Best 1313 quotes in «painting quotes» category

I never wanted to be a filmmaker. I still, sometimes, think I got sidetracked by this, like this is a tangent. My main thing was painting; I was just going to do that.

In every respect, fantasy is like doing abstract paintings.

In every form of art, you really want the experience of the images to transcend the medium, for the medium to disappear into the greater experience of viewing the work. So that you forget you are looking at a painting, or a photograph.

In general, my paintings are multifocal. You can't call it unfocused space, but not being fixed to a single focus is very much of our time.

In large studio paintings... composition, or arrangement, may be better studied, and nearer perfection, washes may be more suavely graded.

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

In most natural scenes there is a prevailing colour, which the landscape painter must learn to identify, and which must prevail also in a slightly exaggerated form, in his painting, for the sake of truth, harmony and unity.

In my earlier paintings, I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active.

In my opinion painting should be considered excellent in proportion as it approaches the effect of relief, while relief should be considered bad in proportion as it approaches the effect of painting.

I noticed that the large windows between the paintings [in the Musee d'Art Moderne] interested me more than the art exhibited. From then on, painting as I had known it was finished for me.

In painting, as in the other arts, there's not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula. You come to nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat.

In painting, the key is not taking myself seriously to the point where it kills sincerity.

In painting you cover up your sins and everyone thinks you're naturally talented.

In painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter your manner.

In painting, detail for the sake of itself is useless. It must have relevance to the whole.

In painting one must search rather for suggestion than for description, as is done in music.

In the end, the gesture of painting becomes almost meditative, like a ritual.

In the back of every painting there's an entire universe that makes it possible for the painting to be there: an army of conservators, technicians, people who maintain these things, the market.

I paint as I feel like painting; to hell with all their studies.

In the sphere of natural investigation, as in poetry and painting, the delineation of that which appeals most strongly to the imagination, derives its collective interest from the vivid truthfulness with which the individual features are portrayed.

In Zen brush-painting, the circle is a master's problem. It represents everything and nothing, and in so doing, the universe.

I paint my own reality.

I paint the way someone bites his fingernails; for me, painting is a bad habit because I don't know nor can I do anything else.

In the middle 1940s... I heard everyone live. Painting, the theater; everything was happening. It was an exciting time when New York was the place to be.

I paint for myself. I don't know how to do anything else, anyway. Also I have to earn my living, and occupy myself.

I paint to evoke a changing language of symbols, a language with which to remark upon the qualities of our mysterious capacities which direct us towards the ultimate reality.

I paint very directly. I go from top to bottom. When I get to the floor, the painting is finished.

I prefer you to take as your model a mediocre sculpture rather than an excellent painting, for from painted objects we train our hand only to make a likeness, whereas from sculptures we learn to represent both likeness and correct incidence of light.

I quit painting very early. I just jumped ship. In a way, the window is the tragic possibility - you can jump out into your future. That kind of action is more like a direction. It's that same thinking that brought me to New York.

I rage against Vincent van Gogh for needing to die at 37, after painting for only ten years.

I painted myself out of my painting.

I really prize and love great painting. It's so out of date now. It's slightly come back in.

I realize that protest paintings are not exactly in vogue, but I've done many.

I realized painting could look like a film, and a film like a painting.

I seldom have my stuff up unless I'm testing it. If I'm worrying about a painting, I put it up and see if I detest it quickly or slowly. Otherwise I have things by other artists.

I see my studio like a laboratory, where I work like an investigator - it's almost forensic. I love the discovery process in painting.

I see no thread running through my work; I simply get on with my life and my painting.

I sometimes use a lot of light greens and greys when I feel there is sadness in the painting.

I should also mention that the Neue Galerie is piping music into the galleries where "Klee and America" is hanging, a practice for which vulgar is not even close to the word. Yes, I like Schumann's Carnaval, but I'm damned if I know why anybody thinks the paintings of Paul Klee profit from being viewed with Carnaval playing in the background.

I sort of feel that the role of a portrait in society is to represent the sitters, we see paintings of Shakespeare and we believe that it is what he looked like, well maybe a little older, fatter and with a higher hairline. I guess it would be cool if the portraits that were painted really did look like the sitter or expressed some sort of emotion that gave the viewers in the future a sense of the sitter's pathos at the time it was painted.

I should like to paint like an man who has never seen a painting, but this man -myself - lives in a museum.

I started with straight, basic, symbolic structures. My problem now is the opposite; as I get older, I try to make my paintings more contrapuntal, richer.

I still have a lot of pleasure doing them, but as time goes by I come to appreciate more clearly which paintings are good and which should be discarded.

I think humor really is the most effective way for me personally to express myself. When I see an incredible formalist painting, I respect it. I really do. I see its history and I get it. But when I pass something weird or something funny, I totally associate with it. I find myself thinking about it later that day. That's how I know something is thought provoking. That's how I know something is effective.

I stopped painting in 1990 at the peak of my success just to deny people my beautiful paintings. And I did it out of spite.

I studied shades, textures by painting after the Old Masters, the classical European paintings, as part of my educational process.

I stopped painting, not because I didn't like painting; the sensuality of it was fun. But I wasn't able to get to the point I wanted to.

I suppose what you're doing as a painter is making a record of your trip through life. I can't think of any job that is quite as satisfactory as doing a painting.

I think half the point of painting a picture is that you don't know what will happen... that if painters did know what was going to happen they wouldn't bother to do it.

I think, if one is a painter, all you experience does come out when you’re painting.