Neil Gaiman

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you: your voice, your mind, your story, your vision.  So write and draw and dance and play as only you can.

Leave the world more interesting for your being here.
[2012 commenement address at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia]

David W. Galenson
(born 1951)

Important artists are innovators whose work changes the practices of their successors. [Artistic Capital, 2006]

Mahatma Gandhi

A poet is one who can call forth the good latent in the human beast.

Mahatma Gandhi

When asked what he thought of western civilization, Gandhi replied "I think it would be a very good idea."

Paul Gauguin
(1848-1903)

Don't sweat over a painting, a great sensation can be rendered immediately.  Dream on it and look for the simplest form in which you can express it.  

Paul Gauguin

I have tried to establish the right to dare everything.

Paul Gauguin

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

Art is an abstraction as you dream amid nature.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
(1777-1855)

Martin Gayford

Jean-Léon Gérôme
(1824-1904)

How can the government dare welcome such a collection of inanities into a museum?  Why, have you seen the collection?  The state the ward of such junk!  The Luxembourg Museum is a school.  What lessons are our young artists going to receive there from now on?  They'll all start to do Impressionism!  [Writing in L'Eclair about Caillebotte's bequest to the French nation, 1894]

André Gide
(1869-1951)

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Gilbert 

(of Gilbert and George)

If it doesn't ask questions, art is for nothing. It has to be provocative in a good way. [2017]

Charles Gleyre
(1808-1874)

Nature is fun to study, but style is everything.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749-1832)

Painting predicates what man wants to see, and what man ought to see, not what he ordinarily sees.

Goethe

The hardest thing is to see what's under your very eyes.

Goethe

Everyone hears only what he understands.

Goethe

Unless you have see the Sistine Chapel you have no idea what man can accomplish.

Goethe

There is no surer way of evading the world than by art, and no surer way of uniting with it than art.

Goethe

The best way to understand a painting is by drawing it.

Goethe

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture, and if possible speak a few reasonable words at least every day of his life.

Vincent van Gogh
(1853-1890)

Try to walk as much as you can, and keep your love for nature, for that is the true way to learn to understand art more and more.  Painters understand nature and love her and teach us to see her.  If one really loves nature, one can find beauty everywhere. [Letter to Theo vn Gogh, 1873]

Vincent van Gogh

I often think the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.
[Letter to his brother Theo, Letter 533, Arles, 8 September 1888]

Vincent van Gogh

To paint nature you must be in it a long time.  [Letter June 25, 1889]

Vincent van Gogh

Let me stop there, but my God, how beautiful Shakespeare is, who else is as mysterious as he is; his language and method are like a brush trembling iwth excitement and ecstasy. But one must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live. [Letter to Theo van Gogh, July 1880]

Vincent van Gogh

I'd rather die of passion than boredom.

E. H. Gombrich
(1909-2001)

Art does not copy nature – it suggests it.

Edmond de Goncourt
(1882-1896)

Surely nothing has to listen to more stupid remarks than a painting in a museum.

Blade Gopnik

At his best, Warhol didn't think outside the box, he thought outside any artistic universe whose laws would allow boxes to exist. Warhol always wanted to make art for a world where X and not-X could be true at the same time.   [2020]

Antony Gormley
(born 1950)

It is as much the conversations between objects as between us and objects that make museums so valuable.  
[The Guardian, June 23, 2007]

Clement Greenberg
(1909-1994)

The reality of art is disclosed only in experience, not in reflection upon experience.

Clement Greenberg

All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.

Clement Greenberg

A poor life is lived by any one who doesn't regularly take time out to stand and gaze, or sit and listen, or touch, or smell, or brood, without any further end in mind, simply for the satisfaction gotten from what is gazed at, listened to, touched, smelled, or brooded upon.

Pope Gregory I
(about 540-604)

To adore images is one thing; to teach with their help what should be adored is another . . . what scripture is to the educated, images are to the ignorant.