Best 1313 quotes in «painting quotes» category

Well, I have a very simple method of painting.

We need to understand that there is a process of learning and experience and success will stem from this. The painting represents life and the brushstroke represents the steps we take in life.

What caricature is in painting, burlesque is in writing; and in the same manner the comic writer and painter correlate to each other; as in the former, the painter seems to have the advantage, so it is in the latter infinitely on the side of the writer. For the monstrous is much easier to paint than describe, and the ridiculous to describe than paint.

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.

What can be said about a man who is interested in nothing but his painting? It's a pity if a man can only interest himself in one thing. But I can't do any thing else. I have only one interest.

What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.

Whatever is valuable in painting is precisely what one is incapable of talking about.

What is real for me are the illusions I create with my paintings. Everything else is quicksand.

What has reasoning to do with painting?

Whenever I buy a painting, someone invariably says, "Oh, what a great investment." And I hate that reaction. To me, it's a matter of love and not an exchange of equity.

What makes you think painting is any less difficult than brain surgery?

What's so astonishing about not understanding? There are so many things in art, beginning with art itself, that one doesn't understand. A painter doesn't see everything that he has put in his painting.

When an artist wants to paint a painting, they have all those things in their head that they want to portray on a canvas. It's the same thing when I'm pitching. I have all these thoughts going through my head about how I want to pitch: which pitch I want to throw here, and why do I want to throw it?

What is painting but the act of embracing, by means of art, the surface of the pool?

When a painting is finished, it's like a new born child, and the artist himself must have time for understanding. How then do you expect an amateur to understand that which the artist dos not yet comprehend.

Whenever I see a Frans Hals I feel like painting, but when I see a Rembrandt I feel like giving up!

When I am finished painting, I paint again for relaxation.

When I began as an artist, I already did not like expressionism, or abstract expressionism, because abstract painting had already been done. I did not want to belong to any one group or the other, and I'm not one or the other.

When I am painting I have a general notion as to what I am about. I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident.

[When] I am taking a photograph, I am conscious that I am constructing images rather than taking snapshots. Since I do not take rapid photographs it is in this respect like a painting which takes a long time where you are very aware of what you are doing in the process. Exposure is only the final act of making the image as a photograph.

When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else.

When I don't feel in the mood for painting I go to the movies for a week or more. I go on a regular movie binge!

When I first started painting candyland imagery, I was looking for the best possible metaphor for everything that is pleasure, desire and insatiability.

When I get intimate with my paintings, it's a real good spiritual thing to get off my chest. Same as playing the instruments is a great release.

When I'm painting outdoors, I only have time to think about what I'm saying, not how I'm saying it.

When I'm painting them, the whole legend and mythology of apples occurs to me, and so Adam and Eve and the snake and all the rest of it somehow gets into the picture.

When I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.

When I'm traveling the world, I don't ever look anymore at the geography - just enough to catch galleries and paintings.

When in doubt, make a red painting.

When I paint from a photograph, conscious thinking is eliminated. I don't know what I am doing. My work is far closer to the Informel than to any kind of 'realism'. The photograph has an abstraction of its own, which is not easy to see through.

When I need some striking inspiration about deep depression for my new painting, I just need to go to check my bank account.

When I paint I am ageless, I just have the pleasure or the difficulty of painting.

When I work alone, my process is like painting. With Fleetwood Mac, it's more like movie making.

When I've painted a woman's bottom so that I want to touch it, then [the painting] is finished.

When Robert Benton was doing the movie 'In the Still of the Night,' I'd choreographed the auction scene and supplied the paintings and had a bit part - I was bidding against Meryl Streep.

When Michael Werner saw a painting of mine, such as Die grosse Nacht im Eimer, which back then nobody wanted and everybody thought was ridiculous, he realized that this was the right provocation, that it represented the feeling of the times in the right way.

When something is finished, that means it's dead, doesn't it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting - I just stop working on it for a while.

When Michelangelo finished the painting of the Sistine Chapel's ceiling, he spent the rest of his life trying to remove the paint that had poured into his sleeve.

When objects shattered into fragments appeared in my painting about 1909, this for me was a way of getting closest to the object... Fragmentation helped me to establish space and movement in space.

When you're on a highway, viewing the western U.S. with the mountains and the flatness and the desert and all that, it's very much like my paintings.

When you are painting a landscape, assume the painting is real and the landscape is an illusion.

When you feel concentrated within the intensity of making paintings, you know exactly what you are doing.

When we did Cubist paintings, our intention was not to produce Cubist paintings but to express what was within us. No one laid down a course of action for us, and our friends the poets followed our endeavour attentively but they never dictated it to us.

When we begin to lift the veils of censorship and repression in painting, a great deal of energy is unleashed.

When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing.

When you look at a work of art, you don't see a cover for something else; you see revelation. If you're an artist, art is the truest expression of yourself. Even if you're painting a life you don't have.

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.

Whether Iranians are drinking wine in the evening or painting something "offensive," they choose not to dwell on the fact that they could receive some seventh-century punishment. Laws are inconsistently enforced, and you can usually pay off police to look the other way.

While adding the finishing touches to a painting might appear insignificant, it is much harder to do than one might suppose.

Wine pricing is an art - like painting.