Painting Quotes
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I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nick-name God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath made me mad.
William Shakespeare
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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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If you do things, whether it's acting or music or painting, do it without fear - that's my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there's nothing to lose.
Anthony Hopkins
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How vain is painting, which is admired for reproducing the likeness of things whose originals are not admired.
Blaise Pascal
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I made my first trip west of the Hudson and it was a revelation. The naked musculature of the Rockies was overpowering and my painting responded.
Elaine de Kooning
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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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When you first commence painting everything is a muddle. Even the commonest colors seem to have the devil in them.
Thomas Eakins
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A thousand moral paintings I can show
That shall demonstrate these quick blows of Fortune's
More pregnantly than words.
William Shakespeare
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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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I'm always trying to get to a danger point in color, where color either becomes too sweet or it becomes too harsh, it becomes too noisy or too quiet, and at that point I still want the picture to be strong, forceful, and the carrier of everything that a painting has to have: contrast, drama, austerity.
Wolf Kahn
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You usually want to get something out of a painting other than the ideas that you had in your head.
Alex Katz
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Collage-making, for me, is basically an act of painting, allowing me to indulge in an appetite for immediacy.
Abe Ajay
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It isn't enough to have the eyes of a gazelle... you also need the claws of a cat in order to capture your bird alive and play with it before you eat it, and so join its life to yours. This is the mystery of painting.
Augustus John
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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.
Gary Panter
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Literature is painting, architecture, and music.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
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There was a point after the whole intensity of the Clash finally subsided when I just found that painting grounded me in a way that music didn't.
Paul Simonon
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The sign of a masterpiece: A painting when there's a lack of resolution.
Tracy Chevalier
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The spirit of a painting is very hard to explain and articulate. I can't say it's not intentional because that is the mark I'm trying to hit, however I don't feel I have much control over it.
Danny Fox
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I was working within a figurative representational framework, and there was a sense of reading the painting as a transparency, or truth, or autobiography, which I think is partially the burden of artists of color - or women, or anybody who is representing a so-called minority position. Are you actually telling a true story, or your own story? You don't just get to tell a story. The readings of the work didn't necessarily conform to my own understanding of mythology, where violence and eroticism and the body and all of these different forms coexist all the time.
Chitra Ganesh
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High tax rates in the upper income brackets allow politicians to win votes with class warfare rhetoric, painting their opponents as defenders of the rich. Meanwhile, the same politicians can win donations from the rich by creating tax loopholes that can keep the rich from actually paying those higher tax rates - or perhaps any taxes at all. What is worse than class warfare is phony class warfare. Slippery talk about 'fairness' is at the heart of this fraud by politicians seeking to squander more of the nation's resources.
Thomas Sowell
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Philologists, who chase A painting syllable through time and space Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's Ark.
William Cowper
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Keep painting - day in - day out. Be absorbed by it.
Milton Avery
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You get a painting idea, and you go do that. You get a cinema idea, and you go in to do that. The difference is, even though the paintings might take some time to make, with cinema you are booked for a year and a half, minimum.
David Lynch
The Platters
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If he sees nothing within, then he should stop painting what is in front of him.
Caspar David Friedrich
