Painting Quotes
-
When I look at a body I know it gives me choices of what to put in a painting; what will suit me and what won't. There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.
-
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.
-
You have got to be able to picture side by side everything Matisse and I were doing at that time. No one has ever looked at Matisse's painting more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he.
-
The mere drawing and painting world of the pattern designer and the applied artist must become a world that builds again.
-
'Pomegranate,' started with my imagining a bullet going through the fruit and causing it to bleed. My initial associations were with pomegranates in old masters painting and their Judeo-Christian symbolism.
-
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.
-
Painting puts me into an alpha state. It's a private event. I make all the decisions in the process and never have to deal with the outside world.
-
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.
-
I know for sure that I have an instinct for color, and that it will come to me more and more, that painting is in the very marrow of my bones.
-
There are a lot of artists in Gowanus, and certain things come into your visual vocabulary from living there - the scale of the subway and the canal, sometimes it almost looks like a de Chirico painting, with the intense angles of the shadows and everything.
-
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
-
When I was living in New York, I had this slightly wannabe bohemian existence and took up painting, at which I'm appalling. I also bought several guitars.
-
I gave up painting by 16. I secretly thought I would have been Rembrandt by then.
-
Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.
-
Photography has arrived at the point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and even from the subject. In any case, a certain aspect of the subject now belongs to the domain of photography. So shouldn't painters profit from their newly acquired liberty, and make use of it to do other things?
-
Most people don't really like to pose. It is difficult to get them to be present and relaxed under this kind of molecular scrutiny. I want them to understand I'm not simply painting them: I am painting them within a precise moment in time, as a shadow moves across their eyebrows. Then it is gone. The moment is over.
-
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.
-
He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.
-
I put it a still life of a pear, made by Manet there on the wall, next to Ingres' painting 'Jupiter', for a pear like that would overthrow any god.
-
A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don't get it, I'm not sure why you are doing it.
-
My secret pleasure is painting these little mini figures that you send into battle - they're called Warhammer figures. It's the nerdiest thing in the world, but it's a lot of fun. It's relaxing; that's the main reason I do it.
-
I had wanted to be a sculptor throughout life, but to do so, I had to stop painting.
-
Writing plays supplied for me everything that painting didn't, which is the ability to tell stories in real time, in a real space, in three dimensions, in flesh and blood. I realized I had been trying to cram all this narrative into my paintings, but ultimately painting was a static medium. So it just opened up this whole new door.
-
Not all paintings are abstract; they're not all Jackson Pollock. There's value in a photograph of a man alone on a boat at sea, and there is value in painting of a man alone on a boat at sea. In the painting, the painting has more freedom to express an idea, more latitude in being able to elicit certain emotion.
