Painting Quotes
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In a painting, what counts is the unexpected.
Georges Braque
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When painting the faces of young persons ... use the yolk of the egg of a city hen, because they have lighter yolks than those of country hens.
Cennino Cennini
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From building a fire one can learn something about artistic composition. If you use only small kindling and large logs, the fire will quickly eat up the small pieces but will not become strong enough to attack the large ones. You must supply a scale of sizes from the smallest to the largest. The human eye also will not make its way into a painting or building unless a continuum of shapes leads from the small to the large, from the large to the small.
Rudolf Arnheim
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The sign of a masterpiece: A painting when there's a lack of resolution.
Tracy Chevalier
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What really happened was one day in my late five I went out and I found my dad in the garage staining some wood because sometimes he makes furniture for the house. I said, "Could I experiment a little bit?" and he said sure so I experimented and I realized that it's so fun! You can express yourself, you can use your imagination, and in just that little time I wanted to change the world for the better. After that wonderful experience I thought, how about painting?
Autumn de Forest
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There is a famous painting, Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper. I am in love with that painting. Sometimes, I think everyone is like the people in that painting, everyone lost in their own private universes of pain or sorrow or guilt, everyone remote and unknowable. The painting reminds me of you. It breaks my heart.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
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Why does no one speak of the cultural advantages of the country? For example, is a well groomed, ecologically kept, sustainably fertile farm any less cultural, any less artful, than paintings of fat angels on church ceilings?
Gene Logsdon
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The world concerns me only in so far as I have a certain debt and duty to it, because I have lived in it for thirty years and owe to it to leave behind some souvenir in the shape of drawings and paintings – not done to please any particular movement, but within which a genuine human sentiment is expressed.
Vincent Van Gogh
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I think I love and reverence all arts equally, only putting my own just above the others; because in it I recognize the union and culmination of my own. To me it seems as if when God conceived the world, that was Poetry; He formed it, and that was Sculpture; He colored it, and that was Painting; He peopled it with living beings, and that was the grand, divine, eternal Drama.
Charlotte Saunders Cushman
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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.
Donald Judd
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Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
Vladimir Nabokov
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Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it.
William Hazlitt
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Ever since I started painting, I have tried to get the fluidity and surprise of image connection, the simultaneity of film montage, into painting.
David Salle
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I loved surrealism and abstract painting, and anything related to those. I always thought painting was the highest form of art. What led me to drawing was seeing so much self-important, pretentious, conceptual-type art in university. I wanted to reject that by making quick, fun art.
Neil Farber
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No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.
Claude Monet
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I've never let one day go by without painting, or at least without drawing.
Auguste Renoir
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All my big heroes are literary, writers. I'd love to meet Jimmy Hendrix or John Coltrane, but I'd much rather meet Thomas Wolfe, or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Words and books have always meant a lot to me. That someone can take words and string them together to where they will move me is just a hell of a thing. It's amazing to me; more amazing to me than music or painting. It's always been the written word or the spoken word, like a great lecture or a great lyric, or a great poem. To me it's just amazing. And I always aspire toward capturing that, or my version of it.
Henry Rollins
Black Flag
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While adding the finishing touches to a painting might appear insignificant, it is much harder to do than one might suppose.
Claude Monet
