Top 100 Artist Paint Quotes
#1. What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist: "Paint me just as I am." Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it.
Aubrey Beardsley
#2. Artist paint images unseen, musicians create sounds that emerge from silence, and authors write from a synthetic point of view about a world that can never exist.
Carl Henegan
#3. Self-deceit is a most damaging trait. The remedy, for an artist, is to paint a self-portrait!
Scott Kahn
#4. My belief is that it is most important for an artist to develop an approach and philosophy about life - if he has developed this philosophy, he does not put paint on canvas, he puts himself on canvas.
Jacob Lawrence
#5. The key is what is within the artist. The artist can only paint what she or he is about.
Lee Krasner
#6. Art doesn't begin with a brush and a palette, but with the artist's ability to perceive life. You have to learn how to live before you can learn how to paint.
Dean Mitchell
#7. You can't paint pictures of love. You can only imagine them. So I suppose I don't need a painting by another artist. I have enough of my own.
Wolfgang Beltracchi
#8. I can draw really well. And I like to paint. I'm a bit of an artist.
Zac Efron
#9. The best work of artists in any age is the work of innocence liberated by technical knowledge. The laboratory experiments that led to the theory of pure color equipped the impressionists to paint nature as if it had only just been created.
Nancy Hale
#10. See, if you paint wrong because that's the best you can do, you just a chump. But you do it because you want to? Then you're an artist.
Neal Shusterman
#11. Freeform radio is an art form. The airwaves are the empty canvas, the producer is the artist, and the sound is the paint.
Julius Lester
#13. The artist need not know very much; best of all let him work instinctively and paint as naturally as he breathes or walks.
Emil Nolde
#14. Adolin was there in a heartbeat, attacking with more skill than any other man Dalinar had known. The lad was a genius with the Blade, an artist with paint of only one shade.
Brandon Sanderson
#15. I have a strange need to paint; if I don't paint I cry and get bad headaches.
Judith Ellen Levy
#16. I am a commercial artist because I paint to earn a living. We who earn money from what we produce are all commercial artists.
Jack White
#17. T has always been so much my desire to paint for those who don't know the artistic side of a painting.
Vincent Van Gogh
#18. I would like to be a great artist. I would quit pitching if I could paint like Monet or Rousseau. But I can't. What I can do is pitch, and I can do that very well.
Tom Seaver
#19. Your mind is the canvas upon which you are the artist. What will you paint on your canvas today? Will you draw a stick figure or create a masterpiece ... ?
James A. Murphy
#20. An artist can go paint, and a writer can go write, but an actor needs to get hired, needs somebody to say, 'Here, come and do this,' That's the hard part.
John Glover
#21. My business is to paint what I see, not what I know is there.
J. M. W. Turner
#22. I still paint. I love the joy that color can give to our lives and to our communities. I try to bring something of the artist in me to my politics.
Edi Rama
#23. Before civilization, artists painted for the living. Today, most paint for a living.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#24. I paint because this is what I love to do. I have been painting since I was a kid and my dream was to become a well known professional artist
Leonid Afremov
#25. Shepard Fairey, the street artist responsible for President Obama's 'Hope' poster, is now facing vandalism charges in Detroit. It's pretty serious. Detroit officials say the artist's spray paint caused over $9,000 worth of improvements.
Jimmy Fallon
#26. I'm quite arty. I didn't know whether to become an artist or musician but I realised I could paint with music. All my songs have colours.
Ed Sheeran
#27. The artist has the master picture in his mind, before he begins to paint.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#28. Did I not tell you that I, too, in my way was an artist? I realised in myself the same desire as animated him. But whereas his medium was paint, mine has been life.
W. Somerset Maugham
#29. I've been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you. An amateur artist is one who works all week at something else so he can paint on Saturday and Sunday. A professional artist is one whose wife works so he can paint all the time.
Ben Shahn
#30. I don't want to have anything to say, it just gets in the way. I think the journey of an artist is a journey of discovery and some engagements with paint, with the nature of material, with bodily things ... One wants to open the story, not close it.
Anish Kapoor
#31. Wherever I wander off to, when I draw, when I paint, I get my life back. I am lucky that I am an Artist.
Hiroko Sakai
#32. In my previous life, I was an artist. I still paint. I love art.
Edi Rama
#33. To an artist, a picture is both a sum of ideas and a blurry memory of 'pushing paint,' breathing fumes, dripping oils and wiping brushes, smearing and diluting and mixing.
James Elkins
#34. I wanted to paint in a folk-artist-y way. My heroes were Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Rembrandt. I think Picasso is about as a modern as I got. But I incorporated things that they rejected as well as movements that happened later.
Joni Mitchell
#35. I talked to Miriam. She says you paint and write, you're an artist"
"at rare times I'm an artist; at most other times I'm nothing
Charles Bukowski
#36. My father kind of had hopes that I was going to become an artist like him - the typical thing. Of course I could play guitar better than him when I was about 12. But I couldn't paint better than him. So I went, 'I'm going to be the guitarist of the house, not the painter.'
David Russell
#37. The first assumption of an art critic is that the artist meant to paint something else.
Robert Breault
#39. Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature. This need we may call self-actualization.
Abraham Maslow
#40. And so in time the rowboat and I became one and the same-like the archer and his bow or the artist and his paint. What I learned wasn't mastery over the elements; it was mastery over myself, which is what conquest is ultimately all about.
Richard Bode
#41. They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist.
Oscar Wilde
#42. What I really think about Banksy is I think he's a genius; he's a great artist, and I like his stuff. But he's got to accept it if, from time to time, someone will need to paint over his work.
Boris Johnson
#43. The artist is now giving a first coat of paint to that tautly stretched canvas which the scientist has been so busy stretching that he has forgotten the use he intended to put it to.
Henry Miller
#44. Ben Says: The good news is ... nothing ever is permanent. You are the artist of your life ... so take your brush & paint it bright!
Timothy Pina
Bullying Ben
Timothy Pina
#45. David is purely a conceptual artist. He didn't play any instruments or paint or anything. We were painters.
Tina Weymouth
#46. My philosophy is that I'm an artist. I perform an art not with a paint brush or a camera. I perform with bodily movement. Instead of exhibiting my art in a museum or a book or on canvas, I exhibit my art in front of the multitudes.
Steve Prefontaine
#47. I don't paint what people expect,
I paint what my heart yearns to express.
Nikki Rowe
#48. Chefs work with food, artists with oil paint, programmers with code.
Steve Lohr
#49. Painting is an unspoken and largely unrecognized dialogue, where paint speaks silently in masses and colors and the artist responds in moods.
James Elkins
#50. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to.
Frida Kahlo
#51. Where there is a true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.
Orhan Pamuk
#53. I was trained as a fine artist. I went to a progressive public school in Pennsylvania that developed these talents, but I was never able to apply to a decent college because I had no math, no science - I was allowed to just paint all day and write.
Lynda Resnick
#54. When an artist friend of mine explained she was working her way up the creative ladder, I asked if she would kindly paint the front of my house on the way up.
Benny Bellamacina
#55. I consider myself an artist, but instead of paint or clay, my medium is drag. I put so much of myself into my drag from every detail of the costume, makeup and hair to my performance, the way I speak or even stand.
Manila Luzon
#56. I also had this artist friend who'd paint butterflies and things like that on my head.
Persis Khambatta
#57. He wanted to do more than paint his flame-haired model.
Juliette Banks
#58. I paint all the time. Each night I wrestle, I paint my face because I am an artist. It's kind of all coming together where I am able to do everything I really love to do and need in my life.
Jeff Hardy
#59. I am also an artist. I have the whole world as my canvas. I paint souls ...
Meher Baba
#60. Words are your paintbrush, and your life is the canvas. You can paint whatever you want to paint; you can even copy another artist's work - but what you express with your paintbrush is the way you see yourself, the way you see the entire reality.
Miguel Ruiz
#61. No artist, if he has original talent, can paint like another.
Joseph Plaskett
#62. A way you can get really good abs in film is you get your makeup artist to paint shadows - faux washboard. But if you see me in a movie and I have great abs, it means I have a great body double.
Jennifer Tilly
#64. I know artists whose medium is life itself, and who express the inexpressible without brush, pencil, chisel or guitar. They neither paint nor dance. Their medium is Being. Whatever their hand touches has increased life ... They are the artists of being alive.
Frederick Franck
#65. I started studying as an artist, but I got fed up with the fact that you can paint terrible pictures and if you explain them in an erudite way it's called great art. I thought this was rubbish.
Brian Froud
#66. An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.
Willem De Kooning
#67. I started out as an artist, and what I do is verbal paintings. I paint a picture. Hopefully, you'll see the characters and what they're doing and what they're saying.
Jonathan Winters
#68. To be an artist, you don't have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It's just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.
Viggo Mortensen
#69. It is for the artist ... in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features.
James Whistler
#70. Sometimes artist like to catch themselves looking out, let the world see them for once. It's a signature. This one is a very bold one. But this is also a witnessing. We want to remember, and we want to be remembered. That's why we paint.
Maureen Johnson
#71. After being taught sets and reps and working at it for a length of time you can't paint by numbers anymore. It must come from within. Any artist has an emotional contact with their work. A true bodybuilder doesn't just build muscle he creates muscle. You can't be a robot.
Tom Platz
#72. As an artist you organize your life so that you get a chance to paint, a window of time, but that's no guarantee you'll create anything worth all your effort. You're always haunt by the idea you're wasting your life.
Chuck Palahniuk
#73. The artist is obliged to invent the self who will paint his pictures.
Harold Rosenberg
#74. I realized that were I to paint flowers small, no one would look at them because I was unknown. So I thought I'll make them big, like the huge buildings going up. People will be startled; they'll have to look at them - and they did.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#75. Looking to the mountains around us, I saw that the mysterious artist who comes at night had paid us a visit. I wondered how he could paint so many different colors in one night; red, wine, yellow, and rust.
Wilson Rawls
#76. I grew up thinking art was pictures until I got into music and found I was an artist and didn't paint.
Chuck Berry
#77. Because all the brilliant ones- they can sing it and they can paint it, but they can't do it. You can't expect them to love you.
Dakota Lane
#79. If you're a Black artist, you could paint a wall of smiley faces, and someone will still ask you, 'Why are you so angry?'
Kara Walker
#80. Over time, jealousy becomes an element as indispensable as paint in the life of the master artist.
Orhan Pamuk
#81. Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.
Kathryn Bigelow
#82. No one would have the courage to walk up to a writer and ask to look at the last few pages of his manuscript, but they feel perfectly comfortable staring over an artist's shoulder while he is trying to paint.
Robert Genn
#83. When an artist wants to paint a painting, they have all those things in their head that they want to portray on a canvas. It's the same thing when I'm pitching. I have all these thoughts going through my head about how I want to pitch: which pitch I want to throw here, and why do I want to throw it?
Justin Verlander
#84. When I paint I feel that all the artists of the past are behind me.
Pablo Picasso
#85. The artist can't paint, sing, or dance without emotion: if he does, he is a machine masquerading as a person.
Eric Maisel
#86. The artist is a vessel for creativity. He has the key to the door of a very special place, which he can open at will. He doesn't paint but is painted through.
Thomas J. Katz
#87. I love color. When I paint, I use a lot of color. I love art that has a vibrancy of color and compositions. I adore the Impressionists, and I'm influenced strongly by them as a self-taught artist.
Pierce Brosnan
#88. I am convinced that each work of art, be it a great work of genius or something very small, has its own life, and it will come to the artist, the composer or the writer or the painter, and
say, "Here I am: compose me; or write me; or paint me"; and the job of the artist is to serve the work.
Madeleine L'Engle
#89. Write the masterpiece that has not been written.
Sing the masterpiece that has not been sung.
Paint the masterpiece that has not been painted.
Create the masterpiece that has not been created.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#90. Artists are perceptive, but they choose to write songs or make movies or paint pictures rather than simply keeping private diaries.
Jon Pareles
#91. The artist needs but a roof, a crust of bread, and his easel, and all the rest God gives him in abundance. He must live to paint and not paint to live.
Albert Pinkham Ryder
#92. When I paint, I liberate monsters They are the manifestations of all the doubts, searches and groping for meaning and expression which all artists experience One does not choose the content, one submits to it.
Pierre Alechinsky
#93. As an artist I have always tried to be faithful to my vision of life, and I have frequently been in conflict with those who wanted me to paint not what I saw but what they wished me to see.
Diego Rivera
#94. It does take a long time and a lot of paint to become our own artist.
Kate Jackson
#95. sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life.
George Eliot
#96. I'm an artist. And usually when I tell people I'm an artist, they just look at me and say, 'Do you paint?' or 'What kind of medium do you work in?'
Hasan M. Elahi
#97. I'm an independent artist, but I do have a good business relationship with Lego, since I'm a unique customer. They're aware of what I'm doing. A painter may not have a relationship with a paint maker, but there's only one company that makes Lego.
Nathan Sawaya
#98. I like to write and draw and paint, and my mom's an artist, so I think I get caught up in thinking, 'I'm afraid it's gonna be bad,' and it's hard for me to start sometimes.
Kristen Wiig
#99. When you give an artist a canvas, you shouldn't tell him exactly how much paint to put on it, or exactly how sharp the images should be. You should let the artist get going.
Reed Hundt
#100. Painters must want to paint above all else. If the artist in front of the canvas begins to wonder how much he will sell it for, or what the critics will think of it, he won't be able to pursue original avenues. Creative achievements depend on single-minded immersion.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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