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There is an appalling amount of mechanical work in the artist's life ... Talent is mysterious, but the qualities that guard, foster, and direct it are not unlike those of a good quartermaster.

Anne Truitt

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Anne Truitt
Age: 83 †
Born: 1921
Born: March 16
Died: 2004
Died: December 23
Artist
Drawer
Painter
Sculptor
Baltimore
Maryland
Anne Dean Truitt
Anne Dean
Quality
Mechanical
Artist
Guard
Art
Unlike
Work
Qualities
Good
Mysterious
Life
Direct
Amount
Appalling
Talent
Foster

More quotes by Anne Truitt

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I never decided at all to be an artist being an artist seems to have happened to me.
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artists often lie behind on the field long after the art combine, the broad-bladed harvester of informed criticism, has mowed, bailed, and stored the crop.
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I had forgotten what sleep is like - a kingdom all its own.
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Artists have no choice but to express their lives. They have only, and that not always, a choice of process. This process does not change the essential content of their work in art, which can only be their life.
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I come to the point of using steel, and simply cannot. It's like the marriage proposal of a perfectly eligible man who just isn't loveable. It is wood I love.
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It is ultimately character that underwrites art.
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The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own intimate sensitivity.
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Generosity is often the stalking horse of control.
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I have slowly come to realize that a family is composed of people who are teaching one another.
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When I speak now, my experience in art wells up so articulately that I am surprised even while I am talking. I move around a podium as easily as if it were my living room and although I am keyed up I am not anxious. I feel as if I were doing what I should be doing - the feeling I have when intent in my studio.
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Their [artists'] essential effort is to catapult themselves wholly, without holding back one bit, into a course of action without having any idea where they will end up. They are like riders who gallop into the night, eagerly leaning on their horse's neck, peering into a blinding rain. And they have to do it over and over again.
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the more visible my work became, the less visible I grew to myself.
Anne Truitt
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Love ... is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery.
Anne Truitt
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Art comes into the highest part of the mind, that with which we can know the presence of God.
Anne Truitt
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I've struggled all my life to get maximum meaning in the simplest possible form.
Anne Truitt
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The art of being officially old seems to lie in cooperative submission.
Anne Truitt
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I have been flooded with color on the inside, drab on the outside.
Anne Truitt
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the knowledge of personal failure ... is the invaluable predicate of all honest compassion.
Anne Truitt
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The finest teaching touches in a student a spring neither teacher nor student could possibly have preconceived.
Anne Truitt
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No one questions the fact that verbal language has to be learned, but the commonplaceness of visual experience betrays art people tend to assume that, because they can see, they can see art.
Anne Truitt