Susan Vreeland Art Quotations

Where there is no human connection, there is no compassion. Without compassion, then community, commitment, loving-kindness, human understanding, and peace all shrivel. Individuals become isolated, the isolated turn cruel, and the tragic hovers in the forms of domestic and civil violence. Art and literature are antidotes to that.

I write about art out of gratitude to painters for the joy and spiritual uplift they have given me. Painters interpret for us the visual glories of God and, in this way, bring us closer to Him.

When I think how art education is eliminated whenever we get a budget crunch in the schools, I have to stand up and say that even when there was dire poverty ten blocks away from Tiffany Studios in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, there was art and creativity within.

Two of my grandfathers had been artists, lifelong oil painters, so I was exposed to art very young. I've always been interested in it, although I never pursued it as a career or even as an avocation.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

Coming out of the Louvre for the first time in 1971, dizzy with new love, I stood on Pont Neuf and made a pledge to myself that the art of this newly discovered world in the Old World would be my life companion.

Art history looks at art works and the people who have created them.

The value of writing about art is its effect on the imagination. Paintings allow us to inhabit another culture, place, and time period, and address the issues of those time periods that resonate with our own time.

I pored over art books and absorbed the placidness of Monet's garden, the sparkling color of the Impressionists, the strength and solidity of Michelangelo's figures showing the titanic power of humans at one with God, Jan Vermeer's serene Dutch women bathed in gorgeous honey-colored light... My conviction grew that art was stronger than death.

I could say diamonds are a girl's best friend, and that never changes. But the taste for art did change.

The gift art gives us is that instead of seeing only our own world, we see into other times, which offers a window into other cultures and sensibilities.