Painting Quotes
-
The painting cannot be laid aside even for a day; for it takes constant work to keep 'flowing,' but above that it takes concentration, which in our language is consecration.
-
I never know what it's going to look like. Wouldn't be much point in painting if I already knew the outcome. I have a subject in front of me and I start flooding colour and making marks, I don't know, it's improvisation isn't it?
-
Painting depends on freedom. When you're feeling completely free, you can create, and this power to create is, in turn, the greatest freedom of all.
-
Don't put needless expense into painting a head! Don't try to match tints! Rose and pearly colours blend into each other so that no one can unite them if painted separately. Keep the impression of your subject as one thing!
-
I consider my painting finished when my eyes goes to a particular spot on the canvas. But if I put the picture away about thirty feet on the wall and the movements keep returning to me and the eye seems to be responding to something living, then it is finished.
-
Mondrian? His mind was too subtle. He worked in the light. I work in the darkness.. .Mondrian is the Buddha of painting. I saw him once. You wondered how a man could radiate such charisma.
-
I went to the Chicago Art Institute, which was the best painting school in the area at that time. And I took painting classes - basic elementary painting classes and drawing classes of all sorts.
-
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.
-
In painting as in prose, a good eye is not enough to tell you whether what you see is real or fake.
-
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.
-
I believe that there's a force of life in the universe, and that when we're writing or making music or painting, we're likely to connect with that flow.
-
What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting.
-
There is only the present. A painting is an instant of time that has escaped oblivion.
-
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.
-
Matisse never hoped to save lives. But he repeatedly said that he wanted to make paintings so serenely beautiful that when one came upon them suddenly all problems would subside.
-
I inherited a painting and a violin which turned out to be a Rembrandt and a Stradivarius. Unfortunately, Rembrandt made lousy violins and Stradivarius was a terrible painter.
-
I love getting my nails done. My mom's best friend is a manicurist. When I was little, she'd do little paintings on my nails, like flowers.
-
The real horror is mass production. Painting when there is no compulsion to do so… …Pictures like that are all unpunished crimes.
-
When you are painting a landscape, assume the painting is real and the landscape is an illusion.
-
These are things that I continue to enjoy speaking about. The woods. Boats. Greeks. I think the real heart of it, is really being in love with these Dutch paintings over the last several years.
-
Of course painting is ridiculous. But it’s the only way I've got to get closer to life.
-
The joy of painting lies precisely in the challenge of memory and the challenge of translation from the lived experience to the two-dimensional or three-dimensional symbol.
-
He turns to the painting. "I fear Mark was right." "Who is Mark?" "A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a murderer." Gregory says, "Did you not know?
-
I am in a thousand pieces. Painting somehow makes me whole.
