Top 40 Sara Genn Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Joy is my energy and energy is my powerhouse.”

— Sara Genn

2. “You are solely responsible for doing the work required to become better.”

— Sara Genn

3. “Learn from the greats, and expose yourself to better work.”

— Sara Genn

4. “Scientists tracking mirror neurons noticed that a monkey will get excited not just when holding a banana, but also when seeing someone else holding a banana.”

— Sara Genn

5. “Learning a new thing is a shortcut to joy and informs your area of mastery.”

— Sara Genn

6. “Refreshing failures roll off the travel easel like ants from a picnic blanket.”

— Sara Genn

7. “I value the momentum of making the list and the drive to tick. Sometimes I add stuff I’ve already accomplished so I can get going on my feelings of accomplishment.”

— Sara Genn

8. “New surroundings have a way of returning attention to areas that may have become rote.”

— Sara Genn

9. “Play is your route to mastery.”

— Sara Genn

10. “Make a searching and fearless inventory of your creative curiosity.”

— Sara Genn

11. “As a community of artists, we might just keep safe each other’s love affair.”

— Sara Genn

12. “Making strides in areas unencumbered by hard-won expectation feels effervescent. By switching into child-mode, shuffling the cortex, we remember our innocence, when we knew less. These are the essentials of continued aesthetic discovery.”

— Sara Genn

13. “Read in order to write, but paint in order to paint.”

— Sara Genn

14. “Artists and their subjects are the star-crossed lovers of the world. They recognize each other on impact.”

— Sara Genn

15. “The Painter’s Keys is a timeless, universal guide to lifemanship masquerading as a painting blog.”

— Sara Genn

16. “Half of the pleasure of painting and feeling the joy of the creative act is sharing it with others and the feeling of connection. It could just be the colour. But it is something that someone other than you has seen and felt. It is momentous. It is magic.”

— Sara Genn

17. “Going beyond one’s backyard grants one perspective.”

— Sara Genn

18. “Every task is given equal importance – that way I can pick and choose my tasks based on the ebb and flow of my creative metabolism.”

— Sara Genn

19. “Having a favorite color is like having a favorite lung.”

— Sara Genn

20. “Art begins when an observer’s sensibilities engage with the understatements of a calculating craftsman.”

— Sara Genn

21. “Ideas bubble differently when we’re forced to inquire about the obvious.”

— Sara Genn

22. “You are responsible for understanding your limitations.”

— Sara Genn

23. “Rules are, like an ashtray-in-progress, meant to be thrown, poked and reshaped to suit yourself.”

— Sara Genn

24. “You need to paint with enough assurance and confidence to know you can do whatever you like.”

— Sara Genn

25. “The ‘wandering studio’ gathers and stores experiences, takes chances with the unfamiliar and requires a measure of self-trust. Mistakes are part of the change of scene.”

— Sara Genn

26. “Once you sophisticate the in-betweens, your blacks and whites can take their solos and shine.”

— Sara Genn

27. “Art is a perfectly complete cause.”

— Sara Genn

28. “Some artists approach their ‘why?’ intuitively, and work toward giving it a voice through their technical skill. Others begin as technicians, and develop, or discover, their ‘why?’ as they become stronger communicators.”

— Sara Genn

29. “Pay no attention to the less courageous.”

— Sara Genn

30. “Does an artist truly need to understand her times in order to create? I’m not sure. We’re all sitting in a context. It’s a market.”

— Sara Genn

31. “Could rivalry be a productive system?”

— Sara Genn

32. “Artists live in an imperfect world where affairs of the heart must sometimes be compromised with business.”

— Sara Genn

33. “I can hide as much as I want in my colours.”

— Sara Genn

34. “Vibrancy is only as effective as the mastering of restraint.”

— Sara Genn

35. “These days, if you happen to be a poet you have to sing your words to get your ideas out.”

— Sara Genn

36. “The strategy of keeping the studio close, like an outbuilding five paces from the house, or in the loft next door, or with the studio on one end and the bed on the other – makes art always available.”

— Sara Genn

37. “A millionaire is a person who is free, who does what she loves, who has unlimited materials, her choice of tools, abundance, inspiration, freedom and an inflated sense of entitlement to have, create and get more.”

— Sara Genn

38. “Why all these years have I been agreeably turning down the stereo every time the phone rings?”

— Sara Genn

39. “In the art game we do our own cooking.”

— Sara Genn

40. “Things we do regularly become buried with habits, and we lose the ability to extract their powers to inspire.”

— Sara Genn

41. “To return to awareness is to notice this new world with baby-eyes, and to appreciate her strangeness.”

— Sara Genn

42. “As artists, we bear the charge of signalling, guiding, communicating and inspiriting change.”

— Sara Genn

43. “Be artistic, choose taste, set an example.”

— Sara Genn

44. “Tear-stained flops are necessary. They’re the gift you give yourself when you’re willing to fly.”

— Sara Genn