Painting Quotes

• In Holman Hunt's painting, "The Light of the World, "Christ is shown in a garden at midnight, holding a lantern in His left hand. With His right hand He is knocking on a heavily paneled door. When the painting was unveiled, a critic remarked to the painter, "Mr. Hunt, the work is unfinished. There is no handle on the door." "That," Hunt answered, "is the door to the human heart. It can be opened only from the inside."

  

  James Keller
  • Painting
  • Holman Hunt`s
  • The Light of the World

• I love film - it's like painting.

  

  Azzedine Alaia
  • Painting

• If a painting contains no abstraction nor impressionistic elements, it is a kite that will never fly. But if the painting completely breaks the connection between human feeling and the object portrayed, the kite string has been broken. I try to keep the line unbroken.

  

  Wu Guanzhong
  • Feelings
  • Humans
  • Connections

• Without painting, sculpture, music, poetry, and the emotions produced by natural beauty of every kind, life would lose half its charm.

  

  Herbert Spencer
  • Kind
  • Beauty
  • Emotion

• Do not let it look as if you reasoned too much. Painting must be impulsive to be worth while.

  

  Charles Webster Hawthorne
  • Painting
  • Worth
  • Impulsive

• Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.

  

  Blaise Pascal
  • Thoughts
  • Painting
  • Eloquence

• I do remember when it occurred to me the first time, when I got the idea of painting the way I feel at a given moment. I was sitting in a chair and felt it pressing against me. I still have the drawings where I depicted the sensation of sitting.

  

  Maria Lassnig
  • Time
  • Remember
  • Painting

• Among those who study painting, some strive for an elaborate effect and others prefer the simple. Neither complexity in itself nor simplicity is enough.

  

  Chai Lu
  • Simple
  • Study
  • Enough

• I’ve been looking at oil paintings from oriental artists lately, and the one artist who’s inspired me right now is a man named Hokusai and I’ve had his book by my bed looking at how he interprets landscapes – mountains and water and flowers and birds.

  

  Renee O'Connor
  • Mountain
  • Flower
  • Landscape

• I'd like to think, that were he alive today, Warhol would be painting the Housewives.

  

  Andy Cohen
  • Today
  • Painting

• This is an occupation known as painting, which calls for imagination, and skill of hand, in order to discover things not seen, hiding themselves under the shadow of natural objects, and to fix them with the hand, presenting to plain sight what does not actually exist.

  

  Cennino Cennini
  • Imagination
  • Shadow
  • Natural

• 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
  • Book
  • Together
  • Moving

• I think about women and their thoughts and ideas, and I suppose when I'm painting them I'm getting to be them, in a sense. That is why I plainly paint women.

  

  Chantal Joffe
  • Ideas
  • Painting
  • Paint

• You usually want to get something out of a painting other than the ideas that you had in your head.

  

  Alex Katz
  • Ideas
  • Painting
  • Head

• Color in painting lures the eyes as verses do in poetry.

  

  Nicolas Poussin
  • Eyes
  • Painting
  • Color

• There are two problems in painting. One is to find out what painting is and the other is to find out how to make a painting. The first is learning something and the second is making something.

  

  Frank Stella
  • Learning
  • Painting

• I've never let one day go by without painting, or at least without drawing.

  

  Auguste Renoir
  • Never
  • Painting
  • Drawing

• 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
  • Trying
  • Ideas
  • Humans

• Women have always collected things and saved and recycled them because leftovers yielded nourishment in new forms. The decorative functional objects women made often spoke in a secret language, bore a covert imagery. When we read these images in needlework, in paintings, in quilts, rugs and scrapbooks, we sometimes find a cry for help, sometimes an allusion to a secret political alignment, sometimes a moving symbol about the relationships between men and women.

  

  Miriam Schapiro
  • Moving
  • Sometimes
  • Helping

• In mathematics the complicated things are reduced to simple things. So it is in painting.

  

  Thomas Eakins
  • Simple
  • Simplicity
  • Mathematics

• The interesting thing is that in everyday life, I fail to see the most ordinary things. I often stumble and sometimes I even fall over. But when I draw or look at a painting, I go into a sort of overdrive and just see things differently than other people.

  

  Wolfgang Beltracchi
  • People
  • Interesting
  • Everyday

• 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
  • Painting
  • Sincerity
  • Fascinating

• 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
  • Painting
  • Revelation
  • Trip

• And I like the idea of change. Because I don't see why we should hang a painting on the wall and then just not think of it anymore because it's there like a piece of furniture.

  

  Minoru Yamasaki
  • Change
  • Should
  • Furniture

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