Painting Quotes
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A painting of a person can be descriptive, but for me it's about all the things that make up a picture - the feelings, the brushstrokes - more than describing somebody. People latch on to the personalities when they talk about my work and forget the other parts.
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On Painting Rats, and the Glorification of Them. They exist without permission. They are hated, hunted and persecuted. They live in quiet desperation amongst the filth. And yet they are capable of bringing entire civilizations to their knees. If you are dirty, insignificant, and unloved then rats are the ultimate role model.
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I have appointed you his friend, the sculptor Francis Chantry one of my executors. Will you promise to see me rolled up in it in Turner's painting 'Carthage'? ('Yes', responded his friend 'and I promise you also that, as soon as you are buried, I will see you taken up and unrolled.'
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A painting is like a man. If you can live without it, then there isn't much point in having it.
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With every experience, you alone are painting your own canvas, thought by thought, choice by choice.
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If we fall into the trap of painting all Muslims with a broad brush and imply that we are at war with an entire religion, then we are doing the terrorists' work for them.
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Because I went to Chouinard, which then became CalArts, I became a multi-discipline artist - it wasn't just about painting, it was about media and performance.
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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.
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Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about what I paint, really.
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I've done everything from cater, wait tables, pre-school teacher, painting, to being Cinderella, Elmo, a clown, nanny, selling hair... I would do kid's parties and entertain and do magic and paint faces and balloon animals. The highlight of my life.
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Modern art, in particular, seems especially vulnerable to fraud. Its abstractions are sometimes difficult to understand or grasp, and a modern painting is often loved less because of its intrinsic quality - its beauty, as conventionally understood - than because of the identity of the painter, its mark of social status.
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I began to paint again, even though I could barely hold the brush, but knowing exactly what I wanted to paint, I began three more large canvases... of large wheat fields under cloudy skies, and it did not take a great deal to express sadness and loneliness... I believe these paintings say what words cannot.
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I was making big paintings with mythological themes. When I started painting black figures, the white professors were relieved, and the black students were like, 'She's on our side.' These are the kinds of issues that a white male artist just doesn't have to deal with.
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When I was painting in art school - and I think many painters in the 1980s worked similarly - a finished painting would often be constructed from lots of other paintings underneath. Some of these individual layers of painting were better than others, but that was something that you would often only realise retrospectively.
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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.
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Like a guide dog, paintings help you see.
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Painting is, I think, inevitably an archaic activity and one that depends on spiritual values.
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My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition.
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It may be that just as tonality recurs in music and realism in painting, so the idea of liberalism recurs in politics-though each time in a different vein.
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People call me the painter of dancing girls. It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes.
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The kind of painting which I find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational, but it is musical and architectural... Whether this visual relationship is slightly more or slightly less abstract is, for me, beside the point.
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It takes more time to rework a painting than it takes to fill in the canvas in the first place. I wish I could get them all right with the first coat like many of the old masters could, but seem destined to have to rework to make them even passable.
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At that time c. 1904 – 1905 I tried, by means of lines and by distribution of mottled points of colours in his tempera painting on paper: 'Russian Beauty in a Landscape', 1905 to express the musical spirit of Russia. Other pictures of that period reflected the contradictions and later the eccentricities of Russia.
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I was always painting when I was a kid. But then when I handled a camera when I was 17, that was it for me. I loved photography. I would work 4 or 5 hours a day. It was like a calling.
