St Martin’s art school and saw a voluptuous woman sitting on a stool being sketched. I decided to get myself fired.

Expression without culture is flat. Many artists come out of art school and start doing things that don’t last. They are audacious because of ignorance. They are irresponsible.

Art school had taught me it was far better to be a flamboyant failure than any kind of benign success.

Playing in my early bands, working as a studio musician, producing and going to art school was, in retrospect, my apprenticeship. I was learning and creating a solid foundation of ideas, but I wasn’t really playing music.

I’m a trained fine artist. I went to art school from the time I was 5 years old. I was, like, a prodigy out of Chicago. I’d been in national competitions from the age of 14.

I wanted to study film at an art school – I loved the idea of being surrounded by designers and artists. We were encouraged to be experimental.

I’ve always been really interested in fashion, culture and visual arts in general: when I was growing up my parents half-expected me to go to art school, but I ended up working in Parliament, and then working in tech and data.

I was at the Royal Art School. That was a preparatory school specially for art teachers. You see, it was not so much for the development of artists. But we had there terribly stiff training.

I had a teacher in art school who said something about the only works he really enjoyed seeing or found much in were works where he had a sense that a discovery was made in the course of making this object. I like to hold to that as my marching orders.

I knew I didn’t want to pursue an academic career at all, which, of course, my father would have loved me to have done. I didn’t want to go to university. The only other thing I could do was paint, and so I went to art school because they couldn’t conceive of how one would be an actor.

I always noticed that in art school, that grief was considered more profound than happiness. But why?

That’s something I learned in art school. I studied graphic design in Germany, and my professor emphasized the responsibility that designers and illustrators have towards the people they create things for.

I started painting at 17; I took a class at Brentwood Art Center. I thought about art school – but I’m just so not a school person.

I went to an art school and you learn very quickly there that you’re only as good as your next idea, not so much what you’ve got going on at the moment. And so I embraced that. It sunk in at an early point.

In an art school it’s very hard to tell who is the best.

I was in art school since I was five years old. I’ve always been to art school. Everything that’s happened to me, nothing’s been planned. I’ve never had a business plan. I just kind of fell into it, and I liked it, and I took a chance. I took a lot of chances in my life.

I was an actor as a kid in Boston. Then I went to art school with Brice Marden, the Massachusetts College of Art. So the hybrid of being an actor and artist is a director.

I made a life for myself in Africa that was as far as you could possibly get from art school at Yale.

Originally, I thought of being a photographer and nearly went to art school, but I got a record deal instead.

I’ve always been a creative person, and I’d always wanted to paint, so I went to art school and began painting and sculpting.

I’ve exhibited quite a few of my photographs. I expand them digitally till they’re very big. It’s an art school thing, I suppose.

At school, I was basically a loner, it was hard until I was 15 or so. Then I went to art school and was gifted with freedom to do the things I really wanted to do.

Dad never understood why Ridley wanted to go to art school, and then I came along six years later and wanted to do the same thing.

When I decided to go to art school, it wasn’t necessarily something I thought I needed. No one talked about graduate school when I was an undergrad. I went on to a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and that transition from Yale to the Studio Museum, that was the real beginning of my professional career.

My first acquaintance with ‘Peter Pan’ was back when I lived in South London. I was at art school, and I needed to earn money, so I got a job as a stagehand at the Wimbledon Theatre, and ‘Peter Pan’ was on tour there with Donald Sinden, who was playing Captain Hook.

I went to an art school, so I was a choir boy.

When I was in art school, there was a stigma attached to coming from comfortable suburbia. If you were from Great Neck, Long Island, you couldn’t be a ‘real artist’, so I found crafty ways of implying that I was from New York.

The comedy I do on TV came from me being at art school and seeing Gilbert and George films, thinking they were hilarious. I was trying to do that, a sketch version of art, and it ended up on TV.

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

I began painting well before I started doing comedy. In fact, when I came out of the war in 1946, I enrolled in art school in Dayton, Ohio. I painted for three years, and then show business took hold.

I was going to be a painter. I went to art school – but every 16-year-old wants to be a painter.

You never, ever leave art school. It’s important to keep finding inspiration. I look at YouTube videos and think, ‘How would I do that?’ I like experimenting with things. For instance, drying paintings off too quickly in a microwave can look strangely beautiful.

My dad went to art school when I was one. They scraped and continued scraping, because artists, as we all know, don’t earn a lot of money. It’s a precarious existence and my mum didn’t work, so dad sold paintings.

I’ve come up through art school, through painting, through graphic design, through advertising, through TV commercials and music video. I’ve designed books, built billboards, matchbooks, corporate identities. I continuously paint, I’ve done conceptual art pictures.

I fantasized that I went to art school with the Beatles.

I went to art school, I think it helped me a great deal because it taught me who I am.

One of the advantages of not going to art school is that you’re not taught what you can’t do.

Going to beauty school and art school in Romania helped me to think of why we use makeup, and it’s exactly how you do portrait. You use pencil to make a 3D effect. Makeup is the same… You are able to create an illusion of perfection and balancing proportion.

I graduated. I did History of Art, you know, all those things – American Studies – and then I went to art school, and I did Joseph Alvarez in the art school.

When I was a young kid at art school, I loved the sensual geometry of Poliakoff, which, of course, is inherent in my own work.

I went to art school for four years to learn a very expensive lesson – that there are many other artists who are way better than me.

I went to Cal Arts. I went to art school.

My house is full of paintings by my mother Pam. She was a fantastic, prolific artist but had no confidence in herself, thanks to my father running her down. They married during the war when she was 19 – she had planned to go to art school. But my father didn’t want her to work, so she became a housewife.

My initial plan was to spend a year in France, go to some kind of school and learn a bit of French. I went a year in an American college in the outskirts of Strasbourg, but got a glimpse of a real art school, L’Ecole des Arts Decoratifs, and enrolled the following year.

I had a blog and was documenting my life as a college student in an art school. I had a few comments left by a few girls asking if I could do a tutorial on how I did my makeup. I didn’t think my makeup was all that special, but I try my best to share whatever I can with my viewers.

When I go to galleries in New York, I feel like I’m in school. I know that there’s good contemporary conceptual art, but I have a really hard time caring about it. I’d rather look at images of people and things I can relate to. Then again, I didn’t go to art school.

I went to art school when I was little.

I went to art school in Chicago for a year at Columbia College. I had this whole master plan of getting into sustainable development and green architecture and construction, so I wanted to go to business school and then get my masters in construction and development.

Has the painter not always gone to an art school, or at least to an established master, for instruction? And the composer, the sculptor, the architect? Then why not the writer? Good poets, like good hybrid corn, are both born and made.