Art quotes and Instagram go hand in hand. As an uber visual social media platform, Instagram is the place to share your own artwork, or other art you love. Here are all the art quotes for Instagram you could ever need, to use as fun, inspiring captions to share with your followers.
Of course, even if you don’t use them on Instagram, these art and creativity quotes will uplift and motivate even the least-inspired of artists.
Come on back here whenever you need a creative energy boost.
Art Quotes for Instagram
Don’t you hate when you have the best image ever to share to your Instagram feed, but then you freeze up and don’t know how to caption it? You could go the easy route with the fire and heart-eyes emojis, or you could totally classy up your instagram game and drop a cool art quote as the caption.
Drawing Quotes
I grew up understanding that drawing is the backbone of art. You were to master drawing before moving onto anything else, and while I think that conviction has loosened a bit, drawing is still obviously something we’ve all done and can appreciate.
As I work at my drawings, day after day, what seemed unattainable before is now gradually becoming possible. Slowly, I’m learning to observe and measure. I don’t stand quite so helpless before nature any longer. ••• Vincent van Gogh
Drawing at its best is not what your eyes see but what our mind understands. ••• Millard Sheets
Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself. ••• John Berger
Drawing is giving a performance; an artist is an actor who is not limited by the body, only by his ability and, perhaps, experience. ••• Marc Davis
Drawing is like making an expressive gesture, with the advantage of permanence. ••• Henri Matisse
Drawing is not what one sees, but what one can make others see. ••• Edgar Degas
Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic. ••• Keith Haring
Drawing is vision on paper. ••• Andrew Loomis
Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache. ••• David Hockney
Drawing things makes them seem more real and makes me feel more alive. It also makes me pin down and remember things landscapes, season, weather, occasions, incidents, people that would otherwise have melted from my memory. ••• David Gentleman
For me drawing is an attempt to understand what I feel about the world I live in. ••• Brian Froud
I just wanted to paint and sketch and tell stories by drawing. ••• Robert Redford
I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies. ••• Le Corbusier
One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil. ••• Balthus
It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover, to your surprise, that you have rendered something in its true character. ••• Camille Pissarro
All these months I’ve been trying to find find a pattern. Trying not so much to draw hands as gestures. Not so much faces as the expressions of people. ••• Vincent van Gogh
Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see – to see correctly – and that means a good deal more than merely looking with the eye. ••• Kimon Nicolaides
My idea of heaven is to wake up, have a good breakfast, and spend the rest of the day drawing. ••• Peter Falk
Sketching is almost everything. It is the painter’s identity, his style, his conviction, and then colour is just a gift to the drawing. ••• Fernando Botero
While drawing I discover what I really want to say. ••• Dario Fo
Quotes About Painting
Ah, painting. So many quotes about painting as it relates to art and life in general, many from some of the most famous artists in history.
More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed. ••• Joan Miro
Painting from nature is not copying the object, it’s realising one’s sensations. ••• Paul Cezanne
Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do. ••• Edgar Degas
I started painting as a hobby when I was little. I didn’t know I had any talent. I believe talent is just a pursued interest. Anybody can do what I do. ••• Bob Ross
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. ••• Pablo Picasso
When I’m painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It’s only after a ‘get acquainted period’ that I see what I’ve been about. ••• Jackson Pollock
Don’t paint the object, paint its effect. ••• Unknown
Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is. ••• Jackson Pollock
If you hear a voice within you saying, ”You are not a painter,” then by all means paint… and that voice will be silenced. ••• Vincent van Gogh
Beginning with audacity is a very great part of the art of painting. ••• Winston Churchill
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. ••• Henry Ward Beecher
Life is too short to paint something you don’t have feeling for. ••• Unknown
The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands. ••• Leonardo da Vinci
There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun. ••• Pablo Picasso
When I paint, I never think of selling. People fail to understand that we paint in order to experiment and to develop ourselves as we strive for greater heights. ••• Edvard Munch
Art And Emotions
I love the effect art has on human emotion, and it’s so fun to read what others have to say about it in these quotes.
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced. ••• Leo Tolstoy
How you draw is a reflection of how you feel about the world. You’re not capturing it, you’re interpreting it. ••• Juliette Aristides
It is not enough to know your craft, you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more. ••• Edouard Manet
If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing. ••• Marc Chagall
A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art. ••• Paul Cezanne
Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. ••• Anais Nin
It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure. ••• Albert Einstein
Creativity Quotes
When you’re choosing your art quotes for Instagram, general creativity quotes are a good bet.A creativity quote always makes a good caption, and can make sense with all sorts of images.
You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have. ••• Maya Angelou
Art, freedom, and creativity will change society faster than politics. ••• Victor Pinchuk
Creativity comes from a conflict of ideas. ••• Donatella Versace
Creativity is intelligence having fun. ••• Albert Einstein
Creativity is nothing but a mind set free. ••• Torrie T. Asai
Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous. ••• Bill Moyers
Creativity is taking the best skills and techniques from experts around you and improving upon them. ••• Unknown
Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected. ••• William Plomer
Creativity takes courage. ••• Henri Matisse
Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things. ••• Ray Bradbury
Art Quotes About Artists
Artists talking about artists are so meta, right? Some of these quotes are spot-on.
A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others. ••• Salvador Dali
An artist must have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye. ••• Michelangelo
Artists are just children who refuse to put down their crayons. ••• Al Hirschfeld
An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision. ••• James Whistler
Every child is an artist. The problem is staying an artist when you grow up. ••• Pablo Picasso
He who works with his hands is a labourer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist. ••• Saint Francis of Assisi
The artist has one function–to affirm and glorify life. ••• W. Edward Brow
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist. ••• Pablo Picasso
A work is finished when an artist realizes his intentions. ••• Rembrandt
Every artist was first an amateur. ••• Ralph Waldo Emerson
No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time, it’s just that others are behind the times. ••• Martha Graham
The Achilles heel of an artist lies in the hope that his art is good. ••• Kapil Gupta
The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist. ••• Eric Gill
The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul. ••• Wassily Kandinsky
The great artists of the past were aware that human life is full of chaos and suffering. But they had a remedy for this. And the name of that remedy was ‘beauty’. The beautiful work of art brings consolation in sorrow and affirmation in joy. It shows human life to be worthwhile. ••• Roger Scruton
To be an artist is to believe in life. ••• Henry Moore
When I say artist I mean the man who is building things…some with a brush – some with a shovel – some choose a pen. ••• Jackson Pollock
What is Art?
These are some great Instagram art quotes, as you might spark some really interesting conversations in your feed if you pair one of these with an arty image.
Art is anything you can get away with. ••• Marshal McLuhan
Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth. ••• Pablo Picasso
A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not. ••• Leonardo da Vinci
Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist. ••• René Magritte
Art is a line around your thoughts. ••• Gustav Klimt
Art is longing. You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will. ••• Anselm Kiefer
Art is never finished, only abandoned. ••• Leonardo da Vinci
Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still. ••• Dorothea lange
Art is the only way to run away without leaving home. ••• Twyla Tharp
Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colours flowers, so does art colour life. ••• John Lubbock
Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos. ••• Stephen Sondheim
Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs. ••• Thomas Wolfe
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. ••• Aristotle
The principle of true art is not to portray, but to evoke. ••• Jerzy Kosinski
The work of art is a scream of freedom. ••• Christo
There is no must in art because art is free. ••• Wassily Kandinsky
Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. ••• Stella Adler
Artists on Making Art
Many of these art quotes get right to the essence of what it means to be an artist and be driven to make art daily.
You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club ••• Jack London
You have a million excuses. Write anyway. ••• Carrie Kei Heim
Anything I can not transform into something marvellous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls. ••• Anais Nin
Colour is my day-long obsession, joy, and torment. ••• Claude Monet
Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make. Good. Art. ••• Neil Gaiman
You don’t take a photograph, you make it. ••• Ansel Adams
Great design is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. ••• De Saint Exupery
I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. ••• Michelangelo
Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it. ••• Salvador Dali
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way. ••• Georgia O’Keeffe
Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion. ••• Jack Kerouac
I paint flowers so they will not die. ••• Frida Kahlo
Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working. ••• Pablo Picasso
Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get the work done. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you’re not going to make an awful lot of work. ••• Chuck Close
It’s so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas. ••• Paul Cezanne
Passions are not found, they are developed. ••• Unknown
If I knew what the picture was going to be like, I wouldn’t make it. ••• Unknown
Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing. ••• Salvador Dali
Practice what you know and it will help you to make clear what you do not know. ••• Rembrandt
Stay firmly in your path and dare. Be wild two hours a day! ••• Paul Gauguin
If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery. It wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all. ••• Michelangelo
We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents. ••• Bob Ross
Success is a worn down pencil. ••• Robert Rauschenberg
The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness. ••• Joan Miro
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down. ••• Kurt Vonnegut
More Art Quotes
Since we can never have too many arty quotes, here is where I stopped organizing them, and just added the rest. 😆 Surely by now you’ve found some of your favorite art quotes to post on Instagram, or to just keep you inspired.
What keeps my heart awake is colourful silence. ••• Claude Monet
When I am completely myself, entirely alone during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. ••• Mozart
A picture is a poem without words. ••• Horace
Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing. ••• Georgia O’Keefe
Whoever wants to know something about me, they should look attentively at my pictures and there seek to recognise what I am and what I want. ••• Gustav Klimt
An empty canvas is full. ••• Robert Rauschenberg
You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life. ••• Joan Miro
A line is a dot that went for a walk. ••• Paul Klee
A true masterpiece does not tell everything. ••• Albert Camus
Color is a power which directly influences the soul. ••• Wassily Kandinsky
Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people. ••• Leo Burnett
Ideas come from everything. ••• Alfred Hitchcock
Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth. ••• Rumi
Every child has the spirit of creation. The rubbish of life often exterminates the spirit through plague and a soul’s own wretchedness. ••• Peter Paul Rubens
Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas. ••• Austin Kleon
I am an artwork in constant progress; I am my own canvas, my own colors, my own brushes, and my own inspiration. ••• Efrat Cybulkiewicz
I don’t want to be interesting. I want to be good. ••• Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe
I go to seek a great perhaps. ••• John Green
I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free. ••• Georgia O’Keeffe
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen. ••• John Steinbeck
Imagination is the beginning of creation. ••• George Bernard Shaw
It is only when we are no longer fearful that we begin to create. ••• J. M. W. Turner
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. ••• Henry David Thoreau
Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art. ••• Neil Gaiman
Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. ••• Albert Einstein
Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life. ••• Novalis
Love the art in yourself and not yourself in the art. ••• Constantin Stanislavski
My eyes were made to erase all that is ugly. ••• Raoul Dufy
Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art. ••• Susan Sontag
Originality is nothing but judicious imitation ••• Voltaire
People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible, and childish but that’s only if it’s done properly. ••• Banksy
Replace fear with curiosity. ••• Stephen Spielberg
To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts – such is the duty of the artist. ••• Robert Schumann
An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way. ••• Charles Bukowski
The most talented, thought-provoking, game-changing people are never normal. ••• Richard Branson
To my mind a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful and pretty. There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is, without creating still more of them. ••• Pierre-Auguste Renoir
The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things – but above all we must dare to fail. You must be willing to risk everything to really express it all. ••• John Cassavetes
Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others. ••• Jonathan Swift
The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist. ••• David Hockney
The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before. ••• Neil Gaiman
Funny Art Captions For Instagram
Sometimes you need to lighten the mood a bit with you captions on Instagram. Art puns and jokes for when you’re feeling like delighting your readers with your fantastically arty sense of humor.
Art Puns
If looks could kiln
Paintbrush it off
Chalk full of problems
Let’s clay in touch
That’s just the clay it is
Random wax of kindness
Quick on the draw
Blended by the light
Put your best wood forward
On the home sketch
Off to a flying art
Tomorrow is another clay
Not for the paint of heart
Like mosaic to my ears
This is the last draw
Kick-art your day
It was pigment to be
draw-dropping
Ink and you’ll miss it
To the wax
I’m etching to go
Paintbrush it off
I ink I’ve got it
I arted.
Hue wants some of this?
Got off to a bad art
Glaze a trail
Draw to a close
Don’t get me arted
A clay in the life
Luck of the draw
Copic a fight
Drawn with the wind
Come hell or high watercolor
In print condition
By no etch of the imagination
Blend the rules
At the crack of drawn
As hue know…
Always look on the light side of life
All wood things
All that and pen some
Absence makes the art grow fonder
A rolling tone gathers no moss
A pigment of your imagination
Other Funny Little Arty Jokes
2B or not 2B?
Art is my cardio
Complimentary color always have nice things to say
Why are most artists struggling with finances? Because they have no Monet.
How many art gallery visitors would it approximately take to change a light bulb? Two. One who would actually do it and one to say that his 3-year-old kid could have done that.
I am an artist. That means I live in a fantasy world with unrealistic expectations. Thank you for understanding.
What do pirates do in their free time? They make Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrt.
What happened when the two artists entered the art contest? It ended in a draw.
Why should you never trust an artist? They always seem to be a bit sketchy.
Choose your weapon
What is Salvador Dali’s favorite thing to eat for breakfast? A bowl of surreal.
Art teachers do it for the Monet
When should you fix a painting? When it is Baroque.
Art is my favorite sport
Where do cows usually display their artwork? In mooooseums.
Which are your favorites? I love so many of these quotes, but I’m always drawn (no pun intended) to the simplest ones: Hitchcock’s “Ideas come from everything” is a lovely and true sentiment that sums up the creative process perfectly.
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2 Comments
This post is so inspiring! I love all the quotes and I’m going to start using them on my Instagram account!
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This post is so inspiring! I love all the quotes and I’m going to start using them on my Instagram account!
I’m going to start using them on my Instagram account! Really good