Anne Truitt (March 16, 1921 – December 23, 2004), born Anne Dean, was a major American artist of the mid-20th century.
There's a small still center into which conception can arrive. And when it arrives, you make it welcome with your experience.
the capacity to work feeds on itself and has its own course of development. This is what artists have going for them.
the knowledge of personal failure. . . is the invaluable predicate of all honest compassion.
Our society is monstrously disjunctive, at once so efficient in war and so inefficient in caring for the welfare of its members. It is frightening to see people rooting in garbage pails on streets, living in cardboard crates under bridges, while their government wages war. Even when there is an emergency in a household, decent parents do not forget to feed the children.
I've struggled all my life to get maximum meaning in the simplest possible form.
the more visible my work became, the less visible I grew to myself.
I have slowly come to realize that a family is composed of people who are teaching one another.
I have no home but me.
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.
Humility is the daughter of truth.
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.
The finest teaching touches in a student a spring neither teacher nor student could possibly have preconceived.
The art of being officially old seems to lie in cooperative submission.
I had forgotten what sleep is like - a kingdom all its own.
A mystery confounds the problem of industry in art. In the last analysis, to work is simply not enough. But we have to act as if it were, leaving reward aside.
It is ultimately character that underwrites art.
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.
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.
January is my favorite month, when the light is plainest, least colored. And I like the feeling of beginnings.
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.