Painting Quotes
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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'm in a foul mood as I'm making stupid mistakes... This morning I lost beyond repair a painting with which I had been happy, having done about twenty sessions on it; it had to be thoroughly scraped away... what a rage I was in!
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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.
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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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Of course painting is ridiculous. But it’s the only way I've got to get closer to life.
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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.
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I'm sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don't think there's any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock.
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Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space. I know of no sculpture, painting or music that exceeds the compelling spiritual command of the soaring shape of granite cliff and dome, of patina of light on rock and forest, and of the thunder and whispering of the falling, flowing waters. At first the colossal aspect may dominate; then we perceive and respond to the delicate and persuasive complex of nature.
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Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty.
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I am in a thousand pieces. Painting somehow makes me whole.
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Doubt is a central factor all the time. There's always the doubt: What the hell am I doing out here in the middle of the woods, all alone, painting?
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When I look back to a recent painting, I can hardly bear th suffering in it.
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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.
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Painting is a coalescing of experience.
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The real horror is mass production. Painting when there is no compulsion to do so… …Pictures like that are all unpunished crimes.
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Remember the enemy of all painting is gray: a painting will almost always appear grayer than it is, on account of its oblique position under the light.
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Painting doesn't interest me.. .What I paint is beyond painting.
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Finishing a painting demands a heart of steel: everything requires a decision, and I find difficulties where I least expect them... It is at such moments that one fully realizes one's own weaknesses.
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Painting can be like poetry but as somebody who creates both I feel the necessity for both so they cant be that similar. Sometimes I think it's as basic as not wanting to get dirty.
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Within the category of Kitsch we can thus distinguish between more and less successful paintings. Kitsch, too has its masterpieces.
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We sat there, not talking, for a few minutes. He ate the Moon Pie; only skinny people can scarf down junk food like that. Finally, I said, "Norman?" "Yeah?" "Are you ever going to show me the painting?" "Man," he said. "You are, like, so impatient." "I am not," I said. "I've been waiting forever." "Okay, okay." He stood up and went over to the corner, picking up the painting and bringing it over to rest against the bright pink belly of one of the mannequins. Then, he handed me a bandana. "Tie that on.
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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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All painting worth its name, unless one is talking about black and white, must include the idea of color as one of its necessary supports, in the same way that it includes chiaroscuro, proportion, and perspective.
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Mount Tamalpais became my house. For Cezanne, Sainte-Victoire was no longer a mountain. It was an absolute. It was painting.
Etel Adnan
