Painting Quotes
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My paint is like a rocket, which describes its own space. I try to make the impossible possible. What is happening I cannot foresee, it is a surprise. Painting, like passion, is an emotion full of truth and rings a living sound, like the roar coming from the lion's breast. To paint is to destroy what preceded. I never try to make a painting, but a chunk of life. It is a scream; it is a night; it is like a child; it is a tiger behind bars.
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Refine your senses through the great masters of music, painting, and poetry.
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Painting is so difficult that I would give it up if it were not so enjoyable.
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My painting is visible images which conceal nothing... they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.
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I love audio books, and when I paint I'm always listening to a book. I find that my imagination really takes flight in the painting process when I'm listening to audio books.
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When in doubt, make a red painting.
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I want to make paintings full of colour, laughter, compassion and love. I want to make paintings that will make people happy, that will change the course of people's lives. If I can do that, I can paint for a hundred years.
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I am in a thousand pieces. Painting somehow makes me whole.
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If I keep coming back to a painting and there's a little something that bothers me, I know I'm not going to get away with it. I'm going to have to fix it, change it, whatever it is, to something that I'm comfortable with, that doesn't make me itch when I look at it.
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It is easy to have a lot of paintings or projects hanging around that are 'almost done.
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The painting is finished when the idea has disappeared.
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Of course painting is ridiculous. But it’s the only way I've got to get closer to life.
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It was a figure painting class, where you had a model, and Robert von Neumann would wander around and he'd come up behind someone and say, "Well, what are you trying to do?" And if you told him what you were trying to do, he would then proceed to discuss this with you and suggest things that you might look at and ways in which you could improve what you were attempting to do, etc - never worked on your painting, never touched your painting but talked extensively about what you were trying to do.
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I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.
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The edge of a painting is its frontier... where the artist negotiates his boundaries with the real world... where art begins and ends and where the eye enters and leaves the image. It determines, in an infinitely subtle number of ways, how you read a painting - which, unlike a book or a piece of music, has no pre-determined beginning or end.
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Creating a painting is a matter of ensuring that all its parts achieve unity. Though it's a precarious, fragile unity.
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I have told myself a hundred times that painting - that is, the material thing called a painting - is no more than a pretext, the bridge between the mind of the painter and the mind of the spectator.
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Sometimes it seemed as if the past was a painting that she had dipped in water, allowing the colours to run and drip, merge and fade so that an entirely altered landscape remained.
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I lost my job as an art salesman. It was the customer's fault. He wanted to buy the wrong paintings.
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What the eye can see won't get us very far. And what it can see is so limited, so restricted. But a gouache or an oil painting can be seen at a glance, can take in a whole world at a single glance.
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In working on a drawing or a painting, one can rework and rework and rework and change ideas until you get it the way you think is right at that time. With clay that's not possible. You either succeed the first time, or you should wad it up and start over again, because you can't mess around with the clay and still have it fresh.
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There is only the present. A painting is an instant of time that has escaped oblivion.
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If you start a painting and you don't like where it's going, don't give up on it. Just keep going and follow through. You might be surprised how it ends up.
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People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of what is good or bad art in the theater.
