Painting Quotes
-
One has to seek Beauty and Truth, Sir! As I always say to my pupils, you have to work to the finish. There's only one kind of painting. It is the painting that presents the eye with perfection, the kind of beautiful and impeccable enamel you find in Veronese and Titian.
-
Very few people have a natural feeling for painting, and so, of course, they naturally think that painting is an expression of the artist's mood. But it rarely is. Very often he may be in greatest despair and be painting his happiest paintings.
-
I am very depressed and deeply disgusted with painting. It is really a continual torture.
-
Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture. Usually it has been related, closely or distantly, to one or the other. The work is diverse, and much in it that is not in painting and sculpture is also diverse. But there are some things that occur nearly in common.
-
If you keep pushing paint when you're tired of it, you lose sensitivity. I can only focus on painting for a few hours, so I'll stop and work on something quite different.
-
If art depended on content, then one painting of an apple would be as good as the next one.
-
Photography as a subject is a good one. Its history is only about 150 years... You only have to know about twenty-five or thirty names and that's it. All you need. In painting there are more than 1,000.
-
Poetry is to a painting what life is to man.
-
...photography can lie as convincingly as literature or painting. The angle, the selected content, the assumed context.
-
Doubt is a central factor all the time. There's always the doubt: What the hell am I doing out here in the middle of the woods, all alone, painting?
-
I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.
-
I don't have a lot of pressure on myself to be successful. I'm more of an artist. I just try to make myself more a part of the most beautiful painting as possible. And enjoy it.
-
The only thing I can say is consistent in all my paintings is vivid color.
-
An artist must forget painting when he paints. That's the only way he will do original work.
-
I love the trick of painting. You can have the movement within the still thing, but it is completely fixed. And that illusion is constantly exciting.
-
In film, you're painting a canvas. I got really excited about that.
-
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.
-
If you try consciously to be avant-garde, it's a little dangerous, like the present state of modern painting, where dealers try to be avant-garde, and under this pretext, painters take some old scraps and call it avant-garde.
-
A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of anxiety, but a Kokoschka painting, or a Schiele self-portrait, reveals what an anxiety state really feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of the mind, yet they are rarely brought together.
-
I should also mention that the Neue Galerie is piping music into the galleries where "Klee and America" is hanging, a practice for which vulgar is not even close to the word. Yes, I like Schumann's Carnaval, but I'm damned if I know why anybody thinks the paintings of Paul Klee profit from being viewed with Carnaval playing in the background.
-
Painting is such an individual profession. I'm not performing. There's no audience.
-
The Metropolitan Museum of Art some time ago held a display of contemporary art at which $52,000 was awarded to American sculptors, painters, and artists in allied fields. The award for the best painting went to the canvas of an Illinois artist. It was described as "a macabre, detailed work showing a closed door bearing a funeral wreath." Equally striking was the work's title: "That which I should have done, I did not do."
-
I believe the reason I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective.
-
If you have used colour throughout most of your artistic life, try just black and white... it will take your painting to another dimension where tone and form in all its permutations reign supreme.
