Painting Quotes
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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.
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My paintings always feature trails that dissolve into mysterious areas, patches of light that lead the eye around corners, pathways, open gates, etc.
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It was not that the figure had been removed, not that the figures had been swept away, but the symbols for the figures, and in turn the shapes in the later canvases were substitutes for the figures.. ..these new shapes say.. ..what the symbols said. Rothko, explaining Seitz his new way of painting during the mid-1940s
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The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.
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A painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience.
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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.
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My painting teacher in high school used to say, 'I can't paint like I want to, but through practice I'll get better.' But I don't think that's true. I think sometimes you just can't paint.
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If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.
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How are we going to make painters by lecturing to them? We are going to make questioners, doubters, and talkers. We are going to make painters by painting ourselves, and by showing the paintings of others. By working frankly from our convictions, we are going to make them work frankly from theirs.
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A painting works only on the edge of not working. Then what is ungraspable comes near.
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The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it’s the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it’s a failure in communication.
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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.
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Painting and illustration cannot be mixed—one cannot merge from one into the other.
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I remember the first time I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and saw a Kerry James Marshall painting with black bodies in it on a museum wall... It strengthened me on a cellular level.
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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.
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To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.
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I'd rather lose large than win slightly. I think life is an oil painting, not a watercolor.
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Whether a watercolor is inferior to an oil [painting], or whether a drawing, an etching, or a photograph is not as important as either, is inconsequent. To have to despise something in order to respect something else is a sign of impotence.
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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.
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Painting is another form of thinking.
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I figure I'm still good for painting until 95 or thereabouts.
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My struggle has been to return painting to the tangible object, which is like returning the personality to touching and feeling the world around it, to offset the tendency to vagueness and abstraction. To remind people of practical activity, to suggest the sense and not to escape from the senses.
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The small amount of people that control the discourse around painting - I thought that the whole museum world was just a bunch of phonies, and I didn't really want to have anything to do with it. I guess I did installations, in a funny way, because they couldn't be commodified.
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If a symbol should be discovered in a painting of mine, it was not my intention. It is a result I did not seek. It is something that may be found afterwards, and which can be interpreted according to taste.
