Favourite artists: Banksy

Banksy proves that art can be far more than something beautiful hanging on a gallery wall. His work is witty, provocative and deeply human, using simple, unforgettable images to challenge assumptions about war, consumerism, power, inequality and the absurdities of modern life. What I admire most is his ability to communicate profound ideas with remarkable clarity. A single stencil on a brick wall can spark conversations that books and speeches sometimes fail to inspire. He reminds us that great art doesn't just decorate the world—it awakens us to see it differently.

I also love the mystery that surrounds Banksy. By remaining anonymous, he has kept the focus where it belongs: on the work itself rather than the celebrity of the artist. There is something wonderfully subversive about creating priceless art in public spaces, freely accessible to anyone who walks past. Whether or not I agree with every message, I admire his courage, originality and refusal to play by the conventional rules of the art world. Banksy has shown that one person's creativity, imagination and sense of humour can capture the attention of millions while inviting us to question the world we so often take for granted.

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Favourite quotes

• Fight the fighters, not their wars.
• Speak softly, but carry a big can of paint.
• If you get tired, learn to rest, not to quit.
• You can win the rat race but you’re still a rat.
• People who enjoy waving flags don’t deserve to have one.
• Nobody ever listened to me until they didn’t know who I was.
• You don't need planning permission to build castles in the sky.
• I want to live in a world created by art, not just decorated with it.
• A wall is a very big weapon. It’s one of the nastiest things you can hit someone with.
• All artists are willing to suffer for their work. But why are so few prepared to learn to draw?
• I just want to make the world a better looking place. If you don't like it, you can paint over it!
• Graffiti's always been a temporary art form. You make your mark and then they scrub it off. Banksy
• If Michaelangelo or Leonardo Da Vinci were alive today they’d be making Avatar, not painting a chapel.
• When you go to an art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires.
• A recent survey or North American males found 42% were overweight, 34% were critically obese and 8% ate the survey.
• Not everyone will understand your journey. That’s okay. You’re here to live your life, not to make everyone understand.
• We can't do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves.
• I don't know why people are so keen to put the details of their private life in public; they forget that invisibility is a superpower.
• I’d been painting rats for three years before someone said ‘that’s clever it’s an anagram of art’ and I had to pretend I’d known that all along.
• If you feel dirty, insignificant or unloved, then rats are a good role model. They exist without permission, they have no respect for the hierarchy of society, and they have sex 50 times a day.
• The human race is the most stupid and unfair kind of race. A lot of the runners don’t even get decent sneakers or clean drinking water. Some runners are born with a massive head start, every possible help along the way and still the referees seem to be on their side. It’s not surprising a lot of people have given up competing altogether and gone to sit in the grandstand, eat junk and shout abuse. What the human race needs is a lot more streakers.

Favourite artists: Rembrandt

I've had a soft spot for Rembrandt ever since visiting the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 1997. The highlight was seeing The Night Watch in person. I'd seen photos of it before, but the scale and detail of the original are something else entirely. It's one of those artworks that's worth travelling to see.

What I admire most about Rembrandt is his ability to capture real people. His portraits feel honest and deeply human, and his mastery of light and shadow gives them incredible depth without ever feeling overdone. More than 350 years after his death, his paintings still have the power to stop people in their tracks. That's the mark of a truly great artist.

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Favourite quotes

• Without atmosphere a painting is nothing. Rembrandt
• Life etches itself onto our faces as we grow older, showing our violence, excesses or kindnesses. Rembrandt
• A painting is finished when the artist says it is finished. Rembrandt
• Choose only one master - Nature. Rembrandt
• Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God. Rembrandt
• A painting is complete when it has the shadows of a god. Rembrandt

Favourite artists: Salvadore Dali

One of the artists I find most fascinating is Salvador Dalí. At first glance his paintings seem bizarre, almost dreamlike, but the longer I look at them the more they invite reflection. They challenge my assumptions about reality, time and identity, and remind me that the world we experience is not always as fixed or straightforward as it appears. His work rewards curiosity, revealing new details and meanings each time I return to it.

What I admire most is Dalí's imagination and technical brilliance. However strange his visions were, he painted them with extraordinary precision, making the impossible feel almost believable. His art encourages me to think beyond the obvious and to appreciate the power of symbolism and metaphor. In many ways, his paintings feel less like images to be understood and more like invitations to explore the deeper landscape of the mind.

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Favourite quotes

• I don’t need drugs. I am drugs.
• God is just another artist, like me.
• To be interesting, one has to provoke.
• I’m going to live forever. Geniuses don’t die.
• Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.
• God invented man, and man invented the metric system.
• Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.
• Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
• People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings.
• There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.
• Every morning when I awake, the greatest of joys is mine: that of being Salvador Dali.

• Quotes on Wisdom Trove
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Favourite artists: Leonardo da Vinci

What fascinates me about Leonardo da Vinci is not just that he was a brilliant artist, but that he seemed endlessly curious about almost everything. Painting, anatomy, engineering, architecture, geology, flight - he approached each subject with the same desire to understand how the world really works. He reminds me that creativity and curiosity are inseparable, and that the most rewarding discoveries often happen at the intersection of different fields.

I also admire Leonardo's ability to combine scientific observation with artistic vision. He looked at nature with extraordinary care, believing that the closer we observe reality, the deeper our understanding becomes. His notebooks reveal someone who never stopped asking questions or seeking better ways of seeing. His life encourages me to remain curious, to keep learning, and to remember that the pursuit of understanding can be just as important as the answers themselves.

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Favourite quotes

• Art is never finished, only abandoned.
• Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
• The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.
• Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.
• All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.
• A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not.
• Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.
• Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.
• Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.
• My intention is to consult experience first, and then with reasoning show why such experience is bound to operate in such a way.
• Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.
• Quotes on Wisdom Trove
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Favourite artists: Michelangelo

Another of the artists I admire most is Michelangelo. His work combines an extraordinary level of technical mastery with a profound understanding of the human form. Whether in sculpture, painting or architecture, he had an unmatched ability to express strength, beauty and emotion. I still remember visiting Rome in 1996 and standing beneath the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for the first time. I was completely blown away. No photograph had prepared me for the scale, complexity and sheer brilliance of what he created.

What I find especially inspiring is the way Michelangelo seemed to see potential where others saw only raw stone. His famous idea that the sculpture already existed within the marble, and that his task was simply to reveal it, has always resonated with me. It feels like a powerful metaphor for life itself—that beneath the surface there is something waiting to be uncovered through patience, effort and vision. His work reminds me that great art is not only about skill, but about revealing something deeper that was there all along.

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Favourite quotes

• Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.
• My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth’s loveliness.
• The great tragedy of life is not that people set their sights too high and fail to achieve their goals but that they set their sights too low and do.
• If people knew how hard I worked at my art, they would not consider me a genius.
• If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.
• Perfection is no small thing, but it is made up of small things.
• The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.
• No great work of art is ever finished.
• Art is a jealous thing; it requires the whole and entire man.
• I am still learning. (at age 87)
• Only God creates. The rest of us just copy.
• Art lives on constraint and dies of freedom. 
• Quotes on Wisdom Trove
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Favourite artists: Monet

Claude Monet changed the way I look at the natural world. Rather than trying to paint every detail, he captured something more elusive—the quality of light, atmosphere and the feeling of a particular moment. His paintings remind me that what makes a scene beautiful is often not the objects themselves, but the way light transforms them. Looking at his work encourages me to slow down and notice those fleeting moments that are so easily overlooked.

What I especially appreciate is Monet's ability to find endless inspiration in familiar places. He returned to the same subjects again and again—the haystacks, the water lilies, Rouen Cathedral—not because they were unchanged, but because the light was never the same twice. That way of seeing has had a real influence on my photography. It reminds me that I don't need to travel to extraordinary places to create meaningful images. There is endless inspiration in the familiar if I return often enough, pay close attention, and learn to see each scene with fresh eyes.

  

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Favourite quotes

• I want to paint the way a bird sings.
• My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.
• It’s on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.
• Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.
• For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life – the light and the air which vary continually.
• I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
• It is extraordinary to see the sea; what a spectacle! She is so unfettered that one wonders whether it is possible that she again become calm.
• It seems to me, when I see nature, that I see it ready made, completely written.
• My wish is to stay always like this, living quietly in a corner of nature.
• I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
• Quotes on Wisdom Trove
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Favourite artists: Picasso

Pablo Picasso fascinates me because he refused to see the world in conventional ways. He was never content simply to reproduce what the eye could already see. Instead, he explored different perspectives, broke familiar forms apart, and rebuilt them into something entirely new. His work reminds me that creativity often begins by questioning assumptions rather than accepting them.

What I admire most is Picasso's willingness to keep evolving throughout his life. He constantly experimented, took risks, and reinvented his style instead of repeating what had already made him successful. That commitment to exploration is deeply inspiring. It encourages me to stay curious, to keep learning, and to remember that growth often comes from having the courage to look at familiar things from a completely different perspective.

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Favourite quotes

• Art is a leap into the dark.
• We don’t grow older we grow riper.
• Everything you can imagine is real.
• It takes a long time to become young.
• Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.
• Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.
• Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.
• Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.
• I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.
• Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.
• Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.
• We are all born children- the trick is remaining one.
• Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
• It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.
• I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.
• Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
• If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.
• What I want is that my picture should evoke nothing but emotion.
• Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
• What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.
• The important thing is to create. Nothing else matters; creation is all.
• A plagiarist steals from one person. A true artist steals from everybody.
• We now know that Art is not the truth… but rather a way of approaching the truth.
• Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
• The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.
• It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
• If there were only one truth, you couldn’t paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.
• If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse… but surely you will see the wildness!
• The first half of life is learning to be an adult-the second half is learning to be a child.
• He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.
• There is only one way to see things, until someone shows us how to look at them with different eyes.
• One never knows what one is going to do. One starts a painting and then it becomes something quite different.
• I don’t know in advance what I am going to put on canvas any more than I decide beforehand what colours I am going to use.
• My mother said to me, ‘If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.’ Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.
• Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.
• Paintings are but research and experiment. I never do a painting as a work of art. All of them are researches. I search constantly and there is a logical sequence in all this research.
• To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.

• Quotes on Wisdom Trove
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Favourite artists: Renoir

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's paintings always leave me with a sense of warmth and joy. He had an extraordinary ability to capture the beauty of everyday life—friends talking, families gathering, children playing, people enjoying a meal or an afternoon outdoors. His work reminds me that life's most meaningful moments are often the simplest ones, and that ordinary human experiences can be deeply beautiful.

What I appreciate most is the sense of light and humanity that runs through his paintings. His subjects feel alive, relaxed and connected, never posed or distant. Looking at his work encourages me to notice those same moments in my own life and photography—the shared smile, the quiet conversation, the warmth of sunlight on people simply enjoying being together. Renoir reminds me that beauty is not only found in dramatic landscapes or extraordinary events, but also in the richness of everyday human life.

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Favourite quotes

• It’s with my brush that I make love.
• Religion is everywhere. It is in the mind, in the heart, in the love you put into what you do.
• The work of art must seize upon you, wrap you up in itself, carry you away. 
• I arrange my subject as I want it, then I go ahead and paint it, like a child.
• One must from time to time attempt things that are beyond one’s capacity.
• You come to nature with all her theories, and she knocks them all flat.
• Go and see what others have produced, but never copy anything except nature. To be an artist you must learn the laws of nature.
• The pain passes, but the beauty remains.
• Quotes on Wisdom Trove
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Favourite artists: Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse reminds me that creativity is ultimately about vision, not technique. His work is full of colour, simplicity and joy, yet behind that apparent simplicity is a remarkable ability to communicate emotion with the fewest possible elements. He had a gift for stripping away the unnecessary and revealing the essence of a subject, showing that great art doesn't always need complexity to have a profound impact.

One of the things I find most inspiring about Matisse is what he did later in life. When illness meant he could no longer paint in the traditional way, he refused to stop creating. Instead, he began making his famous cut-outs, using painted sheets of coloured paper that he cut into bold, expressive shapes. Rather than seeing his physical limitations as the end of his artistic life, he turned them into the beginning of a completely new chapter. His example reminds me that creativity is ultimately a state of mind, and that obstacles can become opportunities if we are willing to adapt and keep creating.

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Favourite quotes

• I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.
• What I am after, above all, is expression.
• Color exists in itself, possessing its own beauty.
• Color was not given to us in order that we should imitate Nature. It was given to us so that we can express our emotions.
• I’ve been forty years discovering that the queen of all colors is black.
• Fit the parts together, one into the other, and build your figure like a carpenter builds a house. Everything must be constructed, composed of parts that make a whole.
• Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium.
• The artist begins with a vision – a creative operation requiring an effort.
• We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we study a tree, the sky or a thought, because we too are linked to the entire universe.
• There are always flowers for those who want to see them.
• Creation is the artist’s true function; where there is no creation there is no art.
• Don’t wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working.
• To arrive is to be in prison. 
• Would not it be best to leave room to mystery?
• Do I believe in God? Yes, when I work.
• Nothing can be accomplished without love.
• Quotes on Life Trove
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Favourite artists: Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo's art speaks to me because it is so deeply personal and honest. She painted from her own life, transforming physical pain, emotional struggle and questions of identity into works of extraordinary power. Her paintings remind me that great art doesn't have to avoid suffering. Sometimes it is through our deepest challenges that we discover the most authentic forms of expression.

What I admire most about Kahlo is her courage. Despite living with chronic pain for much of her life, she continued to create work that was uncompromisingly original and unmistakably her own. She never tried to fit into someone else's idea of what an artist should be. Her life reminds me that creativity is not about having perfect circumstances, but about expressing truth as honestly as we can. There is something deeply inspiring about her determination to turn adversity into beauty and meaning.

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Favourite quotes

• My painting carries with it the message of pain.
• Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?
• I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.
• At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.
• I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to better.
• I have suffered two grave accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar knocked me down… The other accident is Diego.
• Quotes on Wisdom Trove
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Favourite artists: Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh's paintings have always had a special place in my heart. There is an intensity and emotional honesty in his work that is unlike anyone else's. His use of colour, texture and movement gives his paintings a remarkable sense of life, making landscapes, skies and everyday scenes feel almost alive. I vividly remember visiting the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 1997 after having a joint. Standing in front of his original paintings, I was completely blown away. Seeing the thickness of the paint and the energy of every brushstroke was an experience I'll never forget.

What I admire most about Van Gogh is his ability to find beauty and meaning in ordinary subjects. Whether he was painting a field of wheat, a chair, a pair of old boots or a night sky, he brought an extraordinary depth of feeling to his work. His paintings remind me that art is not simply about recording what we see, but about revealing how we experience the world. They continue to inspire me to look more carefully, feel more deeply, and appreciate the beauty that surrounds us every day.

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Favourite quotes

• What is done in love is done well.
• We are surrounded by poetry on all sides.
• I would rather die of passion than of boredom.
• Art is to console those who are broken by life.
• The only time I feel alive is when I’m painting.
• One must work and dare if one really wants to live.
• If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere.
• Admire as much as you can. Most people do not admire enough.
• What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?
• Success is sometimes the outcome of a whole string of failures.
• I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.
• I work as diligently on my canvases as the laborers do in their fields.
• I put my heart and soul into my work, and I have lost my mind in the process.
• To suffer without complaint is the only lesson we have to learn in this life.
• I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.
• Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.
• …and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?
• It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning.
• Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.
• Seek only light and freedom and do not immerse yourself too deeply in the worldly mire.
• I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say ‘he feels deeply, he feels tenderly’.
• The beginning is perhaps more difficult than anything else, but keep heart, it will turn out all right.
• If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.
• To do good work one must eat well, be well housed, have one’s fling from time to time, smoke one’s pipe, and drink one’s coffee in peace.
• In spite of everything, I shall rise again; I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.
• If you work with love and intelligence, you develop a kind of armour against people’s opinions, just because of the sincerity of your love for nature and art.
• It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.
• It must be good to die in the knowledge that one has done some truthful work…and to know that, as a result, one will live on in the memory of at least a few and leave a good example for those who come after.
• If one feels the need of something grand, something infinite, something that makes one feel aware of God, one need not go far to find it. I think that I see something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a little baby when it wakes in the morning and coos or laughs because it sees the sun shining on its cradle.

• Quotes on Wisdom Trove
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Ron Mueck exhibition at the NSW Art Gallery

I thoroughly enjoyed Ron Mueck's sculpture exhibition. His statues contain such an intimate human dimension. It captures something profound about the experience of being human.

Other art