What is art? It is not just nature, it is nurtured nature. It is intelligence applied to what physical ability you have.
Interpretation
Art is a combination of natural inspiration and the skill developed through practice and intelligence.
In this quote, Rudolf Nureyev defines art as an extension of the natural world that is enhanced and shaped by human intelligence and effort. It emphasizes that while nature provides the raw material for artistic expression, it is the nurturing through creativity and skill that transforms these elements into art, highlighting the importance of both innate ability and learned technique in the creative process.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of creativity in an art class.
I don't care if Margot is a Dame of the British Empire or older than myself. For me she represents eternal youth; there is an absolute musical quality in her beautiful body and phrasing. Because we are sincere and gifted, an intense abstract love is born between us every time we dance together.
For me, purity of movement wasn't enough. I needed expression, more intensity, more mind.
The main thing is dancing, and before it withers away from my body, I will keep dancing till the last moment, the last drop.
I approach dancing from a different angle than those who begin dancing at 8 or 9. Those who have studied from the beginning never question anything.
Technique is what you fall back on when you run out of inspiration.
When I miss class for one day, I know it. When I miss class for two days, my teacher knows it. When I miss class for three days, the audience knows it.
What's wrong with hip-hop is the system that controls the definition of it. There needs to be more balance on the airwaves.
Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul - let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin!
Between parts I was too old for and roles that were too overwhelming, out of reach then for my voice. I carved out a niche with the Wagnerian repertoire since I am attracted by its theatrical intensity.
Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I'm puritanical. I don't mean my subject matter. It's that I'm almost pathologically incapable of leaving something when I'm not quite happy with it.
I was this young boy and I saw this man with his hands round my sister's neck, I was just standing there with her two children beside me... Everything I've done since then was for the purpose of making women look stronger, not naΓ―ve. And so, when everyone started saying I was a misogynist, that really freaked me out. They didn't know me. They didn't know what I had seen in my life. That was the first part of fashion that I hated - people labeling me without knowing me.
Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness.
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