Quotes and Sayings about Painting
"Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs."
- Ansel Adams
(Related: People)
"Ah, lives of men! When prosperous they glitter - Like a fair picture; when misfortune comes - A wet sponge at one blow has blurred the painting."
- Aeschylus
(Related: Misfortune, Painting)
"And I started with this: I have not painted at all my childhood. In fact, I never painted. But I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything."
- Josef Albers
(Related: Father, Childhood, Fact)
"Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon - it is the very heart of painting."
- Josef Albers
(Related: Heart, Contrast, Painting)
"Without a good cultural policy, without adequate help, we will always have individualists, shooting stars who are rapidly forgotten or who stop painting for a more profitable occupation."
- Ralph Allen
(Related: Policy, Help, Occupation, Painting, Stars, Will)
"People are predominant in my paintings. Although they are not obvious, you can feel their presence."
- Ralph Allen
(Related: People, Obvious)
"My first concern was to take care of my drawing. I did not have any knowledge in arts, especially Haitian arts, apart from the paintings I saw in my father's office."
- Ralph Allen
(Related: Father, Knowledge, Care, Concern, First, Office)
"That by listening to some music, by reading some books, by looking at paintings, and most important by hanging out with one another - by collaborating with one another and creating your own network - you can achieve something that is much better than what is out there."
- David Amram
(Related: Music, Books, Listening, Network, Reading)
"Franz Kline, who became known for his black and white paintings, did a whole series of gorgeous landscapes and wonderful portraits that may still hang in Greenwich Village."
- David Amram
(Related: May, Portraits)
"Even if you have $20,000 to buy an item, you still try to get a good price at antique stores. I collect furniture, rugs, paintings, frames. It's my hobby to go around to shops and markets."
- Ursula Andress
(Related: Shops)
"Never buy four C-plus paintings when you can buy one A."
- Walter Annenberg
"You don't need a uniform color: We used a mixture of brick red, browns and grays, and then threw in seashells, branches and various types of rock, so our walls ended up looking like cave paintings!"
- Randy Bachman
"All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they're about dead people. Paintings you don't think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I'm looking at something dead."
- David Bailey
(Related: Time, People)
"Painting pictures didn't make me a lot of money. I have to eat."
- Ralph Bakshi
(Related: Money, Painting)
"The craft of painting has virtually disappeared. There is hardly anyone left who really possesses it. For evidence one has only to look at the painters of this century."
- Balthus
(Related: Painting)
"The best way to begin is to say: Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. And now let us have a look at his paintings."
- Balthus
(Related: Nothing, Now)
"Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is like a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle."
- Balthus
(Related: Experience, Work, Consciousness, Criticism, Painting, Self, Struggle)
"Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible."
- Balthus
(Related: Chaos, Emotions, Order, Painting)
"Painting is a source of endless pleasure, but also of great anguish."
- Balthus
(Related: Painting, Pleasure)
"Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about what I paint, really."
- Balthus
(Related: Language, Painting)
"I will always find even the worst paintings that attempt some kind of representation better than the best invented paintings."
- Balthus
(Related: Will)
"I always feel the desire to look for the extraordinary in ordinary things; to suggest, not to impose, to leave always a slight touch of mystery in my paintings."
- Balthus
(Related: Desire, Mystery)
"The goal is always to make a nice tableau painting with the voice. The more color I can find, the more shadow I can find - the goal is always to make more nuance and colors."
- Cecilia Bartoli
(Related: Goal, Colors, Painting, Shadow, Voice)
"I always feel attacked when I'm asked about my painting."
- Georg Baselitz
(Related: Painting)
"I always work out of uncertainty but when a painting's finished it becomes a fixed idea, apparently a final statement. In time though, uncertainty returns... your thought process goes on."
- Georg Baselitz
(Related: Time, Work, Thought, Idea, Painting, Uncertainty)
"I had always loved expressionist painting, like every European. In fact I admired it all the more because these were precisely the paintings despised by my father's generation."
- Georg Baselitz
(Related: Father, Fact, Painting)
"I had some money, I made the best paintings ever. I was completely reclusive, worked a lot, took a lot of drugs. I was awful to people."
- Jean-Michel Basquiat
(Related: Money, People, Drugs)
"I found I have to stay painting."
- Alan Bean
(Related: Painting)
"I feel like there's too many paintings left unpainted that I just don't want to take the time away."
- Alan Bean
(Related: Time, Want)
"I believe that the reason why I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective. There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality."
- Max Beckmann
(Related: Love, Hate, Nothing, Painting, Reason, Sentimentality)
"I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting."
- Max Beckmann
(Related: Painting)
"I believe the reason I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective."
- Max Beckmann
(Related: Love, Painting, Reason)
"Painting is a very difficult thing. It absorbs the whole man, body and soul, thus have I passed blindly many things which belong to real and political life."
- Max Beckmann
(Related: Life, Soul, Body, Man, Painting)
"Painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement."
- Max Beckmann
(Related: Achievement, Painting)
"Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does."
- John Berger
(Related: Imitation, Painting)
"Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic."
- Ambrose Bierce
(Related: Art, Painting, Weather)
"My movement from painting to film was a very conscious one."
- Kathryn Bigelow
(Related: Film, Painting)
"Whereas painting is a more rarefied art form, with a limited audience, I recognized film as this extraordinary social tool that could reach tremendous numbers of people."
- Kathryn Bigelow
(Related: Art, People, Film, Numbers, Painting)
"In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event."
- Theodore Bikel
(Related: History, Art, Language, Painting, Play, Song, World)
"I think music has gone through a period of something very severe, rather radical, rather the way painting did with cubism."
- Harrison Birtwistle
(Related: Music, Painting, Radical)
"I am a great lover of art, in many forms: paintings, objets, textiles. I don't have the talent for painting, but I have a very good sense of colour, a love of visual beauty."
- Jacqueline Bisset
(Related: Beauty, Love, Art, Talent, Painting, Sense)
"Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish."
- William Blake
(Related: Music, Poetry, Nations, Painting, Race)
"Lovers of painting and lovers of music are people who openly display their preference like a delectable ailment that isolates them and makes them proud."
- Maurice Blanchot
(Related: Music, People, Lovers, Painting)
"Casting is sort of like looking at paintings. You don't know what you'll like, but you recognize it when you see it."
- Steven Bochco
"Every painting is a voyage into a sacred harbour."
- Giotto di Bondone
(Related: Painting)
"You cannot possibly invent painting all by yourself."
- Pierre Bonnard
(Related: Painting)
"A painting that is well composed is half finished."
- Pierre Bonnard
(Related: Painting)
"I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time."
- David Bowie
(Related: Music, Time, Work, Painting)
"Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas."
- Georges Braque
(Related: Ideas, Painting)
"There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking."
- Jean de la Bruyere
(Related: Music, Poetry, Mediocrity, Painting, Public, Public speaking)
"As I had collaborated with visual artists before whether on installations, on performance pieces, in the context of theatre works and as I had taught for a time in art colleges the idea of writing music in response to painting was not alien."
- Gavin Bryars
(Related: Art, Music, Time, Idea, Performance, Artists, Painting, Theatre, Writing)
"Some days I would be there at ten in the morning and wouldn't leave till ten at night, and the others would waltz in for a couple of hours and then leave, because I was doing that painting thing. And they were happy to see that being done."
- Lindsey Buckingham
(Related: Being, Night, Painting)
"When I work alone, my process is like painting. With Fleetwood Mac, it's more like movie making."
- Lindsey Buckingham
(Related: Work, Painting)
"A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress."
- Lord Byron
(Related: Architecture, Poetry, Dress, Man, Painting, Schools)
"It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting."
- Albert Camus
(Related: Painting)
"I hope to actually get back to painting someday... soon. I sort of transitioned into cartooning from painting."
- Max Cannon
(Related: Hope, Painting)
"Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself."
- Truman Capote
(Related: Music, Laws, Light, Painting, Perspective, Rules, Writing)
"Paintings are like a beer, only beer tastes good and it's hard to stop drinking beer."
- Billy Carter
(Related: Beer, Drinking)
"Being in the studio is like painting, you know, you can really take your time, and try different things, and kind of go deep into it."
- Rosanne Cash
(Related: Time, Being, Deep, Painting)
"It is no use painting the foot of the tree white, the strength of the bark cries out from beneath the paint."
- Aime Cesaire
(Related: Strength, Painting)
"Painting is damned difficult - you always think you've got it, but you haven't."
- Paul Cezanne
(Related: Painting)
"Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations."
- Paul Cezanne
(Related: Nature, Painting, Sensations)
"The painter must enclose himself within his work; he must respond not with words, but with paintings."
- Paul Cezanne
(Related: Work, Words)
"When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art."
- Paul Cezanne
(Related: Art, God, Painting)
"I want to die painting."
- Paul Cezanne
(Related: Painting, Want)
"I have sworn to die painting."
- Paul Cezanne
(Related: Painting)
"I am more a friend of art than a producer of painting."
- Paul Cezanne
(Related: Art, Friend, Painting)
"When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art."
- Marc Chagall
(Related: Art, God, Man, Painting)
"I don't believe in making pencil sketches and then painting landscape in your studio. You must be right under the sky."
- William Merritt Chase
(Related: Painting, Right, Sky)
"He greatly valued his possessions, chiefly because they were his, and derived genuine pleasure from contemplating a painting, a statuette, a rare lace curtain - no matter what - after he had bought it and placed it among his household gods."
- Kate Chopin
(Related: Gods, Painting, Pleasure, Possessions)
"I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting."
- Winston Churchill
(Related: Politics, War, Painting, Politicians, Writing)
"I don't know if it was the whole audience getting stoned out of their minds getting ready for the Floyd thing or what it was, but it was like playing to a painting."
- Les Claypool
(Related: Painting)
"You know, the way art history is taught, often there's nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same."
- Chuck Close
(Related: Art, History, Nothing, Painting, Sound, Will)
"Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience."
- Chuck Close
(Related: Experience, Life, Time, Painting, Space)
"I think most paintings are a record of the decisions that the artist made. I just perhaps make them a little clearer than some people have."
- Chuck Close
(Related: People, Artist, Decisions)
"I did some pastels and I did other pieces in which there was just basically one color per square, and then they would get bigger and I could get 2 or 3 colors into the square, and ultimately I just started making oil paintings."
- Chuck Close
(Related: Colors, Oil)
"All the fingerprint paintings are done without a grid."
- Chuck Close
"As the books grew bigger and more ambitious, the situations in question sometimes became political ones, and so it became necessary to start painting in the social background on a scale which eventually became panoramic."
- Jonathan Coe
(Related: Books, Painting, Question)
"Many of the articles printed over the last few months have ended up painting a picture of me that is more than a little distorted."
- Phil Collins
(Related: Months, Painting)
"It's Frank's painting on the cover. We were originally going to use a Salvador Dali painting that we got permission from Salvador Dali to use, and Frank found this one, and it really did fit the music much more."
- Alice Cooper
(Related: Music, Painting)
"Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal."
- Gustave Courbet
(Related: Painting, Realism)
"Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things."
- Gustave Courbet
(Related: Art, Painting)
"I much prefer playing the bad guys. I think they are always the most interesting characters. I liken it to painting: if you're playing the good guy, you get three colors: red, white and blue. But if you're the bad guy, you get the whole palette."
- Ronny Cox
"Painting is much more than therapy to me its a way of life."
- Tony Curtis
(Related: Life, Painting, Therapy)
"But where there is no art show, I would still be painting."
- Tony Curtis
(Related: Art, Painting)
"Now I'm a painter. That was another opportunity I was able to pursue, I've been painting all my life, now it's become a second career because of my success in the movies."
- Tony Curtis
(Related: Movies, Success, Life, Opportunity, Career, Now, Painting)
"Every song is like a painting."
- Dick Dale
(Related: Painting, Song)
"Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality."
- Salvador Dali
(Related: Painting, Personality)
"I don't like painting flowers in my music. I like painting guts and pain."
- Jonathan Davis
(Related: Music, Flowers, Pain, Painting)
"I still have an old painting the Colonel gave me. It was the first time the Colonel had been back to the Hilton since Elvis had passed away."
- Mac Davis
(Related: Time, First, Old, Painting)
"Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do."
- Edgar Degas
(Related: Painting)
"In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false."
- Edgar Degas
(Related: Idea, Painting)
"Painting is by nature a luminous language."
- Robert Delaunay
(Related: Nature, Language, Painting)
"It is this research into pure painting that is the problem at the present moment. I do not know any painters in Paris who are really searching for this ideal world."
- Robert Delaunay
(Related: Painting, Paris, Present, Research, World)
"Nature engenders the science of painting."
- Robert Delaunay
(Related: Nature, Science, Painting)
"Impressionism; it is the birth of Light in painting."
- Robert Delaunay
(Related: Light, Painting)
"I would have liked maybe to be in architecture or painting, something connected to the fine arts."
- Catherine Deneuve
(Related: Architecture, Painting)
"Remember that a painting - before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order."
- Maurice Denis
(Related: Battle, Order, Painting)
"Photography started as a means of getting reference material for my paintings of nature subjects."
- Nigel Dennis
(Related: Nature, Photography)
"So about twenty years ago I gave up on painting - and got into terrible debt after buying a load of camera gear!"
- Nigel Dennis
(Related: Buying, Debt, Painting, Years)
"The substance of painting is light."
- Andre Derain
(Related: Light, Painting)
"I'm very interested to see how this new painting will go - I know I want it big and stark, and as I said, I follow the muse, and that's when it always works perfectly for me."
- Jackie DeShannon
(Related: Painting, Want, Will)
"There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk."
- Charles Dickens
(Related: Painting)
"When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music."
- Denis Diderot
(Related: Age, Music, Poetry, Excellence, Goodbye, Old, Painting, Superstition, Temperament)
"All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time."
- Otto Dix
(Related: Art, Dreams, Time, Chaos, Effort, Order, Painting, Visions)
"Everybody thinks they know what art should be. But very few of them have the sense that is necessary to experience painting, that is the sense of sight, that sees colors and forms as living reality in the picture."
- Otto Dix
(Related: Art, Experience, Colors, Living, Painting, Reality, Sense, Sight)
"Not that painting would have been a release. The reason for doing it is the desire to create. I've got to do it! I've seen that, I can still remember it, I've got to paint it."
- Otto Dix
(Related: Desire, Painting, Reason)
"In the middle 1940s... I heard everyone live. Painting, the theater; everything was happening. It was an exciting time when New York was the place to be."
- Bill Dixon
(Related: Time, Painting, Theater)
"If I had money, I would like to get an old building, have music performances, do lithographs, have shows of paintings, and do those things that I'm interested in doing."
- Bill Dixon
(Related: Music, Money, Building, Old)
"My sister-in-law is a painter, and I'll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She'll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting."
- Anthony Doerr
(Related: Life, Sister, Painting)
"I was painting sets, working in editorial as an assistant, driving their trucks, lying that I knew how to drive a truck, and doing commercials and documentaries."
- Richard Donner
(Related: Driving, Lying, Painting)
"Last year my boyfriend gave me a painting - a very personal one. I really prefer personal gifts or ones made by someone for me. Except diamonds. That's the exception to the rule."
- Minnie Driver
(Related: Boyfriend, Gifts, Painting)
"No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation."
- Marguerite Duras
(Related: Power, Music, Alcohol, Being, Creation, Illusion, Man, Painting, Woman)
"And since geometry is the right foundation of all painting, I have decided to teach its rudiments and principles to all youngsters eager for art."
- Albrecht Durer
(Related: Art, Geometry, Painting, Principles, Right)
"Painting is really good fun, I have always enjoyed it. As long as I paint what I want with the freedom that I enjoy, I never tire."
- John Dyer
(Related: Freedom, Fun, Painting, Want)
"My father is a well known artist, Ted Dyer, who has been painting for many years. Our work is very different, but growing up surrounded by paintings, paints, easels and art books does have an effect."
- John Dyer
(Related: Art, Work, Father, Artist, Books, Effect, Growing up, Painting, Years)
"The majority of my work is from life. I spend most fine days from May to October painting outside."
- John Dyer
(Related: Work, Life, Majority, May, October, Painting)
"The paintings by Van Gough and Chagall had a big influence on me."
- John Dyer
(Related: Influence)
"I decided to become a painter when my first four paintings where all published and attracted a great deal of interest. I exhibited one of them and it was sold."
- John Dyer
(Related: First, Interest)
"I have been surrounded by artists and paintings throughout my life. My father Ted Dyer is an artist, and from a very early age I have spent time painting and drawing."
- John Dyer
(Related: Age, Time, Life, Father, Artist, Artists, Painting)
"I still take photographs for my own use, personal studies. I do not feel that I can fully express my views through the medium and this is why I have moved towards painting."
- John Dyer
(Related: Painting)
"I've been trying to pick up painting but it's hard."
- George Eads
(Related: Painting, Trying)
"Language is much closer to film than painting is."
- Sergei Eisenstein
(Related: Film, Language, Painting)
"For example, in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents - as an element - the greatest difficulty in manipulation."
- Sergei Eisenstein
(Related: Cinema, Difficulty, Example, Manipulation, Painting)
"Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?"
- Sergei Eisenstein
(Related: Ideas, Cinema, Language, Now, Painting, Theater)
"At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art."
- Brian Eno
(Related: Art, Music, Ambition, Beginning)
"Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation."
- Max Ernst
(Related: Amusement, Discovery, Invention, Painting, Reality)
"Lets tell young people the best books are yet to written; the best painting, the best government the best of everything is yet to be done by them."
- John Erskine
(Related: Government, People, Books, Painting)
"I want to give my compliments to Australia. Ever since your government paid a few million dollars for a Jackson Pollack painting, I figure that it must be a marvellous country."
- Morton Feldman
(Related: Government, Compliments, Country, Painting, Want)
"The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem."
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(Related: People, Effort, May, Painting)
"But when I started writing songs, I stopped painting completely, and the only art things I do are connected to the career, like album sleeves and, to some extent, posters and things like that."
- Bryan Ferry
(Related: Art, Career, Painting, Songs, Writing)
"Somehow, the painting soothed him. It verified his fears. But it also informed him that fear was wonderful."
- Timothy Findley
(Related: Fear, Painting)
"But, when I had this feeling and started painting sacred art, as I had this feeling to do, then it come to me: my problem is I'll get a lot of criticism and another problem is my work's not good enough to sell."
- Howard Finster
(Related: Art, Work, Criticism, Feeling, Painting)
"People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of what is good or bad art in the theater."
- Minnie Maddern Fiske
(Related: Art, Music, People, Literature, Painting, Question, Taste, Theater, Understanding)
"In classical oil painting, there seemed to be a radical turn to seeing things as the camera sees them, with that technological modification. I began to have a tremendous problem with all of this."
- Henry Flynt
(Related: Oil, Painting, Radical)
"I was a student at Harvard, and that's where I learned about so-called avant-garde music. Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism and painting were well known at this time."
- Henry Flynt
(Related: Time, Music, Painting)
"Coming out of college with a degree in fine arts and painting isn't worth much any more."
- Dan Fogelberg
(Related: College, Painting, Worth)
"Knowing what paint a painter uses or having an understanding of where he was in the history of where he came from doesn't hurt your appreciation of the painting."
- Jodie Foster
(Related: History, Appreciation, Hurt, Painting, Understanding)
"I needed an outlet in high school and came across painting. I've actually been painting longer than I've been acting. A movie is a collaborative effort, and with painting you just have yourself."
- James Franco
(Related: Acting, Effort, Painting, School)
"If I had been around when Rubens was painting, I would have been revered as a fabulous model. Kate Moss? Well, she would have been the paintbrush."
- Dawn French
(Related: Painting)
"When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't."
- Lucian Freud
(Related: Body, Choice, Painting, Will)
"The paintings that really excite me have an erotic element or side to them irrespective of subject matter."
- Lucian Freud
"I am only interested in painting the actual person, in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong."
- Lucian Freud
(Related: Art, End, Painting, Wrong)
"Painting is sometimes like those recipes where you do all manner of elaborate things to a duck, and then end up putting it on one side and only using the skin."
- Lucian Freud
(Related: End, Painting, Skin)
"The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government."
- Milton Friedman
(Related: Architecture, Government, Science, Civilization, Agriculture, Literature, Painting)
"If he sees nothing within, then he should stop painting what is in front of him."
- Caspar David Friedrich
(Related: Nothing, Painting)
"Some people would say my paintings show a future world and maybe they do, but I paint from reality. I put several things and ideas together, and perhaps, when I have finished, it could show the future."
- H. R. Giger
(Related: People, Ideas, Future, Reality, World)
"You know I was curious - I was interested in all kinds of mystery or deeper meanings in the paintings because I myself have not analyzed why they have turned out like this or like that."
- H. R. Giger
(Related: Mystery)
"Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter's soul."
- Vincent Van Gogh
(Related: Life, Soul)
"Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion."
- Vincent Van Gogh
(Related: Faith, Duty, Opinion, Painting, Public, Public opinion)
"I dream of painting and then I paint my dream."
- Vincent Van Gogh
(Related: Dream, Painting)
"I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream."
- Vincent Van Gogh
(Related: Experience, Nature, Dream, Clarity, Moments)
"I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create."
- Vincent Van Gogh
(Related: Life, Power, God, Painting, Suffering)
"A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world."
- Edmond de Goncourt
(Related: Opinions, Painting, World)
"Coming to understand a painting or a symphony in an unfamiliar style, to recognize the work of an artist or school, to see or hear in new ways, is as cognitive an achievement as learning to read or write or add."
- Nelson Goodman
(Related: Work, Achievement, Artist, Learning, Painting, School, Style)
"I paint because it hurts not to. Pain is in the word painting."
- Marta Gottfried
(Related: Pain, Painting, Word)
"I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention."
- Michael Graves
(Related: Architecture, Music, Poetry, Truth, Invention, Painting)
"Does any art have a practical value? People love to talk about how expensive a painting is. That's the only way we can talk about paintings in this century."
- John Guare
(Related: Art, Love, People, Painting, Talk, Value)
"People go to see beautiful paintings to see how much they cost. Wow. The practical value is that it shows you what the human spirit can do."
- John Guare
(Related: People, Spirit, Value)
"Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see."
- Philip Guston
(Related: Illusion, Magic, Painting)
"In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?"
- Philip Guston
(Related: Experience, Colors, Desire, Painting)
"Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe."
- Philip Guston
(Related: Society, Imagination, Heart, Painting, Sculpture)
"Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again."
- Philip Guston
(Related: Painting)
"The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so that what you see is not what you see."
- Philip Guston
(Related: Illusion, Magic, Mind, Painting)
"I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere."
- Philip Guston
(Related: Thoughts, Desire, Memory, Nothing, Painting, Sensations)
"Look at any inspired painting. It's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation."
- Philip Guston
(Related: Painting, State)
"Let's look at people as artists and try to support them; just because Picasso painted a couple of bad paintings, that's no reason to say he's a lousy painter."
- Steve Guttenberg
(Related: People, Artists, Reason, Support)
"Painting and writing are solitary arts."
- Conrad Hall
(Related: Painting, Writing)
"I'm quite sure that all true professional artists, of every description, in all walks of life, whether their craft is painting, music, sculpture, medicine or anything, have one primary concern - mankind."
- Chico Hamilton
(Related: Life, Music, Artists, Concern, Mankind, Medicine, Painting, Sculpture)
"Red is one of the strongest colors, it's blood, it has a power with the eye. That's why traffic lights are red I guess, and stop signs as well... In fact I use red in all of my paintings."
- Keith Haring
(Related: Power, Blood, Colors, Eye, Fact)
"I think you have to control the materials to an extent, but it's important to let the materials have a kind of power for themselves; like the natural power of gravity, if you are painting on a wall, it makes the paint trickle and it drips; there is no reason to fight that."
- Keith Haring
(Related: Power, Control, Fight, Gravity, Painting, Reason)
"God comes to us in theater in the way we communicate with each other, whether it be a symphony orchestra, or a wonderful ballet, or a beautiful painting, or a play. It's a way of expressing our humanity."
- Julie Harris
(Related: God, Ballet, Humanity, Painting, Play, Theater)
"Art, after all, is traditionally displayed against vacancies: paintings on dun walls, sculptures in empty spaces, music in quiet halls."
- John Hart
(Related: Music, Art, Quiet)
"Painters of paintings, writers of books, never could tell the half."
- Lorenz Hart
(Related: Books, Writers)
"Sunlight is painting."
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
(Related: Painting)
"Well, I've been painting for years. I just started doing a lot more in the last couple."
- Robyn Hitchcock
(Related: Painting, Years)
"When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else."
- Howard Hodgkin
(Related: Painting)
"I hate painting."
- Howard Hodgkin
(Related: Hate, Painting)
"I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings."
- Howard Hodgkin
(Related: Work, Artists)
"A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object."
- Howard Hodgkin
(Related: Painting)
"Through a painting we can see the whole world."
- Hans Hofmann
(Related: Painting, World)
"My aim in painting is to create pulsating, luminous, and open surfaces that emanate a mystic light, in accordance with my deepest insight into the experience of life and nature."
- Hans Hofmann
(Related: Experience, Life, Nature, Light, Open, Painting)
"I have generally found that persons who had studied painting least were the best judges of it."
- William Hogarth
(Related: Judges, Painting)
"In America, the only truly popular art form is the movies. Most people consider painting a hobby and literature, schoolwork."
- Brad Holland
(Related: Art, Movies, People, America, Literature, Painting, Popular)
"If they were starting their careers today, Rockwell and Picasso would probably both be painting on black velvet."
- Brad Holland
(Related: Careers, Painting, Today)
"Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
(Related: Life, Painting)
"Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great."
- Edward Hopper
(Related: Life, Nature, Painting, Will)
"The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting."
- Edward Hopper
(Related: Art, Painting)
"Well, I have a very simple method of painting."
- Edward Hopper
(Related: Painting)
"My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impression of nature."
- Edward Hopper
(Related: Nature, Impression, Painting)
"Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel."
- Robert Hughes
(Related: Sex, American, Painting, Psychoanalysis)
"My parents felt that acting was far too insecure. Don't ask me what made them think that painting would be more secure."
- John Hurt
(Related: Acting, Painting, Parents)
"When the painting is hanging on your wall for a long time, you don't notice it. You get tired of it, even if it's a Picasso. When the next generation inherits the painting, they sell it. I don't want to be sold."
- Julio Iglesias
(Related: Time, Painting, Want)
"I realize that protest paintings are not exactly in vogue, but I've done many."
- Robert Indiana
(Related: Protest)
"Many, many of my paintings have come from the first chapter of Moby Dick."
- Robert Indiana
(Related: First)
"Some people like to paint trees. I like to paint love. I find it more meaningful than painting trees."
- Robert Indiana
(Related: Love, People, Painting, Trees)
"I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza."
- Robert Indiana
(Related: Peace, Being, Painting)
"When I was in art college, I would be painting, and I would create something on a canvas that was actually quite attractive. But if I got frightened and tried to protect that, that canvas would die."
- Michael Ironside
(Related: Art, College, Painting)
"You know, face painting in non-Western cultures is a sign of collectivism, is a sign of one representing the community, it's not unique at all."
- Joseph Jarman
(Related: Community, Painting)
"Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that."
- Jasper Johns
(Related: Power, Manipulation, Painting, Space)
"I think a painting should include more experience than simply intended statement."
- Jasper Johns
(Related: Experience, Painting)
"I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason."
- Jasper Johns
(Related: Business, Ideas, Reason, World)
"I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world."
- Samuel Johnson
(Related: World)
"Painting does what we cannot do - it brings a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane."
- Chuck Jones
(Related: Painting, World)
"The older painting - well, it does have an effect all at once, I suppose, but it's of a lesser intensity than a lot of the American work in the last ten or fifteen years."
- Donald Judd
(Related: Work, American, Effect, Painting, Years)
"Well, I don't think anyone now would say that they're painting the state of the culture of America. I think that's too grand and pompous a thing for anybody to claim."
- Donald Judd
(Related: America, Culture, Now, Painting, State)
"Well, I am not interested in the kind of expression that you have when you paint a painting with brush strokes. It's all right, but it's already done and I want to do something new."
- Donald Judd
(Related: Expression, Painting, Right, Want)
"Painting completed my life."
- Frida Kahlo
(Related: Life, Painting)
"My painting carries with it the message of pain."
- Frida Kahlo
(Related: Pain, Painting)
"I am planning a one-man art show of original Batman oil paintings that I will show in New York City."
- Bob Kane
(Related: Art, Oil, Planning, Will)
"I don't understand it. Jack will spend any amount of money to buy votes but he balks at investing a thousand dollars in a beautiful painting."
- Jackie Kennedy
(Related: Money, Painting, Will)
"That's why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness."
- Corita Kent
(Related: Music, People)
"A painting is a symbol for the universe. Inside it, each piece relates to the other. Each piece is only answerable to the rest of that little world. So, probably in the total universe, there is that kind of total harmony, but we get only little tastes of it."
- Corita Kent
(Related: Harmony, Painting, Rest, Symbol, Universe, World)
"All gardening is landscape painting."
- William Kent
(Related: Gardening, Painting)
"My hobbies are painting, crafts, and I like golfing."
- Nancy Kerrigan
(Related: Hobbies, Painting)
"I'm working on a snow scene right now, and it's summer. It's hot, and I will get chilly. I'll have to turn on the heat. My wife walks in, and it's 95 degrees in the studio. I know it's nutty, but it's a projection you have where you step into the painting."
- Thomas Kinkade
(Related: Wife, Now, Painting, Right, Snow, Summer, Will)
"It is easy to have a lot of paintings or projects hanging around that are 'almost done.'"
- Thomas Kinkade
(Related: Projects)
"The worlds I paint leave a lot to engage the imagination by hinting at what lies beyond the four edges of the painting. I think getting beyond the four edges of an opportunity or challenge is one of the basic skills you need in business."
- Thomas Kinkade
(Related: Business, Imagination, Opportunity, Challenge, Lies, Painting)
"You don't need a framework. You need a painting, not a frame."
- Klaus Kinski
(Related: Painting)
"The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions."
- Paul Klee
(Related: Art, Life, Expression)
"If the weather is good I go into the nearby wood - there I am painting a small beech forest (in the sun) with a few conifers mixed in. This takes until 8 'o clock."
- Gustav Klimt
(Related: Painting, Weather, Wood)
"After tea it's back to painting - a large poplar at dusk with a gathering storm. From time to time instead of this evening painting session I go bowling in one of the neighbouring villages, but not very often."
- Gustav Klimt
(Related: Time, Evening, Painting, Tea)
"Sometimes I miss out the morning's painting session and instead study my Japanese books in the open."
- Gustav Klimt
(Related: Books, Open, Painting, Study)
"The final test of a painting, theirs, mine, any other, is: does the painter's emotions come across?"
- Franz Kline
(Related: Emotions, Painting)
"I love painting."
- Heidi Klum
(Related: Love, Painting)
"I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s."
- Kenneth Koch
(Related: Love, Peace, War, Music, Poetry, Fiction, Painting)
"I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not."
- Kenneth Koch
(Related: Poetry, People, Painting)
"No painting can tell the truth of a single instant; no snapshot can do anything else."
- John A. Kouwenhoven
(Related: Truth, Painting)
"Painting... in which the inner and the outer man are inseparable, transcends technique, transcends subject and moves into the realm of the inevitable."
- Lee Krasner
(Related: Man, Painting)
"You were told how much space so it was a matter of whether you could send in two paintings or three paintings, you know, pending where the show was being held. You did submit work to be accepted. Once you were accepted that was it. You did your own selection of what went in."
- Lee Krasner
(Related: Work, Being, Space)
"Well, let's say we acknowledged the School of French Painting - the Paris School of painting as the leading force and vitality of the time. I think that was understood and felt and experienced."
- Lee Krasner
(Related: Time, Force, Leading, Painting, Paris, School, Vitality)
"People were very affected by the war. But it didn't mean you stopped painting unless you were called into the Army; then you just couldn't paint. But otherwise one continued."
- Lee Krasner
(Related: War, People, Army, Painting)
"You buy any book on color theory today, and it's just complete poppycock. Everybody comes out of school painting pink, purple and green. The whole damn cartoon industry has pink purple and green on their mind."
- John Kricfalusi
(Related: Mind, Painting, School, Theory, Today)
"I influenced the BG style by not being able to draw perspective. The BG artists developed cool graphic painting styles to make my bad backgrounds look like they were that way on purpose."
- John Kricfalusi
(Related: Purpose, Artists, Being, Painting, Perspective, Style)
"I still have agents in France, Los Angeles and Amsterdam who call and suggest parts. I'd love to keep on doing both painting and acting until the end of my days."
- Sylvia Kristel
(Related: Love, Acting, End, France, Painting)
"I wanted to make these people real, not like they were in a painting. Like these are people who don't know they're in a period movie. Those concerns are incredibly immediate."
- Neil LaBute
(Related: People, Painting)
"A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires."
- Hedy Lamarr
(Related: Friend, Company, Painting)
"If people only knew as much about painting as I do, they would never buy my pictures."
- Edwin Landseer
(Related: People, Painting)
"Nothing's sacred anymore. Those girls and I got so close. They were painting me naked every day for months. It was kind of like going to a really bizarre sleepover. It's what you guys imagine we do: One naked girl and seven pairs of hands all over her."
- Jennifer Lawrence
(Related: Bizarre, Day, Girls, Months, Nothing, Painting)
"There is tragic evidence to show that the paintings at the French prehistoric art sites are deteriorating."
- Louis Leakey
(Related: Art)
"No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely."
- Mary Leakey
(Related: Information, Yield)
"This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting."
- Fernand Leger
(Related: Truth, Painting, Understanding, Validity)
"Now painting is different. It's something recollected in tranquility."
- Jack Levine
(Related: Now, Painting, Tranquility)
"Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of oddity."
- Roy Lichtenstein
(Related: People, Forget, Now, Painting, Thinking, Years)
"Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself."
- Roy Lichtenstein
(Related: Art, Painting, World)
"Picasso's always been such a huge influence that I thought when I started the cartoon paintings that I was getting away from Picasso, and even my cartoons of Picasso were done almost to rid myself of his influence."
- Roy Lichtenstein
(Related: Thought, Cartoons, Influence)
"I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it's very hard to guess at a size or a color and all the colors around it and what it will really look like."
- Roy Lichtenstein
(Related: Colors, Mind, Painting, Will)
"But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it."
- Roy Lichtenstein
(Related: Painting)
"Painting and music were the only things I worked at industriously and faithfully."
- Pierre Loti
(Related: Music, Painting)
"But I hang on to books. I love them. I even think they're very nice decor in a room - far better than paintings... That's not quite true!"
- Norman MacCaig
(Related: Love, Books)
"My painting is visible images which conceal nothing... they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable."
- Rene Magritte
(Related: Mystery, Nothing, Painting, Question)
"If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph."
- Janet Malcolm
(Related: Painting)
"Painting is the aesthetic side of the object but it has never been original, has never been its own goal."
- Kazimir Malevich
(Related: Goal, Painting)
"Writing and Painting are the same for me."
- Peter Malkin
(Related: Painting, Writing)
"You can't work in the movies. Movies are all about lighting. Very few filmmakers will concentrate on the story. You get very little rehearsal time, so anything you do onscreen is a kind of speed painting."
- John Malkovich
(Related: Movies, Work, Time, Painting, Will)
"To the humblest among them, who may be listening to me now, I want to say that the masterpiece to which you are paying historic homage this evening is a painting which he has saved."
- Andre Malraux
(Related: Evening, Listening, May, Now, Painting, Want)
"The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself."
- Andre Malraux
(Related: Artist, Discovery, Order, Painting, Universe)
"No one can be a painter unless he cares for painting above all else."
- Edouard Manet
(Related: Painting)
"My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind."
- Agnes Martin
(Related: Mind)
"A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting."
- Abraham Maslow
(Related: First, Painting)
"I take this art very seriously and passionately. I love what I do. You can't help but grow. That's not to say you don't make mistakes or make bad choices, but that's part of the art. Painters paint bad paintings."
- Christopher Meloni
(Related: Art, Love, Choices, Help, Mistakes)
"I felt I was painting with a Popsicle."
- Robert Merrill
(Related: Painting)
"Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture."
- Michelangelo
(Related: Painting, Sculpture)
"Writing requires a great deal of skill, just like painting does. People don't want to learn those skills."
- John Milius
(Related: People, Painting, Skill, Want, Writing)
"I was not out to paint beautiful pictures; even painting good pictures was not important to me. I wanted only to help the truth burst forth."
- Alice Miller
(Related: Truth, Help, Painting)
"Every milieu has something ridiculous about it - film-making, the music world, painting - because people who take themselves seriously become funny pretty quickly."
- Rebecca Miller
(Related: Funny, Music, People, Film, Painting, Pretty, World)
"I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness."
- Joan Miro
(Related: Character, Painting)
"At the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar."
- Joni Mitchell
(Related: Force, Guitar, Painting, Trying, Writing)
"With a painting, you don't have to go back and paint it again."
- Joni Mitchell
(Related: Painting)
"No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition."
- Claude Monet
(Related: Artist, Painting)
"The dance commonly begins about the middle of the afternoon or later, after sundown. When it begins in the afternoon, there is always an intermission of an hour or two for supper. The preliminary painting and dressing is usually the work of about two hours."
- James Mooney
(Related: Work, Dance, Painting)
"Painting self-portraits without clothes on has also given me some publicity."
- Cleo Moore
(Related: Clothes, Painting, Publicity, Self)
"One newspaper even published one of my nude paintings - the one of me naked from the waste up."
- Cleo Moore
(Related: Waste)
"The way I create music is maybe like a painting, to compose in a more visual way. Basically it's the music that I want to hear- that's my inspiration and bottom line. I just try to get ideas from books, movies, paintings."
- Ikue Mori
(Related: Music, Movies, Inspiration, Ideas, Books, Painting, Want)
"In a movie, you're raw material, just a hue of some color and the director makes the painting."
- Viggo Mortensen
(Related: Painting)
"Painting's not important. The important thing is keeping busy."
- Grandma Moses
(Related: Painting)
"If I hadn't started painting, I would have raised chickens."
- Grandma Moses
(Related: Painting)
"Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask."
- Robert Motherwell
(Related: Art, Painting, Tradition)
"Around 1980, I went back to painting with a vengeance."
- Martin Mull
(Related: Painting, Vengeance)
"I try to not get to the point where one is making wallpaper, or simply painting money. I want to make sure that I am at least trying to weigh myself down, that there's a challenge each time."
- Martin Mull
(Related: Time, Money, Challenge, Painting, Trying, Want)
"Oil-painting is a developed technique. Why go backwards?"
- Edvard Munch
(Related: Oil)
"One can easily tell that the creator of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel was above all a sculptor."
- Edvard Munch
"Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness."
- Edvard Munch
(Related: Eye, Memories, Moments, Nothing, Painting, Simplicity)
"This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution."
- Edvard Munch
(Related: Art, Revolution, Painting)
"By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life."
- Edvard Munch
(Related: Life, Colors, Painting)
"What is the use of good painting? We want a spell cast upon the optical part of our existence! We seldom really see the world, but when we do, we become as still as a picture."
- Robert Musil
(Related: Painting, Want, World)
"All still lifes are actually paintings of the world on the sixth day of creation, when God and the world were alone together, without man!"
- Robert Musil
(Related: God, Creation, Day, World)
"Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Painting)
"I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality."
- Barnett Newman
(Related: Hope, Feeling, Giving, Individuality, Painting)
"I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves."
- Barnett Newman
"It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first."
- Jason Newsted
(Related: Art, Poetry, Time, First, Painting, Poems, Songs, Writing)
"I think of painting without subject matter as music without words."
- Kenneth Noland
(Related: Music, Painting, Words)
"If the world could remain within a frame like a painting on the wall, I think we'd see the beauty then and stand staring in awe."
- Conor Oberst
(Related: Beauty, Painting, World)
"Painting is a hobby for me."
- Renee O'Connor
(Related: Painting)
"Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising."
- David Ogilvy
(Related: Advertising)
"I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart."
- Georgia O'Keeffe
"It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it."
- Georgia O'Keeffe
(Related: Time, Painting)
"In painting feathers, you want to create the look of feathers, but if you try to paint all the feathers, you have nothing but disaster."
- John O'Neill
(Related: Disaster, Nothing, Painting, Want)
"90% of every art form is garbage - dance and stand-up, painting and music. Focus on the 10% that's good, suck it up, and drive on."
- Patton Oswalt
(Related: Art, Music, Dance, Focus, Painting)
"Doing the show was like painting the George Washington Bridge. As soon as you finished one end, you started right in on the other."
- Jack Paar
(Related: End, Painting, Right, Washington)
"Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts."
- Blaise Pascal
(Related: Thoughts, Eloquence, Painting)
"As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings."
- Boris Pasternak
(Related: Writing)
"If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens."
- William Lyon Phelps
(Related: Painting)
"Painting is just another way of keeping a diary."
- Pablo Picasso
(Related: Painting)
"Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting."
- Pablo Picasso
(Related: Painting, Sculpture)
"Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen."
- Pablo Picasso
(Related: Blind, Man, Painting, Profession)
"One must act in painting as in life, directly."
- Pablo Picasso
(Related: Life, Act, Painting)
"One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite - that particular peach is but a detail."
- Pablo Picasso
(Related: People, Detail, Painting)
"I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!"
- Pablo Picasso
(Related: People, Horror, Problems)
"Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language."
- Steven Pinker
(Related: Art, Music, Poetry, Language, Literature, Mind, Painting, Sculpture)
"Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks."
- Plutarch
(Related: Poetry, Painting)
"I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way."
- Sydney Pollack
(Related: Art, Architecture, Dance, Film, Painting, Photography, Writing)
"My paintings do not have a center, but depend on the same amount of interest throughout."
- Jackson Pollock
(Related: Interest)
"On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting."
- Jackson Pollock
(Related: Work, Painting)
"Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is."
- Jackson Pollock
(Related: Artist, Painting, Self)
"The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through."
- Jackson Pollock
(Related: Life, Painting)
"When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing."
- Jackson Pollock
(Related: Painting)
"My painting does not come from the easel."
- Jackson Pollock
(Related: Painting)
"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. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own."
- Jackson Pollock
(Related: Life, Painting)
"Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was."
- Jackson Pollock
(Related: Beginning, Compliment, End, Painting)
"He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting."
- Jackson Pollock
(Related: Painting, Realism, Right)
"I don't work from drawings. I don't make sketches and drawings and color sketches into a final painting."
- Jackson Pollock
(Related: Work, Painting)
"I hardly ever stretch the canvas before painting."
- Jackson Pollock
(Related: Painting)
"I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own."
- Jackson Pollock
(Related: Life, Fear, Painting)
"I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge."
- Jackson Pollock
(Related: Time, Painting, Unconscious)
"It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well."
- Jackson Pollock
(Related: Harmony, Painting, Result)
"I never consciously said, 'I want to be an actor.' It sounds stupid, but it's kind of like being a painter or something. You don't say, 'From today on I'm going to be a painter.' It's not something conscious - you've just been painting pictures all your life."
- Franka Potente
(Related: Life, Actor, Being, Painting, Today, Want)
"I studied all about Gauguin. He was a banker. He was a banker who - he used to paint on Sundays. And one day he hated himself for painting on Sundays."
- Anthony Quinn
(Related: Day, Painting)
"I liked sculpting better than painting. You have more freedom in sculpting."
- Anthony Quinn
(Related: Freedom, Painting)
"I'm not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings."
- Robert Rauschenberg
(Related: Painting, Possibilities, Want)
"I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended."
- Robert Rauschenberg
(Related: Old)
"Pollock also... wanted one to be wrapped in the painting."
- Robert Rauschenberg
(Related: Painting)
"There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain."
- Robert Rauschenberg
(Related: Language, Pain, Painting, Struggle)
"Very quickly a painting is turned into a facsimile of itself when one becomes so familiar with with it that one recognizes it without looking at it."
- Robert Rauschenberg
(Related: Painting)
"And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting."
- Robert Rauschenberg
(Related: Excitement, Painting, Variety)
"I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world."
- Robert Rauschenberg
(Related: Painting, World)
"And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission."
- Robert Rauschenberg
(Related: Time, Painting)
"And I think a painting has such a limited life anyway."
- Robert Rauschenberg
(Related: Life, Painting)
"But I was in awe of the painters; I mean I was new in New York, and I thought the painting that was going on here was just unbelievable."
- Robert Rauschenberg
(Related: Thought, Painting)
"Now almost every artist outside of New York is connected with some school or some museum school, and even in New York the majority are. That's an interesting fact when you take the idea of making money, making a living selling paintings. Only a dozen or two painters do that."
- Ad Reinhardt
(Related: Money, Idea, Selling, Artist, Fact, Living, Majority, Now, School)
"If some student came up and wanted to know where to study painting, you'd want to suggest someplace, but there's no place. I wouldn't know where to send a student to study."
- Ad Reinhardt
(Related: Painting, Study, Want)
"I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes. So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities."
- Ad Reinhardt
(Related: Art, History, Now, Painting)
"Painting is, I think, inevitably an archaic activity and one that depends on spiritual values."
- Bridget Riley
(Related: Values, Painting, Spiritual)
"In my earlier paintings, I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active."
- Bridget Riley
(Related: Space)
"I think that has been a benefit to me because I think most people understand quilts and not a lot of people understand paintings. But yet they're looking at one."
- Faith Ringgold
(Related: People)
"Through her paintings, she breaks all the taboos of the woman's body and of female sexuality."
- Diego Rivera
(Related: Body, Sexuality, Woman)
"Overall, the anarchy was the most creative of all periods of Japanese culture for in it there appeared the greatest landscape painting, the culmination of the skill of landscape gardening and the arts of flower arrangement, and the No drama."
- J. M. Roberts
(Related: Gardening, Anarchy, Culture, Drama, Painting, Skill)
"Painting directly from nature is difficult as things do not remain the same; the camera helps to retain the picture in your mind."
- Theodore Robinson
(Related: Nature, Mind, Painting)
"They decided to establish a museum of modern art where works by contemporary artists would be shown. Mother was viewed as a very progressive person, and not everybody liked the paintings she bought."
- David Rockefeller
(Related: Art, Mother, Artists)
"The Japanese have a wonderful sense of design and a refinement in their art. They try to produce beautiful paintings with the minimum number of strokes."
- David Rockefeller
(Related: Design, Art, Sense)
"The '20s ended in an era of extravagance, sort of like the one we're in now. There was a big crash, but then the country picked itself up again, and we had some great years. Those were the days when American believed in itself. I was happy and proud to be painting it."
- Norman Rockwell
(Related: American, Country, Extravagance, Now, Painting, Years)
"The secret to so many artists living so long is that every painting is a new adventure. So, you see, they're always looking ahead to something new and exciting. The secret is not to look back."
- Norman Rockwell
(Related: Adventure, Artists, Living, Painting)
"It wouldn't be right for me to clown around when I'm painting a president."
- Norman Rockwell
(Related: Painting, President, Right)
"I didn't know what to expect from a famous movie star; maybe that he'd be sort of stuck-up, you know. But not Gary Cooper. He horsed around so much... that I had a hard time painting him."
- Norman Rockwell
(Related: Time, Famous, Painting)
"Children's finger-painting came under the arts, but movies didn't."
- Nicolas Roeg
(Related: Movies, Children)
"I don't like food that's too carefully arranged; it makes me think that the chef is spending too much time arranging and not enough time cooking. If I wanted a picture I'd buy a painting."
- Andy Rooney
(Related: Food, Time, Cooking, Painting)
"Never invest in anything that eats or needs painting."
- Billy Rose
(Related: Needs, Painting)
"Wherever you look there are inspirations, books, literature, paintings, landscapes, everything. Just living is an inspiration."
- Gavin Rossdale
(Related: Inspiration, Books, Literature, Living)
"There is no such thing as good painting about nothing."
- Mark Rothko
(Related: Nothing, Painting)
"For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh."
- Georges Rouault
(Related: Life, Forget, Night, Painting)
"I'm passionately involved in life: I love its change, its color, its movement. To be alive, to be able to see, to walk, to have houses, music, paintings - it's all a miracle."
- Arthur Rubinstein
(Related: Love, Change, Music, Houses)
"To be alive, to be able to see, to walk, to have houses, music, paintings - it's all a miracle. I have adopted the technique of living life miracle to miracle."
- Arthur Rubinstein
(Related: Life, Music, Houses, Living)
"I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting."
- John Ruskin
(Related: Painting, Reputation)
"I sometimes use a lot of light greens and greys when I feel there is sadness in the painting."
- Robert Ryan
(Related: Light, Painting, Sadness)
"As a teenager I started painting and playing guitar."
- Buffy Sainte-Marie
(Related: Guitar, Painting)
"The key is in remaining just aloof enough from a painting so that you know when to stop."
- Buffy Sainte-Marie
(Related: Key, Painting)
"The paintings are transferred from my computer to a disk, and I can hand it to the printer this way; or I can modem the painting to the printer over the phone lines from my house in Hawaii."
- Buffy Sainte-Marie
(Related: Computer, Painting)
"The artistic process in digital art is very much the same as for making other kinds of paintings."
- Buffy Sainte-Marie
(Related: Art)
"A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth."
- John Singer Sargent
(Related: Painting, Wrong)
"I never was very capable of expressing my feelings or emotions in words. I don't know whether this is the cause why I did it in music and also why I did it in painting. Or vice versa: That I had this way as an outlet. I could renounce expressing something in words."
- Arnold Schoenberg
(Related: Music, Feelings, Cause, Emotions, Painting, Vice, Words)
"A painting means as much to you as a string of pearls to an ape."
- Paul Scofield
(Related: Painting, Pearls)
"I no longer worry whether a painting is about something or not. I am only concerned with the expectation, from a flat surface, of an illusion."
- William Scott
(Related: Expectation, Illusion, Painting, Worry)
"Every painting I do is related to the last one: it may be a continuation of a previous painting or it may be a reaction against it."
- William Scott
(Related: May, Painting)
"On occasion I have drawn as a release from painting. The economy in using paper, pencil, charcoal and crayon can help towards a greater gamble and higher rewards. I also find that drawing can generate ideas more rapidly than painting."
- William Scott
(Related: Ideas, Economy, Help, Painting)
"Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science."
- Georges Seurat
(Related: Poetry, Science)
"If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting."
- Peter Shaffer
(Related: London, Oil, Painting)
"Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course."
- George Bernard Shaw
(Related: Fire, Painting)
"I think people have to choose between living with contradictions or painting themselves into a corner. I have a lot of contradictions."
- Michelle Shocked
(Related: People, Living, Painting)
"Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent - not with how things are but with how they might be - in short, with design."
- Herbert Simon
(Related: Architecture, Design, Business, Engineering, Medicine, Painting)
"The animation of the canvas is one of the hardest problems of painting."
- Alfred Sisley
(Related: Animation, Painting, Problems)
"Every good picture leaves the painter eager to start again, unsatisfied, inspired by the rich mine in which he is working, hoping for more energy, more vitality, more time - condemned to painting for life."
- John French Sloan
(Related: Life, Time, Energy, Painting, Vitality)
"Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues."
- Robert Smithson
(Related: Architecture, Art, Habit, Painting, Sculpture)
"My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being."
- Wole Soyinka
(Related: Music, Being, Humanity, Listening, Nothing, Opera, Painting, Poems, Reading, Struggle, Writers)
"We have as many planes of speech as does a painting planes of perspective which create perspective in a phrase. The most important word stands out most vividly defined in the very foreground of the sound plane. Less important words create a series of deeper planes."
- Konstantin Stanislavisky
(Related: Painting, Perspective, Sound, Speech, Word, Words)
"A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere."
- Frank Stella
(Related: Painting, Sculpture)
"But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live."
- Frank Stella
(Related: Art, Painting, Space)
"I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall."
- Frank Stella
(Related: Painting)
"Up until 35 I had a slightly skewed world view. I honestly believed everybody in the world wanted to make abstract paintings, and people only became lawyers and doctors and brokers and things because they couldn't make abstract paintings."
- Frank Stella
(Related: People, Doctors, Lawyers, World)
"When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out."
- Frank Stella
(Related: May, Painting)
"One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters."
- Frank Stella
(Related: Painting)
"I'm sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don't think there's any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock."
- Howard Stern
(Related: Religion, People, African, Difference, Painting, Smoking)
"One of the best things about paintings is their silence - which prompts reflection and random reverie."
- Mark Stevens
(Related: Reflection, Reverie, Silence)
"It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture."
- Tom Stoppard
(Related: Art, Painting, Sculpture)
"Where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong."
- Harriet Beecher Stowe
(Related: Music, Ideas, Expression, Painting, Spiritual)
"When we don't have information, we go to the simplest outlook, to black and white. But then we have to lie to ourselves. Black is never as black as you're painting it and white is never as white."
- Patricia Sun
(Related: Lie, Information, Painting)
"The painting develops before my eyes, unfolding its surprises as it progresses. It is this which gives me the sense of complete liberty, and for this reason I am incapable of forming a plan or making a sketch beforehand."
- Yves Tanguy
(Related: Eyes, Liberty, Painting, Reason, Sense, Surprises)
"I started formal piano training when I was 4. From there I had little violas, and I had dancing lessons of every sort and description, and painting lessons. I had German. And shorthand."
- Twyla Tharp
(Related: Dancing, Painting, Training)
"I don't have much of a problem with interruptions. I keep a detailed record of paint and materials as a work on each painting. I can restart exactly where I left off."
- Mike Thompson
(Related: Work, Painting)
"I think it is an inborn talent - just luck. Some people can learn languages; some can throw a ball. Most people have something. My talent is drawing and painting."
- Mike Thompson
(Related: Talent, People, Luck, Painting)
"I make paintings, try to get others to look at them and hopefully buy them."
- Mike Thompson
"I believe that painting should come through the avenues of meditation rather than the canals of action."
- Mark Tobey
(Related: Action, Meditation, Painting)
"I also paint and enjoy acrylic medium; some of my close friends have paintings I did for them."
- Kiana Tom
(Related: Friends)
"A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery."
- Mao Tse Tung
(Related: Revolution, Painting, Party, Writing)
"In our own time it has been seen... that simple children, roughly brought up in the wilderness, have begun to draw by themselves, impelled by their own natural genius, instructed solely by the example of these beautiful paintings and sculptures of Nature."
- Giorgio Vasari
(Related: Nature, Time, Genius, Children, Example, Wilderness)
"Good painting is like good cooking; it can be tasted, but not explained."
- Maurice de Vlaminck
(Related: Cooking, Painting)
"When I get my hands on painting materials I don't give a damn about other people's painting... every generation must start again afresh."
- Maurice de Vlaminck
(Related: People, Painting)
"The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it."
- Voltaire
(Related: Colors, Contrast, Effect, Eye, May, Painting)
"American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet."
- Diane Wakoski
(Related: Poetry, American, Individuality, Painting)
"A painting is like a man. If you can live without it, then there isn't much point in having it."
- Lila Acheson Wallace
(Related: Man, Painting)
"No one blames themselves if they don't understand a cartoon, as they might with a painting or "real" art; they simply think it's a bad cartoon."
- Chris Ware
(Related: Art, Painting)
"I'd asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions. Finally one lady friend asked the right question, 'Well, what do you love most?' That's how I started painting money."
- Andy Warhol
(Related: Love, Money, People, Friend, Lady, Painting, Question, Right)
"If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it."
- Andy Warhol
(Related: Nothing, Want)
"I find myself gravitating towards drama. It interests me. In the books I read, the paintings I like, it's always the darker stuff."
- Naomi Watts
(Related: Books, Drama)
"Butte was once a grand city. To me, that city is like one big stage for Edward Hopper. You could put your camera anywhere, and you felt you were looking at his paintings."
- Wim Wenders
"I'd never painted anything before. I was quite content to take other people's work since I didn't care anyway about the subject matter. I approached subject matter as a scoundrel. I had nothing to say about it whatsoever. I only wanted to make these exciting paintings."
- Tom Wesselmann
(Related: Work, People, Care, Content, Nothing)
"Photography suits the temper of this age - of active bodies and minds. It is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately."
- Edward Weston
(Related: Age, Ideas, Mind, Painting, Photography, Temper)
"I tried painting for a short time and realized that I was not a child prodigy at painting."
- Kim Weston
(Related: Time, Painting)
"I'm just a landscape painter. I look out the window and I see what's going on, and I paint it. While I'm painting it, I also write thoughts about what I see going on out there."
- William Wiley
(Related: Thoughts, Painting)
"I've been attracted to imagery and occasionally I've drawn from it, but I never thought I'd be painting these paintings. I didn't have any desire to. I didn't think there was any reason to."
- William Wiley
(Related: Thought, Desire, Painting, Reason)
"In the fairy tale the painting represents the here and now. The book is actually divided into five sections, through which the key character, the muse, leads us."
- Kit Williams
(Related: Character, Key, Now, Painting)
"The dog, the rabbit and the hoop all feature in the painting, and take the place of the orrery."
- Kit Williams
(Related: Painting)
"So when I'm playing, I'm sort of painting a feeling in the air."
- Pharrell Williams
(Related: Feeling, Painting)
"Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal."
- E. O. Wilson
(Related: Gain, Painting)
"Dwight is a sad clown. You've seen those paintings of sad clown."
- Rainn Wilson
"I'm working on a very long series of paintings based on desert folklore."
- Terri Windling
"But painting can be too lonely... I like being with people too much to have ever made that my life's work."
- Marie Windsor
(Related: Work, People, Life, Being, Lonely, Painting)
"Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting."
- Tom Wolfe
(Related: Painting, Theory)
"Painting is seen as picture making, the making of an art object, something that can stand on its own."
- Peter Wright
(Related: Art, Painting)
"I never know what it's going to look like. Wouldn't be much point in painting if I already knew the outcome. I have a subject in front of me and I start flooding colour and making marks, I don't know, it's improvisation isn't it?"
- Peter Wright
(Related: Painting)
"I have never subscribed to the Dirty Pallet school of painting."
- Peter Wright
(Related: Painting, School)
"I felt the need to get back to painting and I thought the best way was to start drawing, so I enrolled in a life drawing class. I soon discovered that people made very interesting subjects and I am still surprised that I had never discovered it before."
- Peter Wright
(Related: Life, Thought, People, Class, Painting)
"I'm a secretive bastard. I would never let anybody watch me painting... it would be like somebody watching you have sex - painting is that personal to me."
- Andrew Wyeth
(Related: Sex, Painting)
"I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious."
- Andrew Wyeth
(Related: Dream, Painting)
"At 18 I began painting steadily fulltime and at age 20 had my first New York show at the Macbeth Gallery."
- Andrew Wyeth
(Related: Age, First, Painting)
"And I like the idea of change. Because I don't see why we should hang a painting on the wall and then just not think of it anymore because it's there like a piece of furniture."
- Minoru Yamasaki
(Related: Change, Idea, Painting)