Best 1313 quotes in «painting quotes» category

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting

Though painting borrows help indeed from colours... it has nothing more wide of its real aim or more remote from its intention than to make a show of colours... to raise a separate and flattering pleasure to the sense.

Through her paintings, she breaks all the taboos of the woman's body and of female sexuality.

Through a painting, we can see the whole world.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

Well, I have a very simple method of painting.

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.

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

What has reasoning to do with painting?

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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 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.