Best 1313 quotes in «painting quotes» category

When I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.

When I'm painting outdoors, I only have time to think about what I'm saying, not how I'm saying it.

When I need some striking inspiration about deep depression for my new painting, I just need to go to check my bank account.

When I'm traveling the world, I don't ever look anymore at the geography - just enough to catch galleries and paintings.

When in doubt, make a red painting.

When I paint I am ageless, I just have the pleasure or the difficulty of painting.

When I'm painting them, the whole legend and mythology of apples occurs to me, and so Adam and Eve and the snake and all the rest of it somehow gets into the picture.

When I paint from a photograph, conscious thinking is eliminated. I don't know what I am doing. My work is far closer to the Informel than to any kind of 'realism'. The photograph has an abstraction of its own, which is not easy to see through.

When I work alone, my process is like painting. With Fleetwood Mac, it's more like movie making.

When Michelangelo finished the painting of the Sistine Chapel's ceiling, he spent the rest of his life trying to remove the paint that had poured into his sleeve.

When something is finished, that means it's dead, doesn't it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting - I just stop working on it for a while.

When I've painted a woman's bottom so that I want to touch it, then [the painting] is finished.

When Michael Werner saw a painting of mine, such as Die grosse Nacht im Eimer, which back then nobody wanted and everybody thought was ridiculous, he realized that this was the right provocation, that it represented the feeling of the times in the right way.

When objects shattered into fragments appeared in my painting about 1909, this for me was a way of getting closest to the object... Fragmentation helped me to establish space and movement in space.

When you are painting a landscape, assume the painting is real and the landscape is an illusion.

When Robert Benton was doing the movie 'In the Still of the Night,' I'd choreographed the auction scene and supplied the paintings and had a bit part - I was bidding against Meryl Streep.

When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing.

When you feel concentrated within the intensity of making paintings, you know exactly what you are doing.

When we did Cubist paintings, our intention was not to produce Cubist paintings but to express what was within us. No one laid down a course of action for us, and our friends the poets followed our endeavour attentively but they never dictated it to us.

When we begin to lift the veils of censorship and repression in painting, a great deal of energy is unleashed.

When you look at a work of art, you don't see a cover for something else; you see revelation. If you're an artist, art is the truest expression of yourself. Even if you're painting a life you don't have.

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.

Whether Iranians are drinking wine in the evening or painting something "offensive," they choose not to dwell on the fact that they could receive some seventh-century punishment. Laws are inconsistently enforced, and you can usually pay off police to look the other way.

Who among us has not gazed thoughtfully and patiently at a painting of Jackson Pollock and thought "What a piece of crap?

When you're on a highway, viewing the western U.S. with the mountains and the flatness and the desert and all that, it's very much like my paintings.

While adding the finishing touches to a painting might appear insignificant, it is much harder to do than one might suppose.

Who's going to ask a painter to see a diploma? They'd say, 'Can I see your paintings?', wouldn't they?

Within the category of Kitsch we can thus distinguish between more and less successful paintings. Kitsch, too has its masterpieces.

Wit has as few true judges as painting.

Within one hour of touching the brush to canvas for the first time, my students have a total, complete painting.

Wine pricing is an art - like painting.

Without good drawing, the foundation of a painting will collapse.

Writing must certainly be one of the hardest professions - writing and painting.

Wrestling needs to be about the art form again. It needs to be about painting a picture and having a really good match.

Without intent all painting is meaningless.

You are never tired of painting, because you have to set down not what you know already, but what you have just discovered.

You can't make either life or art, you have to work in the hole in between, which is undefined. That's what makes the adventure of painting.

You can always tell a great painting, because when you get close there are all these nervous marks.

You can't sweeten the well by painting the pump.

You don't need a framework. You need a painting, not a frame.

You come back to the beginning. That's why in the "Searching for the Ox" sequence, at the very end of that sequence of the Zen paintings, we're back in the world again.

You have bits of canvas that are unpainted and you have these thick stretcher bars. So you see that a painting is an object; that it's not a window into something - you're not looking at a landscape, you're not looking at a portrait, but you're looking at a painting. It's basically: A painting is a painting is a painting. And it's what Frank Stella said famously: What you see is what you see.

You have the 20th century wrapping up and everything is moving at this breakneck speed? And then, painting is still walking. It's just a very human activity that takes time.

You can eliminate color and still have a painting that works, but you must have drawing, value and design.

You don't talk about paintings, you look at them.

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 have to act and this is something that happened in abstract expressionism too, it was a discovery particularly in De Kooning's paintings, great paintings. There's a lot of speed in his work and the speed produces things that only speed can produce.

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 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.