Best 1313 quotes in «painting quotes» category

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 her book The Writing Life (1989), Annie Dillard tells the story of a fellow writer who was asked by a student, "Do you think I could be a writer?" "'Well,' the writer said, 'do you like sentences?'" The student is surprised by the question, but Dillard knows exactly what was meant. He was being told, she explains, that "if he likes sentences he could begin," and she remembers a similar conversation with a painter friend. "I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, 'I like the smell of paint.'" The point, made implicitly (Dillard does not belabour it), is that you don't begin with a grand conception, either of the great American novel or masterpiece that will hang in the Louvre. You begin with a feel for the nitty-gritty material of the medium, paint in one case, sentences in the other.

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.

Inspiration surrounds us, the creation is our responsibility as artists.-Lyn Crain

In painting, three things must be considered - the position of the viewer, the position of the object viewed, and the position of the light that illuminates the object.

In time, all great masterpieces turn into shameless creatures who laugh at their creators.

In my heaven sweet melodies of the skies ripple pool of the sea playing sweet song to me, sharing tales of the past, blending with mine as mirage, painting new...I breathe in, am in love and alive...

i painted it because i dreamed it because we all dreamed it

I paint the way some people write their autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages of my journal, and as such they are valid. The future will choose the pages it prefers. It's not up to me to make the choice. I have the impression that the time is speading on past me more and more rapidly. I'm like a river that rolls on, dragging with it the trees that grow too close to its banks or dead calves one might have thrown into it or any kind of microbes that develop in it. I carry all that along with me and go on. It's the movement of painting that interests me, the dramatic movement from one effort to the next, even if those efforts are perhaps not pushed to their ultimate end. In some of my paintings I can say with certainty that the effort has been brought to its full weight and its conclusion, because there I have been able to stop the flow of time around me. I have less and less time, and yet I have more and more to say, and what I have to say is,increasingly, something about what goes on in the movement of my thought. I've reached the moment, you see, when the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself.

I prefer painting people’s eyes to cathedrals, for there is something in the eyes that is not in the cathedral, however solemn and imposing the latter may be — a human soul, be it that of a poor beggar or of a street walker, is more interesting to me.

in the corner of the painting of success the signature is blurred

'Paint only what you see,' his hero Millet had admonished. 'Imagination is a burden to a painter,' Auguste Renoir had told him. 'Painters are craftsmen, not storytellers. Paint what you see.' Ah, but what they hadn't said, hadn't warned him about, was how much you could see.

I paint what I see and not what others like to see.

I placed the tubes of paint on the palette and selected a small canvas. I prepared the palette with an assortment of colors, then closed my eyes, remembering the way the moors had looked when I rode into town with Lord Livingston. He'd been so different on that drive into the village before he left for London. Had that been the side of him that Lady Anna had fallen in love with? I dipped my brush into the black paint and then mixed in some white until I'd created the right shade of gray, then touched the brush to the canvas. I loved the feeling of the paintbrush in my hand. He'd been kind to buy me the art supplies, but I remembered how he'd behaved in the dining room and at other times before that. 'How could he be so cruel, so unfeeling?' Once I'd painted the clouds, I moved on to the hills, mixing a sage green color for the grass and then dotting the foreground with a bit of lavender to simulate the heather. I stepped back from the canvas and frowned. It needed something else. But what? I looked out the window to the orchard. The Middlebury Pink. 'Who took the page from Lady Anna's book? Lord Livingston?' I dabbed my brush into the brown paint and created the structure of the tree. Next I dotted the branches with its heart-shaped leaves and large, white, saucer-size blossoms with pink tips.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

I studied the way the individual flowers clustered around the single stalk, their sharp points fitting together like pieces of a puzzle. Something about the configuration of the petals made me believe that forgiveness should come naturally, but in this family, it hadn't. I thought about the decades of misunderstandings, from the yellow rose to the fire, the thwarted attempts at forgiving and being forgiven.

It has been my personal experience that as I allow the painting to speak I become lost, it is delicious and at the same time frightening. The best ones, to me, have a life of their own.

It is important that the image of her beauty sums up in man the richness of life, love, respect for the colors of the world created by God, thought of depth and faith. It does not matter who the painter is.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

It is really surprising what may be done in the home with a small can of paint, if you aren't careful.

I touched the frame of the painting. And then I placed my whole palm on the dry, rumbling surface of the canvas, simply to prove to myself that there was no god stalking my soul. Time was not immemorial. Things were just things.

It's like a nesting doll of imagination! It's like a painting of a painting! It's like the wind catching a chill from the wind, or a wave taking a dip in the ocean. It's like reading a novel that merely describes another novel. It's like music tapping its foot to a tune and saying 'Oh! I love this song!

I sat back and looked at it. It was ugly, dark, uncontrolled. Like a monster's face. Or maybe what I saw there was my own face. I couldn't quite tell. Was the face the image of something evil or the image of myself? "Both," Bea muttered, as if I'd spoken my question out loud. "Of course, it's both. But it shouldn't be. Goodness, no.

I saw all my colors, I realized that painting has the same power as music.

I see it, Jack. Your muse is back. The thing that gave you passion, tormented you, and haunted you is back. You're reeling in ecstasy and dread. It's something you want, but can't ever have. And the one that brings the pain is pure, white as snow... and standing in front of you.

… I studied the painting that hangs over the small fireplace. Immerse myself in art, I told myself. Immerse myself in the conversation of those strollers, people who seem to move about more comfortably in their early-evening twilight than I do, people of maybe sixty years ago.

It has occurred to me that when one is raised in the absence of culture – without access to galleries and museums – one has to fill the void. I turned to books, album covers, magazines, slides and prints – anything visually stimulating that I could lay my hands on.

It makes no sense to expect or claim to 'make the invisible visible', or the unknown known, or the unthinkable thinkable. We can draw conclusions about the invisible; we can postulate its existence with relative certainty. But all we can represent is an analogy, which stands for the invisible but is not it.

It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again.

[I]t was [Barnett] Newman who made the famously wry remark, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds,

It was a tribute to Raphael that lesser artists wanted to copy his work, but this… this was a travesty. The fresco consisted of Galatea’s apotheosis, wherein she is surrounded by mythical creatures. A beautiful scene, with all the potential in the world, but very poorly executed here. Galatea herself looked vapid and empty. The rest of the painting indicated pure ignorance on the part of the painter. I shook my head in confusion. The giant Polyphemus was depicted with two normal eyes, when clearly he ought to have but one. Triton, for his horn, was using not a shell but an actual trumpet of brass. I nearly laughed aloud at that observation; would not such an instrument be completely destroyed by seawater? Who the devil had painted this monstrosity?

I wanted an impressionistic effect, so I highlighted down her arms and the back of one hand. The other I left curled on one side and picked out her shoulders and collar bone. Then down to her navel, which I also highlighted in gold. Then I took a small paintbrush and hovered above her nipples. 'Gold, or pink?' 'Oh, definitely gold,' she said. I painted her nipples and areola, and she giggled. 'Interesting,' she said, lifting her head and looking down.

I visit him a few times downtown while he paints. We talk about how he's going to Spain for the fall semester and he shows me a painting he did and points to this one part, a bridge, and tells me he thought of me when he painted it. It is so sad how knowing something so small can make me so happy.

It was as if I was in a picture, a flat canvas, and everything around me was flat, me painted on like everything else: no colour, nothing in front and nothing behind me, not even earlier today or tomorrow, nothing to look back or forward to, just this moment.

I was confused by this sudden glare of attention; it was as if the characters in a favorite painting, absorbed in their own concerns, had looked up out of the canvas and spoken to me.

I was sort of collaging and I would think, “Oh, I’ll collage this work and then I’ll paint it.” But as I progressed I began to realize that everything was changing: there were different ways of printing the work, and perhaps there were things I could use to develop the work that didn’t involve painting.

I want to create, not kill.

I will admit that we as young rebels always wanted fundamentalists to understand our take on their religion, but rarely, if ever, the other way around. The fundamentalists are the real artists. If you saw only a masterpiece of an original painting and someone threw a splash of red across it saying that their version is better, you would be offended too.

Life hands us storms so we can paint rainbows.

Listen to the sunset...see its pretty hue... When you see it, think of me...and I'll think of you...

Little deer, I've stuffed all the world's diseases inside you. / Your veins are thorns // and the good cells are lost in the deep dark woods / of your organs.

Look at this one.” I picked up a small painting of a man with dark hair and a short, dark beard. He wore a loose shirt, cobalt blue, unbuttoned at the top, showing a prominent, knobby collarbone. He looked…complicated and hungry. She’d captured him focused intensely on a book, his face pressed against a wall like he was resting. Or waiting.

Love is an art, Berk. Just like painting or music. Some painters draw mere lines, scratches on the canvas and call them art; some paint stars studded skies like van Gogh; or Chopin’s music conquers the hearts of millions while the execrable disco music blaring out of the open windows of a car have also their audience. Some describe love in high-flown flowery language and you identify yourself with the hero and the heroine and feel yourself in the seventh heaven while some give such a lamentable picture of it that you almost curse it!

Merleau-Ponty's painting inhabits the same rhetoric as early cinema: it makes the invisible visible, or rather it makes visibility visible; it forms from the thresholds of the visible and invisible world, an order, mode, or aesthetic of visuality. Not only of the small or fast, but of visibility as such. The visuality of the visible and the invisible is found in the mixture of the body and its world, of your body and your world, all your worlds, all your bodies in this world and all those others. Painting is the process by which the visuality of the visible and invisible is made manifest: "Painting mixes up all our categories in laying out its oneiric universe of carnal essences, of effective likenesses, of mute meanings." Each painting is a universal archive, a picture of the universe, a universal image—and like a dream.

Most people take life as a jigsaw puzzle that has to be solved. It is a symphony only if you can play the music. It is a masterpiece only if you can paint it.

Musicians do not get on stage without hearing the song singing inside of them. Poets do not write as if they are jotting down a sermon, they see everything in their subconscious before presenting it to the conscious, which they later turn to  readable materials. Artist do not draw and paint without painting in dream states, trance, or see an art form that others do not see. Being creative does not calls for being any supernatural entity, but in creating with the entities inside of you.

Life is like a painting, seems smooth and glorious but you can see its dullness when you are near it.

Literature, although it stands apart by reason of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or as used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and merely presentative.

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.