Best 1313 quotes in «painting quotes» category

I'm the expert when it comes to my paintings. I think all great painters have to have that confidence in what they are seeking and when they're getting there.

I'm trying to make a primitive painting. I'm trying to summon the archaic. I want to enter into a primitive situation. This is my protest against the sensory deprivation that we experience, which is due to this tendency towards globalization, towards homogenization, towards the generic - a technological standard rather than an aesthetic standard. I'm mining history, trying to regenerate a pictorial situation that is more humanistic. It's not about commodification, it's not about fitting into some sort of corporate structure. It's opposed to that direction.

I must have the personal dialogue, the private time, with each painting in progress. I can't share it with anyone until it's done.

I'm very interested to see how this new painting will go - I know I want it big and stark, and as I said, I follow the muse, and that's when it always works perfectly for me.

I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.

I'm working hard with more determination than ever. My success at the Salon led to my selling several paintings and since your absence I have made 800 francs; I hope, when I have contracts with more dealers, it will be better still.

In a painting, what counts is the unexpected.

In a successful painting everything is integral - all the parts belong to the whole. If you remove an aspect or element you are removing its wholeness.

In classical oil painting, there seemed to be a radical turn to seeing things as the camera sees them, with that technological modification. I began to have a tremendous problem with all of this.

I needed an outlet in high school and came across painting. I've actually been painting longer than I've been acting. A movie is a collaborative effort, and with painting you just have yourself.

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 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.

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 every respect, fantasy is like doing abstract paintings.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

I painted myself out of my painting.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.