Best 1313 quotes in «painting quotes» category

The world of painting has nothing to do with the art world.

The world shows up for us, but it doesn't show up for free. We must show up, too, and bring along what knowledge and skills we've cultivated. As with a painting in a gallery, the world has no meaning-no presence to be experienced-apart from our ability to engagement with it.

They are specific places I have discovered here and there when I am on the road to take photos. I go especially to take photos.

They were wrestling with canvases, using violent colors and huge brush strokes. I arrived with gray, silent, sober, oppressed paintings. One critic said they were paintings that thought.

Think of the centre of interest in a painting as you would read it in a novel or see it in a movie. The crisis or climax is that point when you simply can't put the book down or wouldn't dare leave the movie, for whatever reason.

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

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

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 a painting, we can see the whole world.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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 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.

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.

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.

Well, I have a very simple method of painting.

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.

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

What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.

What has reasoning to do with painting?

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

Whenever I see a Frans Hals I feel like painting, but when I see a Rembrandt I feel like giving up!

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 am finished painting, I paint again for relaxation.