Best 1313 quotes in «painting quotes» category

The men worked hard and faithfully. As a rule, in spite of the number of rough characters among them, they behaved very well. One night a few of them went on a spree, and proceeded "to paint San Antonio red." One was captured by the city authorities, and we had to leave him behind us in jail. The others we dealt with ourselves, in a way that prevented a repetition of the occurrence.

The Mojave Desert is a harsh, but very spiritual, place. It’s as much a matrix as anything else in my life has been. Growing up in the desert has a different gestalt than growing up in a temperate zone, with its humidity and rainfall. As children growing up in the Mojave, we chased lizards and snakes, instead of frogs and squirrels. There is an arid openness about it, and a true feeling of being alone, that you don’t get in any other type of environment.

The most beautiful painting holds by a hard nail. (La plus belle peinture - Tient par un clou dur.)

The object of painting a picture is-however unreasonable that may sound... The object which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence. The picture is but a by-product of the state, a trace, the footprint of that state.

The painter is not simply someone who looks and who sees. Above all, the artist is someone who exposes a personal vision by rendering it visible. The painter shows or allows the seeing of "something" that without him, without his intervention, would not be seen. He manifests through his work a possibility of seeing that would otherwise remain latent. In other words, painting is an art that reveals or unveils the world from an angle that the world itself does not present to us. Painting creates. It does not limit itself to imitation or reproduction. Any desire to confine painting within the limits of déjà vu would be a gross misunderstanding of the essence of what painting is. Painting allows us to see that which without it would never be seen.

The painter knew that color was not something you controlled but something you set free. He believed that color knew its way home.

The painter knew the mirror lied. And the canvas told the truth.

The paint is drying, and time is dying. The pain is crying, lying on my back, trying to get back the time, to brushstrokes too fast, wet went dry and love went dull; now I live in a portrait I never painted.

the painter had no need for grammar. words fell from his brushes already knowing where to stand, sit, lie down.

The painter folded back the heavy curtain, standing in the stream of light breaking through the damp thickness of the room. He paused, still holding the drape in his hand as he considered with suspicion that a world could exist outside the window.

The picture is a flash of color stories. No one can imagine a picture that has no story.

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

...the pride taken by the Italians in their gifted women is among the most important facts in the history of their Renaissance.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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’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.