Painting Quotes
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The purpose of painting is to decorate the walls. Therefore it has to be as rich as possible.
Auguste Renoir
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The first purpose of clothes... was not warmth or decency, but ornament.... Among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes. The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration; as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized countries.
Thomas Carlyle
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If history were a photograph of the past it would be flat and uninspiring. Happily, it is a painting; and, like all works of art, it fails of the highest truth unless imagination and ideas are mixed with the paints.
Allan Nevins
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I don't know if I can convey the postman as I feel him... Unfortunately he cannot pose, and a painting demands an intelligent model.
Vincent Van Gogh
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For one thing, I want gesture-any kind of gesture, all kinds of gesture-gentle or brutal, joyous or tragic; the gesture of space soaring, sinking, streaming, whirling; the gestures of light flowing or spurting through color. I see everything as possessing or possessed by gesture. I've often thought of my paintings as having an axis around which everything revolves.
Elaine de Kooning
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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 T. Wiley
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The media ... is like an oil painting. Close up, it looks like nothing on Earth. Stand back and you get the drift.
Bernard Ingham
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Like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler's Equation reaches down into the very depths of existence.
Keith Devlin
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I majored in industrial design/painting, but haven't had time to exercise that creativity.
Elisabeth Hasselbeck
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I'm a big fan of Edouard Vuillard, so I'd like anything by him - particularly a painting called 'Madame Hessel on the Sofa.' His work is realistic without being literal: I can really imagine what Madame Hessel is thinking.
Lesley Manville
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The only way to get change is not through the courts or - heaven forbid - the politicians, but through a change of human consciousness and through a change of heart. Only through the arts - music, poetry, dance, painting, writing - "can we really reach each other.
Leslie Marmon Silko
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Most people don't like to be confronted with an actual fact-of-life because it's difficult to metabolize. A painting of a bowl of fruit is much easier. It's for the same reason why we don't like going to the doctor. The diagnosis and x-rays are too honest. This is what creates the perception that contemporary art is shocking or suspicious.
Adamo Macri
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For painting, I like strong lines, powerful pieces.
Yusaku Maezawa
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In figure painting, the type of all painting, I have endeavoured to set forth that the principal if not sole source of life enchantments are Tactile Values, Movement and Space Composition.
Bernard Berenson
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Chinese landscape paintings often include tiny figures - as if to emphasize the grandeur of nature of which humankind is one small part. Think of the world in these terms, as larger in scale than the human. This is a healthy corrective to the commonplace view that people own the land, which exists to serve their purposes. Think big and live small.
Barbara Ann Kipfer
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In the Bible (Hebrews, 6:19), hope is ‘an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil.’ Here [in Watts painting], Hope is blindfolded, seated on a globe and playing a lyre of which all but one of the strings are broken . . . Hope’s attempts to make music appear futile and several critics argued that the work might have been more appropriately titledDespair. Watts explained that ‘Hopeneed not mean expectancy. It suggests here, rather, the music which can come from the remaining cord’.
George Frederic Watts
