Best 1313 quotes in «painting quotes» category

It's weird making a drawing of painting. I start to realize that charcoal is this incredibly fragile material. I'm making images of paintings out of dust.

It took me 40 years to find out that painting is not sculpture.

It took me time to understand my water lilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them.

It took me twenty years to discover painting: twenty years looking at nature, and above all, going to the Louvre.

It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn't understand, you'd have some obligation to guess. Now you don't.

It wouldn't be right for me to clown around when I'm painting a president.

I underwent a whole process of slowly letting go of idiosyncrasies and habits and embellishments and everything extraneous to the essentials that I'm unwilling to let go of. I never dreamed that I would be making black-and-white paintings with so little embellishment. But it's been liberating in many ways to let go of that and yet see what I did want to retain.

I understand my own pictures best six months after I have done them.

I've always seen process of crafting as part of the thinking process. It really forms the gestation of the work. I'll get an idea; I want to express this idea, sometimes I'll start it, but during the process of making the object - if it's an object or a painting - it changes. It never goes in a linear progression from A to Zed. It's always this kind of circuitous, stumbling, groping in the dark kind of process of evolving.

I've been attracted to imagery and occasionally I've drawn from it, but I never thought I'd be painting these paintings. I didn't have any desire to. I didn't think there was any reason to.

I've been creating in some capacity forever. It was always usually painting and drawing, but I've been exploring more video and sculpture in recent years. But they're all kind of the same thing to me, in a way. They're all forms of production and output. As a creative person, sometimes you can't live without creating or producing something.

I've been playing piano my whole life, but I'd never tried to understand how compositions are made, really. Try to imagine if you'd loved paintings your whole life but had never painted one. My aspiration now is just to understand.

I've been trying to pick up painting but it's hard.

I’ve learnt from experience that a painting isn’t finished when you put down your brush – that’s when it starts. The public reaction is what supplies meaning and value. Art comes alive in the arguments you have about it.

I want my paintings to have a light of their own, they must glow from inside.

I've never let one day go by without painting, or at least without drawing.

I wanted to show painting paintings first, then the plate paintings; now I can show that I've sort of freed myself from stylistic inhibitions.

I want painting to be difficult to do.

I want painting to be my flashlight.

I've known painters who never did any good work because instead of painting their models they seduced them.

I've reached a point in my life where my Truman Show boat has hit the painting.

I've tried to decentralize and interpenetrate so that all parts of a painting are of related value.

I want it to be more universal than that - like a painter doesn't have to explain his life story away to justify his painting.

I want my paintings to look like what's going on outside my window rather than what's inside my studio.

I want the viewer to be overwhelmed. I want the space to feel like it is caving in on the viewer and that they are forcibly entering the world of my paintings. I want there to be a feeling of overpowering decadence to the work, that is almost too much to take. I don't want them to be subtle.

I want the paintings to take me or the viewer out somewhere else.

I want to die painting.

I want the people looking at my work to feel a sense of all the possibilities of painting, and, through that, in life as a whole. When that happens, I feel I've accomplished something useful.

I was always interested in language. I thought, why not? If a painting, by the normal definition of the term, is paint on canvas, why can't it be painted words on canvas?

I was good friends with Frank Sinatra, I heard Steve Kaufman painting his portrait, so I asked Steve to paint my portrait.

I was always a little bit of a collector and a hoarder. And whenever I got involved in anything, whatever it was - even when I was a kid and I collected cigarette cards - I really got into it and had the most. So when it came to paintings, once I got the bug, I always wanted to buy something. But I really knew nothing about art.

I was always involved in art and when I went under contract at Warner Bros. at 18, it afforded me the possibility of never having to stop painting, never having to stop taking photographs and so on, and to actually live a cultural life.

I was always artistic - right from childhood - but my love of painting came a bit later. It followed my love of music.

I was in love. With a two-dimensional object. A mute in love with a painting. Lovely. Just lovely.

I was very interested in being a painter. I had facility, I had talent, and I loved painting and printmaking, and I was quite serious about it.

I was the first woman to paint cleanly, and that was the basis of my success. From a hundred pictures, mine will always stand out. And so the galleries began to hang my work in their best rooms, always in the middle, because my painting was attractive. It was precise. It was 'finished'.

I went through about six or seven painting methods just to see what I didn't want to do. And then I got off the wall, and went into the environment.

I wish I felt energetic and could paint all the time, because there are so many paintings I'd like to do.

I will do a lot of research and create a lot of material for use in one painting. And then I go on discovering and working with a whole other range of material in another painting. I'm interested in a fairly comprehensive and orchestrated synthesis that might bring about a new situation consisting of this hidden material. I'm interested in hidden source material.

I wish to die painting.

I work day and night without sleep. The paintings keep me fired up.

I wish to have no status as a man. I am equally content to be a worm or a rat, and am only glad that I am not becuase they have such a rough time without the pleasure of painting.

I work on all parts of my painting at once, improving it very gently until I find that the effect is complete.

I would always be painting and drawing. If I was stuck at home, I was in the basement working on a painting.

I would advise young artists to paint as they can, as long as they can, without being afraid of painting badly.

I would exchange every painting of Christ for one snapshot.

I would be doomed if I didn't invent humor in my life. When I was young, I had all these punk and performance-art bands, dressed in costumes and painting the room and getting kicked out by police. Now when I perform I still feel the stage is more than just where you put your instruments. It's where you can do whatever you feel like.

I would have liked maybe to be in architecture or painting, something connected to the fine arts.

I would never have taken up painting if women did not have breasts.

I would never finish a painting if I didnt have a deadline.