Best 1313 quotes in «painting quotes» category

Go out into the sunlight and be happy with what you see.

Great paintings—people flock to see them, they draw crowds, they’re reproduced endlessly on coffee mugs and mouse pads and anything-you-like. And, I count myself in the following, you can have a lifetime of perfectly sincere museum-going where you traipse around enjoying everything and then go out and have some lunch. But if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you. An individual heart-shock. Your dream, Welty’s dream, Vermeer’s dream. You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the museum gift shop sees something else entire, and that’s not even to mention the people separated from us by time—four hundred years before us, four hundred years after we’re gone—it’ll never strike anybody the same way and the great majority of people it’ll never strike in any deep way at all but—a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you. And—oh, I don’t know, stop me if I’m rambling… but Welty himself used to talk about fateful objects. Every dealer and antiquaire recognizes them. The pieces that occur and recur. Maybe for someone else, not a dealer, it wouldn’t be an object. It’d be a city, a color, a time of day. The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.

Hans then asked him about painting from nature; Jackson...bluntly offered a phrase that entered Village lore, “I am nature.

He disregarded everything, he gave everything to art. He tirelessly visited galleries, spent whole hours standing before the works of great masters, grasped and pursued a wondrous brush. He never finished anything without testing himself several times by these great teachers and reading wordless but eloquent advice for himself in their paintings.

He had been a boy who liked to draw, according to my friend, so he became an architect. Children who drew,I learned, became architects; I had thought they became painters. My friend explained that it was not proper to become a painter; it couldn’t be done. I resigned myself to architecture school and a long life of drawing buildings. It was a pity, for I disliked buildings, considering them only a stiffer and more ample form of clothing, and no more important.

He painted until his cursive brushes were only whispers of rawness on the thin ivory. Only the walls and the ravens that watched knew the boy with the paint-stained palms weaved his art onto his sketchpad on the park bench at lunchtimes, and only the trees whispered it like a prayer.

Herbert Bayer was a photographer, an architect, a painter, and he was also the inventor of photo montage, as well as one of the originators—and probably the first modern—land artist. And so it was the idea that an artist could do all of these things using the same basic design concepts, and that it didn’t really matter if he was creating a beautiful land sculpture or if he was using photography or painting. He was really making art using the same methods, the same Bauhaus-type methods.

He said, one has to learn that painting well - in the academic and technical sense - comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you've got that ability. So have thousands.

He smiled and squinted at me again, tilting his head up and to the right as he stared. “Maybe what I’m attracted to in you is more than your looks and your brain and your humor.” He leaned closer like he had a secret. “It could be your soul,” he whispered. I pushed his cheek until he was squinting at the door to the kitchen instead. “Is this when you tell me I’m your soul mate, O’Neill?

Grip’s favorite painting didn’t contain a single figure. 'Seven A.M.' showed distant trees on one side, and on the other a storefront that time had passed by. So still. Some kind of story could probably be told, but one refrained from asking questions. The light and shadows convinced the viewer to exist in the moment. Hopper had drawn sharp lines where the sun cast shadows on the white walls inside the window, while outside the ground gleamed like warm sand. The hands of an old wall clock suggested that the time was seven. Someone who should have been there was somewhere else. Yet nothing was missing. With the morning light streaming down on the ground and in through the window, time might as well have stopped—so the clock always stood at seven. Just like that, a place where nothing ever changes.

...he tried to make each painting capture that gently fuzzed qualit the camera gave everything, as if someone had patted away a top layer of clarity and left behind something kinder than the eye alone would see.

He could even talk about painting, and that's more than can be said of most painters.

He was halfway to the house, thinking to set the cabbage inside the kitchen door,when a brown blur thundered past him. Joanna Robbins tore out of the barn astride a magnificent chestnut quarter horse. She leaned forward in the saddle,hat flopping against her back, hair streaming out behind her in a wild curly mass as she urged her mount to a full-out gallop. Unable to do anything but stare, Crockett stood dumbstruck as she raced past. She was the most amazing horsewoman he'd ever seen. Joanna Robbins. The shy creature who claimed painting and reading were her favorite pastimes had just bolted across the yard like a seasoned jockey atop Thoroughbred. She might have inherited her mother's grace and manners, but the woman rode like her outlaw father.Maybe better.

He told her the flowers in her painting contained exactly the purple substance of the flowers on the desk in front of her [...] Let us open the window and see if your painting can entice the butterflies.

He unzipped the nylon case, and inside was a discolored frame that smelled like smoke. A thin layer of soot covered the painting under the glass- a picture of an old manor house. Gothic Victorian. Wisteria climbed the wall near the entrance, the pale-lavender blossoms clinging to the gray stone. The artist had brushed flowers below the windows as well, though those colors had been muted by the smoke damage.

How do you even know I'm someone you'll want to remember? We've only seen each other once before.' (Amber) 'Have you ever looked at a painting and known you had something in common with it? Have you ever seen something so beautiful you feel like crying? When I see you, I feel that way. I feel like the deepest part of me understands something vital about you.' (Virgil Daly)

I am sure that it was only because Michael Angelo was engaged in the ancient and honourable occupation of lying in bed that he ever realised how the roof of the Sistine Chapel might be made into an awful imitation of a divine drama that could only be acted in the heavens.

I am the wood frame, the bundle of ox hair, and the creative spark... my value unhangable.

I came there again another time. And I looked many times again. I was filled with consolation, with my consolation. The thirty-three abominations were truthful. They were the truth. They were life. The sharp fragments of life, sharp, complete moments. Such are women. They have lovers. Each of these thirty-three (or how many of them were there?) had painted his mistress. Excellent! I grew used to myself being in their presence. Thirty-three mistresses! Thirty-three mistresses! And I was all of them and yet all were not me. I studied the abomination for a long while: before I modeled for them, as well as afterwards. I modelled in order to study. This I felt so keenly. It seemed to me that I was learning about life by pieces, by separate pieces, fragments, but every fragment possessed all its own complexity and power. The abominations began to divide in half. With every day this became clearer. One half became mistresses and the other half queens. Each of the thirty-three created his mistress or his queen. ("Thirty Three Abominations")

He went to look closely at the painting, which portrayed a parade of fat white geese strolling past the doorway of a cottage. "Someday I'll be able to afford real art," Garrett said, coming to stand beside him. "In the meantime, we'll have to make do with this." Ethan's attention was drawn to the tiny initials in the corner of the work: G.G. A slow smile broke over his face. "You painted it?" "Art class, at boarding school," she admitted. "I wasn't bad at sketching, but the only subject I could manage to paint adequately was geese. At one point I tried to expand my repertoire to ducks, but those earned lower marks, so it was back to geese after that." Ethan smiled, imagining her as a studious schoolgirl with long braids. The light of a glass-globe parlor lamp slid across the tidy pinned-up weight of her hair, bringing out gleams of red and gold. He'd never seen anything like her skin, fine and powerless, with a faint glow like a blush-colored garden rose. "What gave you the idea to paint geese in the first place?" he asked. "There was a goose pond across from the school," Garrett said, staring absently at the picture. "Sometimes I saw Miss Primrose at the front windows, watching with binoculars. One day I dared to ask her what she found so interesting about geese, and she told me they had a capacity for attachment and grief that rivaled humans. They mated for life, she said. If a goose was injured, the gander would stay with her even if the rest of the flock was flying south. When one of a mated pair died, the other would lose its appetite and go off to mourn in solitude.

I became an artist because I wanted to be an active participant in the conversation about art.

I could either succumb to the nightmares I’ve raised or paint them.

I developed a thirst for great art, but it wasn’t until I was 20 that I finally visited my first museum, the Prado in Madrid. There, in 1968, my interest was caught by the paintings of Luis de Morales, a 16th-century artist from the harsh Extremadura region of Spain. Morales was a Mannerist, like El Greco or Parmigianino, who painted very graceful figures with long necks and limbs. He did a magnificently smooth sfumato modelling. But the effect that impressed me the most was a fine line that he applied around all of his figures. He didn’t need those illustrative lines, but they really made his figures ‘pop’ off the background.

I discovered is that I’m an image maker, and I don’t care how its made—whether it’s through painting or photography or drawing—I just want to create images.

I’d stumbled upon the inner sanctuary of a woman who loved the world. Loved the faces of people she saw. Loved the way a hand looked when it was relaxed. Loved the way a woman looked when she touched her own face. The way a man looked when he opened himself to her. Loved the way wind changed a tree or a field or a child’s hair. The beauty of a neck meeting a shoulder. The softness of a smile that wasn’t forced.

If a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see and think and feel, you don't think, 'oh I love this painting because it's universal' 'I love this painting because it speaks to mankind'. That's not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It's a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes, you. An individual heart shock. . . .A really great painting is fluid enought to work its way into the mind and heart through all different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

If life can be a work of art, then what are the works of art?

I force myself to get up and lock my eyes on the painting, my birthday gift. It’s the essence of everything I want to remember about us. I pick it up and imagine the stars shimmering over us and the brisk air on our skin. The way the cold dissipated when we touched and nothing else mattered, how perfect it was.

If we do everything that’s comfortable, then what we come up with is just kind of a boring, comfortable result.

If you construct a room in paint, you haunt it. Your life rests in every stroke. So paint only the rooms that you can bear to occupy forever. Or paint the stars instead.

If you feel joy when you do something unselfish for him, and would just as soon do it in secret as openly, then that rings of the true metal

If you can’t paint a man falling from a five story building before he hits the ground, you will never make a monumental painting.

If you have walked into a museum recently - whether you did so to attend an art exhibition or to escape from the police - you may have noticed a type of painting known as a triptych. A triptych has three panels, with something different painted on each of the panels. For instance, my friend Professor Reed made a triptych for me, and he painted fire on one panel, a typewriter on another, and the face of a beautiful, intelligent woman on the third. The triptych is entitled What Happened to Beatrice and I cannot look upon it without weeping. I am a writer, and not a painter, but if I were to try and paint a triptych entitled The Baudelaire Orphans' Miserable Experiences at Prufrock Prep, I would paint Mr. Remora on one panel, Mrs. Brass on another, and a box of staples on the third, and the results would make me so sad that between the Beatrice triptych and the Baudelaire triptych I would scarcely stop weeping all da

I had only to open my bedroom window, and blue air, love, and flowers entered with her”.

If you’re to choose to paint your life today... What will it be? Remember, you’re the artist, not the canvas.

I hear the question upon your lips: What is it to be a colour? Colour is the touch of the eye, music to the deaf, a word out of the darkness. Because I’ve listened to souls whispering – like the susurrus of the wind – from book to book and object to object for tens or thousands of years, allow me to say that my touch resembles the touch of angels. Part of me, the serious half, calls out to your vision while the mirthful half sours through the air with your glances. I’m so fortunate to be red! I’m fiery. I’m strong. I know men take notice of me and that I cannot be resisted. I do not conceal myself: For me, delicacy manifests itself neither in weakness nor in subtlety, but through determination and will. So, I draw attention to myself. I’m not afraid of other colours, shadows, crowds or even of loneliness. How wonderful it is to cover a surface that awaits me with my own victorious being! Wherever I’m spread, I see eyes shine, passions increase, eyebrows rise and heartbeats quicken. Behold how wonderful it is to live! Behold how wonderful to see. I am everywhere. Life begins with and returns to me. Have faith in what I tell you.

I have been in love with painting ever since I became conscious of it at the age of six. I drew some pictures I thought fairly good when I was fifty, but really nothing I did before the age of seventy was of any value at all. At seventy-three I have at last caught every aspect of nature–birds, fish, animals, insects, trees, grasses, all. When I am eighty I shall have developed still further and I will really master the secrets of art at ninety. When I reach a hundred my work will be truly sublime and my final goal will be attained around the age of one hundred and ten, when every line and dot I draw will be imbued with life. - from Hokusai’s ‘The Art Crazy Old Man

I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime.

I intend to destroy, destroy everything that exists in painting. I have utter contempt for painting.

I lacked the knowledge of linear perspective needed to get into the art school, so now I whitewash walls and imagine I’m heaven’s landscape painter.

I look for ambiguity because life is ambiguous!

I look up at the painting. It's not even that interesting. Definitely doesn't grab me and shake my brain around like the meadow scene did.

I love to draw—pencil, ink pen—I love art. When I go on tour and visit museums in Holland, Germany or England—you know those huge paintings?—I’m just amazed. You don’t think a painter could do something like that. I can look at a piece of sculpture or a painting and totally lose myself in it.

I'm painting color squares. One square - one color. That's what I paint.

Impression — I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it … and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.

In 1946 there was no money in art, no dealer galleries, no craft shops. After the war we started to teach art in every school for the first time. Our generation played a crucial role. We were the stepping stones towards today's galleries.

in case we ever lose each other always remember this our sign and i will find you again as i go to find my brother' the painter promises

In every motions to put colors on my canvas, I feel like I am screaming, "I AM HERE"... To whom?.. To where?... Where am I going to...?

Ingenting er mer krevende og angstfremkallende enn et nytt, fullstendig hvitt lerret. Hvordan du enn begynner, så føles det som om du ødelegger alt.