Best 1313 quotes in «painting quotes» category

You have to live in a state of thinking your painting is good, or you couldn't do it.

You just pray that something is going to hit you like lightning. Like a movie, a book, or a photograph, a painting, something that you can riff on it and learn more about it and explore it, and just go on a journey with it. So lots of times when I choose a theme, I'll also incorporate other things that I'm doing at that period.

You know how fussy and particular I am in painting. I am ever removing the paint and repainting the spot until I am completely exhausted.

You know I was curious - I was interested in all kinds of mystery or deeper meanings in the paintings because I myself have not analyzed why they have turned out like this or like that.

You must hold on to the sort of finger-painting aspect of music. That's something I learned, particularly from listening to Neil Young. Tom Waits is another one, because Tom's music is incredibly sophisticated and beautifully arranged, but he's using a toolbox that's unlike anybody else's.

You must break all the rules of painting, but you must also convince me you've had a reason to do so.

You're going to react to a painting in a way that the painting demands you react.

You're trying to make your painting too complicated. Paintings get complicated all by themselves.

Age in itself gives substance — what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer’s mind.

You want every movie to be a hit. But every painting isn’t a masterpiece.

After I see a painting, I go into a room, I close my eyes and I slowly escape into the beauty of the painting. I reflect on the painting, the nuances of the artwork, it's theme, mood and highlights -until the magic of the painting flashes before me.

Above all, he encourages her to paint, nodding with approval at even her most unusual experiments with color, light, rough brushwork [...]. She explains to him that she believes painting should reflect nature and life [...]. He nods, although he adds cautiously that he wouldn't want her to know too much about life - nature is a fine subject, but life is grimmer than she can understand. He thinks it is good for her to have something satisfying to do at home; he loves art himself; he sees her gift and wants her to be happy. He knows the charming Morisots. He has met the Manets, and always remarks that they are a good family, despite Édouard's reputation and his immoral experiments (he paints loose women), which make him perhaps too modern - a shame, given his obvious talent. In fact, Yves takes her to many galleries. They attend the Salon every year, with nearly a million other people, and listen to the gossip about favorite canvases and those critics disdain. Occasionally they stroll in the museums in the Louvre, where she sees art students copying paintings and sculpture, even an unchaperoned woman here and there (surely Americans). She can't quite bring herself to admire nudes in his presence, certainly not the heroic males; she knows she will never paint from a nude model herself. Her own formal training was in the private studios of an academican, copying from plaster casts with her mother present, before she married.

A force de peindre la vie des autres, il avait oublié de peindre la sienne." On ne se tue pas pour une femme (2000)

After graduation, I dealt blackjack in Las Vegas to make ends meet. When I wasn’t working, to straighten out my head, I would go out into the desert – up to Red Rock and Pine Creek. I would hike those creek beds and find a comfortable red-sandstone boulder, where I could sit and draw. In those days before cell phones, I could spend hours undisturbed, drawing or painting

A hand moved gracefully over the canvas, releasing the first colorful dot onto a sea of white. Her mind traveled to a different realm, and she joined in spirit with every human being whomever dared to take that first stroke, and she knew the risks; she was willing to pay the price, because wasn’t that what the heart longed for? Whether it be by writing, painting, or music—one only needs to find the strength of courage to walk along the creative path, to search for one’s higher self, and maybe, for just a moment, to gaze into the eyes of God." ― AnneMarie Dapp, Autumn Lady

A lake so vibrant in color that it looks like a fine art painting.

All the aesthetic anarchy of our day is caused by more international artillery than by international paintings.

All great art is praise.

All the same, I'm sure that if one is brave then recovery comes from within, through complete acceptance of suffering and death, and through the surrender of one's will and love of self. But that's no good to me, I like to paint, to see people and things and everything that makes our life—artificial, if you like. Yes, real life would be something else, but I don't think I belong to that category of souls who are ready to live, and also ready to suffer, at any moment.

An artist need to be free in imagination and disciplined in execution.

Alma is in a painting phase, and the people she paints are all the color of mold, look like they've just been dredged from the bottom of a lake. Her last painting was of you, slouching against the front door: only your frowning I-had-a-lousy-Third-World-childhood-and-all-I-got-was-this-attitude eyes recognizable.

An artist who works with his hands, his head and his heart at the same time creates a masterpiece.

And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past.

And if what they say is true--if every great painting is really a self-portrait--what, if anything, is Fabritius saying about himself?

And if it is true that the image still has the function of speaking, of transmitting something consubstantial with language, we must recognize that it already no longer says the same thing; and that by its own plastic values painting engages in an experiment that will take it farther and farther from language, whatever the superficial identity of the theme.

And I see that his brown eye has a splash of green in it and the green one a splash of brown. Like Cezanne painted them. Impressionist eyes.

And while the walls in all the other rooms were filled with artwork, here there was a single painting hung with care- a path through a forest with shadows and soft morning sunlight on fallen trees, everything quiet and green. "It's by Shishkin," Wendy told me, when she noticed I was looking at it. "Ivan Shishkin.

And now as if the cleaning and the scrubbing and the scything and the mowing had drowned it there rose that half-heard melody, that intermittent music which the ear half catches but lets fall; a bark, a bleat; irregular, intermittent, yet somehow related; the hum of an insect, the tremor of cut grass, dissevered yet somehow belonging; the jar of a dor beetle, the squeak of a wheel, loud, low, but mysteriously related; which the ear strains to bring together and is always on the verge of harmonising but they are never quite heard, never fully harmonised, and at last, in the evening, one after another the sounds die out, and the harmony falters, and silence falls. With the sunset sharpness was lost, and like mist rising, quiet rose, quiet spread, the wind settled; loosely the world shook itself down to sleep, darkly here without a light to it, save what came green suffused through leaves, or pale on the white flowers by the window. [Lily Briscoe had her bag carried up to the house late one evening in September. Mr. Carmichael came by the same train.]

And on the days I couldn't breathe, I learned to paint air.

Anyone that says his mind will be probably regarded a fool, but the true artist is not moved by the comments about the looks of his painting or remarks that are dreadfully sarcastic, but hearken now! That he who says what others want to hear hasn't said anything of his own.

A painter of genius has a bovine mind. He does not think, he only sees.

Any work done with love - be it a photo or a meal or a painting - always looks so pretty, because love is a master of creating magical beauties!

A painting is worth a thousand confused art-gallery visitors.

A painting is a universal language which everyone can read, understand, and interpret in his own way through the power of imagination.

A painting shouldn't be just a picture, it should be a philosophy.

...A painting was a translation of the language of my heart.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but the way I paint I'm going to need to contact an editor. Even if I were to abstractly paint the phrase "I love you," it would be the visual equivalent of Joyce's Ulysses. -James Lee Schmidt and Jarod Kintz

A portrait is a painting in which there is something wrong with the mouth.

Art depicts life and life depicts art.

Art is the conscious making of numinous phenomena. Many objects are just objects - inert, merely utilitarian. Many events are inconsequential, too banal to add anything to our experience of life. This is unfortunate, as one cannot grow except by having one’s spirit greatly stirred; and the spirit cannot be greatly stirred by spiritless things. Much of our very life is dead. For primitive man, this was not so. He made his own possessions, and shaped and decorated them with the aim of making them not merely useful, but powerful. He tried to infuse his weapons with the nature of the tiger, his cooking pots with the life of growing things; and he succeeded. Appearance, material, history, context, rarity - perhaps rarity most of all - combine to create, magically, the quality of soul. But we modern demiurges are prolific copyists; we give few things souls of their own. Locomotives, with their close resemblance to beasts, may be the great exception; but in nearly all else with which today’s poor humans are filling the world, I see a quelling of the numinous, an ashening of the fire of life. We are making an inert world; we are building a cemetery. And on the tombs, to remind us of life, we lay wreaths of poetry and bouquets of painting. You expressed this very condition, when you said that art beautifies life. No longer integral, the numinous has become optional, a luxury - one of which you, my dear friend, are fond, however unconsciously. You adorn yourself with the same instincts as the primitive who puts a frightening mask of clay and feathers on his head, and you comport yourself in an uncommonly calculated way - as do I. We thus make numinous phenomena of ourselves. No mean trick - to make oneself a rarity, in this overpopulated age.

Art is a visual language; I'm just perfecting my alphabet.

Artwork can be consumed for ages. The people and the state can be proud of it. That is why it is incorrect to stimulate something that has no real value.

Art is like hard digging. Without daily searching, nothing can be found.

Art is energy, emotion, entertainment and sometimes economics.

Artist communities love to bullshit each other and glad-hand one another, and there's no room for the crippling honesty of comedy. "I'm a painter" -- well... you don't...probably need to do that. . . . if you're painting something that doesn't exist, I understand that, I can appreciate- . . . but if your pain- 'oh, it's a barnyard scene in autumn'--well then just take a picture of a barn in autumn! It's way better than a painting! - Before Turning the Gun on Himself [2012]

ART The world is full of confusion and contradiction. We cannot expect to do anything that is absolutely right. We can only measure rightness by the truth within ourselves. And our own truth will never be quite the same as somebody else's. I wish that I could touch you and be sure that it was the right thing to do. I only want to touch you briefly. Just once so that you will know. We are flesh and blood and full of faults. But we are also full of warmth. The world is full of confusion but there is compassion in its midst. communication via simple touch can transmit so much of us in just one minute. Like a painting or a piece of music. I want to touch your soul. I only wish I could be sure it was the right thing to do.

Art is unpredictable.

Art is wood that has fewer branches than science but its roots are deeper than in science.

As a student I thought there was a formula of some kind that I would get hold of somewhere, and thereby become and artist. There is a formula, but it has not been in books. It is really plain old courage, standing on one's own feet, and forever seeking enlightenment; courage to develop your way, but learning from the other fellow; experimentation with your own ideas, observing for yourself, a rigid discipline of doing over that which you can improve.

As in zoology, monsters exist in art. It is the pervert of the formation of words, lines, colors, and sounds.