Painting Quotes
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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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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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It is well for young men to have a model, but let them draw the curtain over it while they are painting.
Paul Gauguin
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Painting someone's portrait is, of course, an impossible task. What an absurd idea to try and distil a human being, the most complex organism on the planet, into flicks, washes, and blobs of paint on a two-dimensional surface.
David Cobley
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A painting, you know, it's all dirty material. But it's about transformation. Taking that earth, that heavy earthen kind of thing, turning it into air and light.
Brice Marden
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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.
Cecily Brown
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Painting, because of its universality, becomes speculation.
El Greco
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What makes a painting fascinating is its sincerity. Sincerity is such a rare thing. Most people don't dare to be sincere.
Bram van Velde
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I never think about actual things when I'm painting. I'm not thinking, "I'm going to put a person here, a tree here and a bird there." The beginning stage is always the sound. From that, slowly, stories come about based on what I'm reading or thinking at the time, but if I didn't have that sound I don't know what I would do.
Ali Banisadr
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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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For me, acting is about the art of it and it's about being on a film set and doing your thing, painting a blank canvas.
Shailene Woodley
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All art is a gift. It is first of all a gift that the maker can do it. It is then a gift to someone else, whether they pay for it or not. The wonder of it is that we cannot get the production of these gifts stopped. Art is life seeking itself. It is our intractable expressions of love for the beauties, ideas and epiphanies we regularly find. I framed the painting. It's now hanging in our den. "I have walked this earth for 30 years, and, out of gratitude, want to leave some souvenir.
Vincent Van Gogh
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But the burns were like the fingerprints of an older time—before Ziegler and his brethren decided that traditional sources of value were merely superstition. “Those thousands of generations of technical progress” obliterated ritual, emptied out all meaning, glossolalia without divinity. I decided that’s what the painted mother foresaw, that she was saying farewell to candlelight, that she knew she was trapped inside a painting addressed to the future, where it could only be, however great, an instance of technique.
Ben Lerner
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I've been hurting most of my life. I tried to pretend I wasn't. I even believed my own lie. I've lived my entire life trying to avoid pain...That's a terrible way to live. I don't care any more if it hurts...If I'm working on a painting, and it doesn't hurt, then the painting won't matter. And if it doesn't matter, then it isn't real—then I'm not real...I have a new theory...if I develop a great capacity for feeling pain, then I am also developing a great capacity for feeling happiness.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
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In classical oil painting, there seemed to be a radical turn to seeing things as the camera sees them, with that technological modification. I began to have a tremendous problem with all of this.
Henry Flynt
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Every philharmonic orchestra merely interprets the composer. My goal was to create new music by that composer. In doing so, I wanted to find the painter's creative center and become familiar with it, so that I could see through his eyes how his paintings came about and, of course, see the new picture I was painting through his eyes - before I even painted it.
Wolfgang Beltracchi