Top 100 Art Of Painting Quotes
#1. He who has learned what is commonly considered the whole art of painting, that is, the art of representing any natural object faithfully, has as yet only learned the language by which his thoughts are to be expressed.
John Ruskin
#2. He that would be a painter must have a natural turn thereto. Love and delight therein are better of the Art of Painting than compulsion.
Albrecht Durer
#3. Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting.
Edmund Burke
#4. No-one who has a real understanding of the art of painting attaches any importance to what we call the subject of a picture - what is represented. To one who feels the language of pictorial form, all depends on how it is presented, nothing on what.
Roger Fry
#5. The art that I make and that I see others make confirms the miracle of being alive. Almost every day I live in a state of exaltation. The art of painting is to me sacred. It is central to all the other visual arts. This art is in a constant state of renewal.
Joseph Plaskett
#6. My art is representational by choice ... if the art of painting is to survive, it must describe and express people, their lives and times. It must communicate.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#7. The art of painting is entering a new golden age. It is in no danger of becoming obsolete.
Joseph Plaskett
#8. What has reason to do with the art of painting?
William Blake
#9. Beginning with audacity is a very great part of the art of painting.
Winston Churchill
#10. To me, the art of cinema is the same as the art of painting. The artist takes a 2D medium and gives you the illusion of depth. If you look at any of the great paintings, you have the illusion of depth. Which is part of the art. The same with the great movies.
William Friedkin
#11. If I want to pursue the art of painting - or music or writing or sculpture - it requires only my time and a few dollars for materials. If, however, I want to produce a motion picture I have to go out and raise a million dollars!
Orson Welles
#12. Learning the art of painting is not an easy task. It takes a great deal of intelligence, keen analysis, study and practice.
Edgar Alwin Payne
#13. Art, if it is successful in the task of questioning reality, if it is good painting and not merely a performance of dexterity, will be an affirmation of God.
Patrick Swift
#14. Art itself, in all its methods, is the child of religion. The highest and best works in architecture, sculpture and painting, poetry and music, have been born out of the religion of Nature.
James Freeman Clarke
#15. In every form of art, you really want the experience of the images to transcend the medium, for the medium to disappear into the greater experience of viewing the work. So that you forget you are looking at a painting, or a photograph.
Bill Henson
#16. I am more a friend of art than a producer of painting.
Paul Cezanne
#17. I began to see cinema as the perfect combination of so many wonderful art forms - painting, photography, music, dance, theater.
James Gray
#18. Painting, which is essentially a rhythmic harmony of coloured spaces. Realism was the death of art. Great art should come from the harmony of two lines.
Arthur Wesley Dow
#19. Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things.
Gustave Courbet
#20. Weirdly, an image of Adrian's Love painting came back to me. I thought of the jagged red streak, slashing through the blackness, ripping it
apart. Staring at Jill and her inconsolable pain, I suddenly understood his art a little bit better.
Richelle Mead
#21. All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time.
Otto Dix
#22. I couldn't live on the singing at first, so I worked as a cleaner, in a launderette, in a garage, face painting and doing the windows of shops at Christmas, 'cause I had been to art college.
Imelda May
#23. Initially I explored the tension between illustration and fine art when I first encountered miniature painting in my late teens. Championing the formal aspects of the Indo-Persian miniature-painting genre has often been at the core of my practice.
Shahzia Sikander
#24. Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, / Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? / That we by tracing magic lines are taught, / How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?
Marshall McLuhan
#25. Everyone who has any talent at all in sketching, painting, sculpturing or carving, should have the opportunity to use that talent. The expression is important for the person, and can tremendously enrich the lives of other people. What can you do?
Edith Schaeffer
#26. I will give a proof to demonstrate with facts that there are no rules in painting and that oppression or servile obligation of making all study or follow the same path is a great impediment for the young who profess this very difficult art.
Francisco Goya
#27. Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.
Salvador Dali
#28. For me, it's important to experience aesthetic shock, which sets in motion our imagination, our emotions, our feelings, and our thoughts. That's the purpose of a painting and of art in general.
Pierre Soulages
#29. A simple equation for the production of successful art work is lots of reference material plus lots of art supplies equals lots of painting happiness.
Robert Genn
#30. A lot of ideas don't translate very well into art. To say, "Oh my god, the grass is green ... " You're going to end up with a big green painting.
John Baldessari
#31. Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he been believes.
J.M. Coetzee
#32. I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.
Robert Indiana
#33. For me, acting is about the art of it and it's about being on a film set and doing your thing, painting a blank canvas.
Shailene Woodley
#34. Painting is seen as picture making, the making of an art object, something that can stand on its own.
Peter Wright
#35. And since geometry is the right foundation of all painting, I have decided to teach its rudiments and principles to all youngsters eager for art.
Albrecht Durer
#36. I am doing what I want to do - painting pictures people want and understand. I have no burning ambition to create the kind of 'art' which the confused critics praise for its 'plastic significance,' 'fluid lines,' and 'inner awareness,' or 'must be understood on three levels.
Arnold Friberg
#37. A man that has a taste of music, painting, or architecture, is like one that has another sense, when compared with such as have no relish of those arts
Joseph Addison
#38. The drama embraces and applies all the beauties and decorations of poetry. The sister arts attend and adorn it. Painting, architecture, and music are her handmaids. The costliest lights of a people's intellect burn at her show. All ages welcome her.
Robert Aris Willmott
#39. I don't think of myself as making art. I do what I do because I want to, because painting is the best way I've found to get along with myself.
Robert Rauschenberg
#40. Painting, art in general, enchants me. It is my life. What else matters? When you put all your soul into a work, all that is noble in you, you cannot fail to find a kindred soul who understands you, and you do not need a host of such spirits. Is not that all an artist should wish for?
Camille Pissarro
#41. All artists are mothers. To be an artist is to be a creator, whether of a symphony or a supper or a painting or a person. Motherhood is the primary art, the art of creating (procreating) people.
Peter Kreeft
#42. In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.
Theodore Bikel
#43. All art, be it writing, painting, film, dance, whatever, is a manipulation of time and space. It's an interpretation and a recreation of the facts, using various artifacts that point us in the direction of our personal truths.
Elisa Lorello
#44. In painting I try to make some logic out of the world that has been given to me in chaos. I have a very pretentious idea that I want to make life, I want to make sense out of it. The fact that I am doomed to failure - that doesn't deter me in the least.
Grace Hartigan
#45. What lives in art and is eternally living, is first of all the painter and then the painting.
Vincent Van Gogh
#46. I had always planned to make a large painting of the early spring, when the first leaves are at the bottom of the trees, and they seem to float in space in a wonderful way. But the arrival of spring can't be done in one picture.
David Hockney
#47. Only the four corners of the background remained. It was terribly difficult to fix my eyes on all of them at the same time. My experience was that the most difficult thing of all in art is painting in all four corners at the same time.
Arnulf Rainer
#48. An artist who painted a face was now 'playing with the idea of portraiture,' or 'exploring push-pull aesthetics,' or toying with contradictions like 'menacing-slash-playful,' but he or she was never, ever, just painting a face.
Steve Martin
#50. I am never in a hurry to reach details. First and above all I am interested in the large masses and the general character of a picture; when these are well established, then I try for subtleties of form and color. I rework the painting constantly and freely, and without any systematic method.
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
#51. A painting is a universal language which everyone can read, understand, and interpret in his own way through the power of imagination.
Debasish Mridha
#52. An artist's job is to inspire, from the Latin inspirare: to breathe into. The primary function of art is to inspire new thought shaped by emotions using the creative mediums we master - be it painting, music, design, craft, or photography.
Anonymous
#53. Letter from Van Gogh to Gauguin: Ah! my dear friend, to make of painting what the music of Berlioz and Wagner has been before us ... a consolatory art for distressed hearts! There are as yet only a few who feel it as you and I do!!! [Letter 739, Arles, 21 January 1889]
Liesbeth Heenk
#54. The paint for the grey paintings was mixed beforehand and then applied with different implements - sometimes a roller, sometimes a brush. It was only after painting them that I sometimes felt that the grey was not yet satisfactory and that another layer of paint was needed.
Gerhard Richter
#55. On the opposite wall was a Damien Hirst spot painting, bought by Arabella after a decent bonus season. Roger's considered view of the painting, looking at it from aesthetic, art-historical, interior-design, and psychological points of view, was that it had cost forty-seven thousand pounds, plus VAT.
John Lanchester
#56. Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God.
Rembrandt
#57. Nothing in the whole world is of interest to me but my painting and my flowers.
Claude Monet
#58. The subtle hues of gold and yellow and the fresh greens and the pepper red seemed to spiral into a kaleidoscope of shapes and forms that made the tips of a person's toes tingle, so that some were inclined to remove their shoes in its presence.
Jeffry R. Halverson
#59. 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.
Jane Hirshfield
#60. What seems most significant to me about our movement [Impressionism] is that we have freed painting from the importance of the subject. I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them flowers, without their needing to tell a story.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#61. Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all this. I think work is the best. (Frida Kahlo, p. 157)
Martha Zamora
#62. I love crafting. Knitting, decoupage, scrapbooking, any "lady-ish" art form, I'm a fan. For about six months each. Then I shove all the supplies in a closet, alongside the skeletons of long dead New Year's resolutions, like saber fencing, playing the ukulele, and Japanese brush painting.
Felicia Day
#63. My mother was the most creative, fantastic person and would come up with great things for us to do. She'd buy art supplies and all of us would sit around painting. I was lucky.
Cher
#64. Everybody thinks they know what art should be. But very few of them have the sense that is necessary to experience painting, that is the sense of sight, that sees colors and forms as living reality in the picture.
Otto Dix
#65. Painters strike me as having warm uncomplicated friendships and probably more natural generosity than the practitioners of any other art. Perhaps this is because painting is such a portable, flexible thing.
Paul Theroux
#66. Movie making is not like other art forms, like painting, or writing a novel, because that can be digested or interpreted ... It takes two years to make each one of these, and it's always judged on money.
M. Night Shyamalan
#67. The autonomy of art that emerged through Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Mondrian, and the Russian Constructivism had seen painting develop independent of imitations or decoration, and so the content of art became much closer to that of music.
Neville Weston
#68. I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.
Alistair Cooke
#69. If a certain activity, such as painting, becomes the habitual mode of expression, it may follow that taking up the painting materials and beginning work with them will act suggestively and so presently evoke a flight into the higher state.
Robert Henri
#70. ( ... ) photography opened up quite a little Pandora's box, kiddies. ( ... ) Once we no longer had to depend on drawing and painting to record our existence - once they became an option - they mutated ... into a form of expression. And Art for its own sake, God help us, was born.
Chip Kidd
#71. I have not collected art. Art collected me. I never found paintings. They found me. I have never even owned a work of art. They owned me.
Edward G. Robinson
#72. 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.
Hanya Yanagihara
#73. The pride taken by the Italians in their gifted women is among the most important facts in the history of their Renaissance.
Walter Shaw Sparrow
#74. The science of design, or of line-drawing, if you like to use this term, is the source and very essence of painting, sculpture, architecture ... Sometimes ... it seems to me that ... all the works of the human brain and hand are either design itself or a branch of that art.
Michelangelo
#75. Painting is the only universal language. All nature is creation's picture book. Painting alone can describe every thing which can be seen, and suggest every emotion which can be felt. Art reaches back into the babyhood of time, and is man's only lasting monument.
William Morris Hunt
#76. A sad fact of life lately at the Museum of Modern Art is that when it comes to group shows of contemporary painting from the collection, the bar has been set pretty low.
Jerry Saltz
#77. The dance is the mother of the arts. Music and poetry exist in time; painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space.
Curt Sachs
#78. Like what Jackson Pollock used to say. He thought the creation of the painting was the art, and the painting was just what was left. He didn't know why people wanted to buy his paintings.
Andy Reynolds
#79. NEXT LIFE. My embroidery studio on the main street of Bayeux will be just one part of my Institute of Slow Information. I will also teach letter writing, listening, miniature portrait painting, and the art of doing one thing at a time.
Vivian Swift
#80. Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.
Ambrose Bierce
#81. It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts-music, painting and writing-is magical and evocative; and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result.
William S. Burroughs
#82. How painting surpasses all human works by reason of the subtle possibilities which it contains.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#83. The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.
Edward Hopper
#84. What do you think an artist is? ... he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.
Pablo Picasso
#85. 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.
John Fowles
#86. There are many schools of painting. Why should there not be many schools of photographic art? There is hardly a right and a wrong in these matters, but there is truth, and that should form the basis of all works of art.
Alfred Stieglitz
#87. Like the people that in the 60s or 70s claimed the "end of painting" - all they did was open up a whole new branch for painting. Happily, it doesn't work. It's not a reason for art. Closing something out is not a reason for something to exist.
Lawrence Weiner
#88. Who speaks of art speaks of poetry. There is not art without a poetic aim. There is a species of emotion particular to painting. There is an effect that results from a certain arrangement of colors, of lights, of shadows. It is this that one calls the music of painting
Edouard Vuillard
#89. This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.
Edvard Munch
#90. Parks are works of art just as a painting or sculpture is.
Thomas Hoving
#91. Living is art.
Breathing and heart beating is music.
Seeing is painting the world with our eyes.
Touching is sculpting the shape of everything.
Life is the most intense art of all.
Jacob Nordby
#92. Anything can be art: painting stairs, raising a child, or organising a trip to the end of the world. It's the way you live that makes you either an artist, or an art connoisseur, or an unsatisfied critic.
Mykyta Isagulov
#93. You tell the big lie by carefully selecting only the small, isolated truths, linking them in such a way that that advance the bigger lie by painting a picture inside the viewer's head. The Ascended High Master of this Dark Art is Noam Chomsky.
Bill Whittle
#94. To explain away the mystery of a great painting - if such a feat were possible - would do irreparable harm ... If there is no mystery, then there is no poetry, the quality I value above all else in art.
Georges Braque
#95. In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.
Siri Hustvedt
#96. The real self of an artiste lies in art, so when an artiste performs, all the pain, trauma and tension get released through art, be it dancing, painting, singing, writing or even martial arts.
Mrinalini Sarabhai
#97. Like most sensible people, you probably lost interest in modern art about the time that Julian Schnabel was painting broken pieces of the crockery that his wife had thrown at him for painting broken pieces of crockery instead of painting the bathroom and hall.
P. J. O'Rourke
#98. Comedy is the one absolutely self-aware art form. Actually, hip-hop's another one, I suppose. Because in your songs you're talking about how good a hip-hop artist you are. It's like a painter painting a panting of himself painting a painting.
Bo Burnham
#99. I liked drawing and painting, because the only failure would be to listen to the doubters who wanted me to stop drawing and painting because 'you aren't going to make a living doing that.' I liked looking in art books at the work of painters.
Billy Childish
#100. Drawing is the art of being able to leave an accurate record of
the experience of what one isn't, of what one doesn't know. A
great drawer is either confirming beautifully what is commonplace
or probing authoritatively the unknown.
::: Brett Whiteley :::
Brett Whiteley
