Best 1313 quotes in «painting quotes» category

There are paintings that take on a life of their own, and do not allow you to finish them.

There are ways of entering the dream / The way a painter enters a studio: / To spill.

There is something particularly fascinating about seeing places you know in a piece of art - be that in a film, or a photograph, or a painting.

There's nothing more interesting than painting women, it's the greatest subject that can be.

There was nothing on any of the canvasses that she would have liked to hide or conceal, nor was she ashamed of being thus exposed through her work, good or bad though it might be, the essence, the unique flavour of days when she had been happily engrossed in recreating a face or a garment, in inventing an effective light, in applying an expressive glaze.

. . . there were masses of pictures she had not seen; however, Lily Briscoe reflected, perhaps it was better not to see pictures: they only made one hopelessly discontented with one’s own work.

The search for this inner truth is the search for beauty. People whose vision does not penetrate beyond the narrow limits of the commonplace, and to whom a cabbage is but a vulgar vegetable, are surprised if they see a beautiful picture painted of one, and say that the artist has idealised it, meaning that he has consciously altered its appearance on some idealistic formula; whereas he has probably only honestly given expression to a truer, deeper vision than they had been aware of. The commonplace is not the true, but only the shallow, view of things. [...] Our moments of peace are, I think, always associated with some form of beauty, of this spark of harmony within corresponding with some infinite source without. [...]. In moments of beauty (for beauty is, strictly speaking, a state of mind rather than an attribute of certain objects [...]) we seem to get a glimpse of this deeper truth behind the things of sense. And who can say but that this sense, dull enough in most of us, is not an echo of a greater harmony existing somewhere the other side of things, that we dimly feel through them, evasive though it is

There were several paintings to admire, one of them very fine indeed. Many were urban, industrial landscapes. Paul was generous with his praise, though inwardly discouraged. In comparison with this his own work was immature, and he couldn't understand why. He wasn't particularly young for his age. His mother's long illness and early death had forced him to grow up and take on responsibility. So this maturity of vision in a man whom he found distinctly childish in many respects bewildered him. Living at home, spoiled, self-pitying, moaning on because his mother didn't pay him enough attention - for God's sake! The work and the man seemed to bear no relation to each other. And the contrast was all the more painful because Neville was painting the landscape of Paul's childhood.

They make me...they make me think of being stuck somewhere? I don't know, like weighted down, but then these patches...

The sense of modernism is often seen in the determination of each of the arts to come as close as possible to its own particular nature, its essence. For instance, lyric poetry rejected anything rhetorical, didactic, embellishing, so as to set flowing the pure fount of poetic fantasy. Painting renounced its documentary, mimetic function, whatever might be expressed by some other medium (for instance, photography). And the novel? It too refuses to exist as illustration of a historical era, as description of society, as defense of an ideology, and instead puts itself exclusively at the service of “what only the novel can say.

The world is held together by lies. When I paint, I'm searching for the truth between them, but I'm no better at this than anyone else. Worse, probably.

They paint what they see and we paint what we are watching.

They ran to the museums for paintings. I ran to the roof for sunsets

The Sleeping I have imagined all this: In 1940 my parents were in love And living in the loft on West 10th Above Mark Rothko who painted cabbage roses On their bedroom walls the night they got married. I can guess why he did it. My mother’s hair was the color of yellow apples And she wore a velvet hat with her pajamas. I was not born yet. I was remote as starlight. It is hard for me to imagine that My parents made love in a roomful of roses And I wasn’t there. But now I am. My mother is blushing. This is the wonderful thing about art. It can bring back the dead. It can wake the sleeping As it might have late that night When my father and mother made love above Rothko Who lay in the dark thinking Roses, Roses, Roses.

The subtle hues of gold and yellow and the fresh greens and the pepper red seemed to spiral into a kaleidoscope of shapes and forms that made the tips of a person’s toes tingle, so that some were inclined to remove their shoes in its presence.

The temptation is always to think of Las Vegas as a gambling mecca, the ‘Entertainment Capital of the World’. Well, it’s that. But, it’s a lot more than that as well. There are beautiful natural rock formations, rare plants and animals, and even pseudo-alpine regions. Just because you can see for a hundred miles doesn’t mean that there’s nothing there to see, and open desert allows you to see things in a different way. There is nothing to block your view, and nothing to hide behind.

They’re all daubers, today’s painters; they’ve completely lost touch with the classical tradition, the subtle, noble craft of the old masters. They muddle along with no respect for the laws of anatomy, don’t even know how to glaze, never mix their own paint, use turpentine like water, and are ignorant of the secrets of grinding your own pigments, of fine linseed oil and the blowing of siccatives—no wonder there are no more great painters.

They were both young men under thirty. Art is not so precocious as literature, and does not send quite so many early potatoes into the market, so that the age of thirty is considered young enough for a painter to have learnt his business sufficiently to be marketable from the picture-dealing point of view. ("The Phantom Model")

This can be lonely work, but it connects you to other people in ways that many of the things we could do with our lives do not.

This is a familiar syndrome. There is a stage with every drawing or painting when it looks banal and clumsy. It's worth pushing through that, working through the cliché to find out what made it a cliché in the first place.

This is almost always the case: A piece of art receives its f(r)ame when found offensive.

This is how he came out: he floated into the air high above the sleeping forest, his green hat spinning a few feet above his head. In his hand was the open suitcase and out of it spilled a whole sky of stars.

Today is a good day. Today she feels she is the master of her craft. Today she is free of the grinding tyranny of doubt. The voice that mocks her ambition. The voice that bites and slanders and causes her more heartache than any other voice. Today she is focused, she is exultant. Her every brushstroke like a wake of radiance. Today she can move the paint around the canvas at will. If only painting were like this every day. Without the sudden extinguishing of light, the collapsing of belief, the cursing and flailing, the knots and clenched fists in a world gone suddenly dark.

This painting was created by someone who spent endless hours observing their subject and applying precise strokes of paint in patterns to replicate what their mind said was the essence of the person who stood before them.

Thomas Moran Paints This place gets inside you with its soft reds And tans. You can feel the lithe sweep of brushes Inside your head. Your empty hands moving From side to side involuntarily. It is like seeing An angel’s brilliancy for the first time and trying To describe it to your own soul in a language Of the eye your heart can understand The light is always different here getting darker Near the river paler near the rim. But it is The way the canyon breathes warm air rising Cool air settling that makes the colors vibrant Gives them luster. I can pile and scrape paint On a canvas forever and miss the one rare Note that hides in the throat of a canyon wren But I can dream that bird within me and capture It on silk where its song will bring this magical Secret landscape into my art on its wings.

To become a leader, renovate your mind with painting of peace and roof your heart with ceiling of love. No love, no leader!

Today she feels she is the master of her craft. Today she is free of the grinding tyranny of doubt. The voice that mocks her ambition. The voice that bites and slanders and causes her more heartache than any other voice. Today she is focused, she is exultant. Her every brushstroke like a wake of radiance. Today she can move the paint around the canvas at will. If only painting were like this every day. Without the sudden extinguishing of light, the collapsing of belief, the cursing and flailing, the knots and clenched fists in a world gone suddenly dark.

To draw something is to try to capture it FOREVER, if you really love something, you never try to keep it the way it is forever. You have to let it be free to change

To know is to remember that you've seen.To see is to know without remembering. Thus painting is remembering the blackness.

To live is to paint, it is to create; but while we are painting, we are being painted, being created as well!

To paint one must forget everything else. Where you live, who you know, what you eat, when to sleep. The landscape of the canvas becomes your only reality. The planet you inhabit is a single plane of infinite dimensions, stretched like a guitar string, and standing before you like a concubine waiting for your command.

To paint is to love again, live again, see again. To get up at the crack of dawn in order to take a peek at the water colors one did the day before, or even a few hours before, is like stealing a look at the beloved while she sleeps. The thrill is even greater if one has first to draw back the curtains. How they glow in the cold light of early dawn! … Is there any writer who rouses himself at daybreak in order to read the pages of his manuscript? Perish the thought!

Usually, a "great painter" is a dead painter.

Unfortunately, Da Vinci was a prankster who often amused himself by quietly gnawing at the hand that fed him. He incorporated in may of his Christian paintings hidden symbolism that was anything but Christian - tributes to his own beliefs and a subtle thumbing of his nose at the Church.

Use your own paint; colour your world

We are all artists painting our desires on the canvas of life and time.

Was there some subtle affinity between the chemical atoms that shaped themselves into form and colour on the canvas and the soul that was within him? Could it be that what that soul thought, they realized? -- that what it dreamed, they made true?

We were created to look at one another, weren't we

We both disliked rude rickshwalas, shepu bhaji in any form, group photographs at weddings, lizards, tea that has gone cold, the habit of taking newspaper to the toilet, kissing a boy who'd just smoked a cigarette et cetra. Another list. The things we loved: strong coffee, Matisse, Rumi, summer rain, bathing together, Tom Hanks, rice pancakes, Cafe Sunrise, black-and-white photographs, the first quiet moments after you wake up in the morning.

We make our own music. We paint our own future.

We made love again. This time it was me who asked. Lying there again, on the bed, this time with heath, almost an oven heat, coming through the screen, and sweat instead of tears, I wondered how simple we really are. That we can do the same things again and again and again and find them interesting, even fascinating and seek the repetition with a hunger as avid. How fishing was like that, and painting.

We may not stay quick, If we are weak or sage, but a lot can squeak As we start to age.

We’re more proficient than women at arm wrestling, fresco-painting, ice hockey and particle physics. We make better cabinets, sun decks and booster rockets. We know how to read a map. In the movies, most Westerns and martial arts films would be poorer without our presence. ...So let’s renew our male mission and wear our antlers high on our heads. Let’s stand up straight, aim well, and exercise our prerogative to leave the seat up. After all, we’re MEN, and we hold a proud heritage in our hands.

What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born. Her face, at once innocent and feral, soft and wild! Her mouth voluptuous. Eyes deep as oceans, her eyes as wide as planets. I likened her to the slender Psyché and judged that the perfection of her face ennobled everything unclean around her: the dusty hems of her bunched-up skirt, the worn straps of her nightshirt; the blackened soles of her tiny bare feet, the coal-stained balcony bricks upon which she sat, and that dusty wrought-ironwork that framed her perch. All this and the pungent air!—almost foul, with so many odors. Ô, that and the spicy night! …Pungency, spice, filth and night, dust and light; all things dark did blossom in sight; flower and bloom, the night has its pearl too—the moon! And once a month it will make the face of this tender girl bloom.

What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born.

When she started with the first empty canvas, she didn’t know what she was going to paint, she just let her paint brushes glide and they religiously followed the trajectory of her angst; the choice of colours and the strokes, they were all a reflection of what was going through her mind. The reds were the embers within her that refused to die. The blues were the rare instances when she was spent by her grief. The blacks were her moments of absolute weakness, the colour of the bottomless pit within her that she had plunged into, falling through and through. The brush strokes moved around blank canvases like snakes with fangs of elixir that filled her scars with a deluge of hope and a gale of faith in herself. The colours spoke to her in whispers, narrating their own tale while she poured out hers to them. They allowed her to channel her life through them. They listened. They cared. They laughed. They cried. They reassured her that there was life waiting ahead, staring at her past, urging her forward with eager arms. And Preeti rushed into them with her brush in hand that rose along with her and fell along with her.

What seems most significant to me about our movement [Impressionism] is that we have freed painting from the importance of the subject. I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them flowers, without their needing to tell a story.

When I first started showing the “Indra’s Jewels” work, I had people coming out of the woodwork saying “Who is this guy? What is he doing? Who does he think he is doing this stuff?” and the more they’d find out they’d go “Oh, he was a painter? He taught for more than decade on the university level? He knows what he’s talking about? Oh, well let’s look at it a little closer.

When I take a picture of a derelict sign, I already begin to see and find the patterns and shapes that will form the final piece. Once I get the image in the studio, I begin to layer the patterns created, making sure to save the patterns I particularly like. I never lose a layer of work during this process; I simply continue to build and modify those patterns that appeal to me. Digital Camera, 2017

What’s there to say about making paintings?” He looks hard at his son. “My real life, it’s when I’m working. It’s entirely there. The rest—everything—is flimflam. And that’s tragedy. Because what am I really doing? Wiping colors across fabric? Tricking people into feeling something’s there, when it’s nothing? When I’m doing the work, I almost think it adds up. Then they drag me to some farce like tonight, and I’m reminded what my job really is: goddamn decoration.