Best 1313 quotes in «painting quotes» category

To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

To do a drawing for a painting most often means doing something very sketchy and schematic and then later making it polished.

To me, photography is like a quest, or a pilgrimage, or a hunt. I love painting, I love music, but photography is what has allowed me to get outside of myself.

To me, the whole process of being a brush stroke in someone else's painting is a little difficult

To paint is to know how to put nothing on canvas, and have it look like something when you stand back.

To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting.

Van Gogh would’ve sold more than one painting if he’d put tigers in them.

Trying to find equivalents for things in words helps me find equivalents in painting.

Under his (Marc Chagall, ed.) sole impulse metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting.

Van Gogh was asked how he created such beautiful paintings. He said I dream my paintings and then I paint my dreams.

Very quickly a painting is turned into a facsimile of itself when one becomes so familiar with with it that one recognizes it without looking at it.

TV has nothing to do with painting. It's just transmission.

Unfinished paintings are more admired than the finished because the artist's actual thoughts are left visible.

Usually I begin things through a drawing, so a lot of things are worked out in the drawing. But even then, I still allow for and want to make changes. I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it's very hard to guess at a size or a color and the colors around it and what it will really look like. It's only a guess at the beginning, and then I try to refine it.

Usually when painters use photographs, they enlarge and copy them and simply make a large, boring painting of a large, boring photograph.

Visible things can be invisible. However, our powers of thought grasp both the visible and the invisible – and I make use of painting to render thoughts visible.

Vasari has been a trusted friend on my painting journey for the last 12 years. Vasari is hands down the best oil paint on the market thanks to its unique hues, handling properties, purity and density of pigment.

Well, I have a very simple method of painting.

Watercolour painting is notoriously difficult - so much depends on directness and speed, and certainty of intention. Tentative or fumbling touches are disastrous, for they cannot be obliterated easily.

We could say that Romanian Onirisme was born from painting and not from surrealist literature. The visual is primordial. Dimov said, 'Dreams are not a source, but a canon, a legislative model.'

We didn't want to sign the painting itself, that would have interfered with the composition. And even later, for that reason or for another, I sometimes marked my canvases on the back. If you don't see my signature and the date, madam, it's because the frame is hiding it.

We had collaborated with Allen Ginsberg on one of his last projects just before he died in the spring of '97, a book called Illuminated Poems - it was Allen's poems and songs and I illustrated them. Or, I illuminated them with paintings and drawings that bounced off of them. You want the picture to relate to the text without it slavishly regurgitating it or merely illustrating it, because that's redundant. You want to show another angle of what the text is saying.

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

What has reasoning to do with painting?

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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 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 finished painting, I paint again for relaxation.

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

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

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