Painting Quotes
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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.
Paul Strand
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It was in mid-summer 1906. The colors of the flowers attracted me irresistibly and almost sudden I was painting. My first small gardens paintings were born.
Emil Nolde
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There is something intimate about painting I cannot explain to you ? but it is so delightful just for expressing one's feelings.
Vincent Van Gogh
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A conscious decision to eliminate certain details and include selective bits of personal experiences or perceptual nuances, gives the painting more of a multi-dimension than when it is done directly as a visual recording. This results in a kind of abstraction... and thus avoids the pitfalls of mere decoration.
Wayne Thiebaud
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The greatest productions of art, whether painting, music, sculpture or poetry, have invariably this quality-something approaching the work of God.
D. T. Suzuki
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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.
Corita Kent
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I think most people gain some sense of how to look at a painting, but no one ever teaches you how to look at a piece of silver.
Mary Beard
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If I had to spend equal time doing paintings, and equal time going to galleries and doing art business, and equal time making music, and equal time going to record companies, or to the publicist or to the lawyer, forget it. It would take four times as long to do all that stuff. Unless I had a patron. That's why Leonardo da Vinci was successful. He had the Medicis, right?
Debbie Harry
Blondie
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This book full of linoleum prints will be an alphabet of pictorial elements without text, which shall aim at establishing a larger scale of painting, a closer contact between the artist and the wall, and a new spirit of art accompanying architecture.
Ellsworth Kelly
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In painting it is the forming of the image.
Cy Twombly
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Because he attempted to tell in his painting 'The Jewish Cemetery' painted by Ruisdael, that which is outside the reach of art... .there are ruins to indicate old age, a stream to signify the course of life, and rocks and precipices to shadow forth its dangers. But how are we to discover all this?
John Constable
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My pictures had and have secret lives, and so there were things I did not tell, a lot of stuff I did not say back then which I'm saying now... I intend to continue allowing forms of secret life to paintings I'm working on right now because it excites me to do that.
R. B. Kitaj
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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.
Vincent Van Gogh
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My interest in society - at times so pronounced that the word 'snob' comes a little to mind - derives from the fact that I like an immense number of things which society, money, and position bring in their train: painting, tapestries, rare books, smart dresses, dances, gardens, country houses, correct cuisine, and pretty women.
Frank Crowninshield
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A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere.
Frank Stella
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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.
Thomas Kinkade
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In drawing after drawing, pastel after pastel, painting after painting, the contours of Degas's dancing figures become, at a certain point, darkly insistent, tangled and dusky. It may be around an elbow, a heel, an armpit, a calf muscle, the nape of a neck.
John Berger
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If this end is unattainable, so, it can be said, is perfection in any other ideal of painting or in any other of man's activities.
Edward Hopper
