Top 100 Artist Painting Quotes
#1. An artist painting a picture should have at his side a man with a club to hit him over the head when the picture is finished.
John Singer Sargent
#2. Indeed, an engineer designing a structure is not unlike an artist painting one. Both start with nothing but talent, experience, and inspiration. The fresh piece of paper on the drawing board is as blank as the newly stretched piece of canvas.
Henry Petroski
#3. A painting is worth a thousand confused art-gallery visitors.
Ljupka Cvetanova
#4. It's a shock for me to go through and see all those years of painting my life, which is very personal for me. It's a very difficult thing for an artist to look back at his work.
Andrew Wyeth
#5. When we digital artists talk about painting on the computer, that is exactly what we do. The paints we use are pixels, the brush we use is a pressure sensitive pen. The colors are the same as painters use, and how we get to the final image is the same gut wrenching way.
Donald Lambert
#6. I'd love to be considered a post-pop artist, but I love to have five or six different styles in every painting, just for the pleasure of the eye.
Erro
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. The technical procedures doubtless release energies in the artist that remain unused in the much more lightweight processes of drawing or painting (remark on printmaking).
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
#11. It is in the intellectual and emotional response, the conscious and subconscious associations of the artist, that the potential power of painting lies.
Thomas S. Buechner
#12. What constitutes American painting? ... things may be in America, but it's what is in the artist that counts. What do we call 'American' outside of painting? Inventiveness, restlessness, speed, change ...
Arthur Dove
#13. It was never my goal to capitalize on punk. I could never make it as a commercial artist. I didn't back then and I still don't have the temperament and don't care for drawing or painting or making art for any other purposes other my own.
Raymond Pettibon
#14. I've gradually fooled myself into becoming a real painter ... I really just like to sit in my air-conditioned Rome painting studio surrounded by Medieval and Renaissance architecture and to hold a tube of Alizarin Madder Lake in my artist's hand and marvel at the shiny goop inside.
Mark Kostabi
#15. The artist must scorn all judgment that is not based on an intelligent observation of character. He must beware of the literary spirit which so often causes a painting to deviate from its true path - the concrete study of nature - to lose itself all too long in intangible speculations.
Paul Cezanne
#16. These days, newish art can be priced between $10,000 and $25,000. When I tell artists that a new painting by a newish artist should go for around $1,200, they look at me like I'm a flesh-eating virus.
Jerry Saltz
#17. The simple truth is that being a creative artist takes courage; it's not a job for the faint of heart. It takes courage each and every time you put a book or poem or painting before the public, because it is, in fact, enormously revealing.
Terri Windling
#18. Painting done under pressure by artists without the necessary talent can only give rise to formlessness, as painting is a profession that requires peace of mind.
Titian
#19. We're painting the same people all our life - it's just the way we look at them that changes. If you experience trauma, you can speak about it in so many different ways. You can speak about landscape, you can speak about your food; it's always different. Trauma is the beginning of life as an artist.
Christian Boltanski
#20. I have plenty of enemies ... among artists who resent my earning a living. They think I should go off and starve while painting something 'significant.
Arnold Friberg
#21. God told me if I painted that mountain enough, I could have it.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#22. Because I went to Chouinard, which then became CalArts, I became a multi-discipline artist - it wasn't just about painting, it was about media and performance.
John Van Hamersveld
#23. 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
#24. How do you complete a painting, really? There are paintings by so many different artists that are interesting precisely because they haven't really been completed.
Peter Doig
#25. 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
#26. It's sort of like my past is an unfinished painting, and as the artist of that painting, I must fill in all the ugly holes and make it beautiful again.
Lady Gaga
#27. Science for me is very close to art. Scientific discovery is an irrational act. It's an intuition which turns out to be reality at the end of it-and I see no difference between a scientist developing a marvellous discovery and an artist making a painting.
Carlo Rubbia
#29. I am the wood frame, the bundle of ox hair, and the creative spark ... my value unhangable.
Marina Leigh Duff
#30. Each artist comes to the painting or sculpture because there he can be told that he, the individual, transcends all classes and flouts all predictions. In the work of art, he finds his uniqueness confirmed.
Ben Shahn
#31. You see, painting has now become, or all art has now become completely a game, by which man distracts himself. What is fascinating actually is, that it's going to become much more difficult for the artist, because he must really deepen the game to become any good at all.
Francis Bacon
#33. Certainly a painting can be reductionistically described by its physical properties only: its shape, the paint, the design, and so forth. But every artwork that exists is both an individual thing, a whole unto itself, and simultaneously a part of the matrix of forces that brought it into being.
Alex Grey
#34. If you're going to be an artist, all life is your subject. And all your experience is part of your art. A youngster told me recently that he was going to give himself a year to see if he has talent. A year! It takes a lifetime to see if you have it. Painting is total engagement.
Ben Shahn
#35. I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist; or I'd draw a big ram's head, really messy. I'd never win painting contests. I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect Spiderman.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
#36. I'm not a political artist in any way, but if an idea takes me somewhere or something is emotionally impactful, I find a way to make a painting that encapsulates it.
Idris Khan
#37. Very few people have a natural feeling for painting, and so, of course, they naturally think that painting is an expression of the artist's mood. But it rarely is. Very often he may be in greatest despair and be painting his happiest paintings.
Francis Bacon
#38. The most mesmerizing of artists is always like one who was merely drawing in the sand and people came to watch.
Criss Jami
#39. The artist finds a greater pleasure in painting than in having completed the picture.
Seneca The Younger
#40. No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.
Claude Monet
#41. Any artist, the work you do, if it's a painting or if it's a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else's life. That's what's fun about sharing art.
Matthew McConaughey
#42. The real truthfulness of all works of imagination, sculpture, painting, and written fiction, is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#43. Drawing is the artist's most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality.
Edgar Degas
#44. Ring sense is an art, a gift from God that flows out of a fighter like a great painting flows out of an artist, or a great book flows out of an author.
Ray Arcel
#45. 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.
Luther E. Vann
#46. When you see what you express through photography, you realize all the things that can no longer be the objectives of painting. Why should an artist persist in treating subjects that can be established so clearly with the lens of a camera?
Pablo Picasso
#47. 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
#48. Elizabeth Peyton, the artist known for tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant youth, is now painting tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant middle age.
Jerry Saltz
#49. Not everybody has a talent for painting, or for the piano, or for dance. But we can write our way into the artist's head and into his problems and solutions. Or we can go there with another writer.
William Zinsser
#50. At art college, I started to do music and then painting and drawing - and that would have been my ideal life, to be an artist and be paid for it, to be able to create stuff. I realized it was difficult, but I don't know if I had the application for it.
Sean Bean
#51. The earth doesn't care where death occurs ... It's the artist, by coming in and writing about it or painting it or taking a photograph of it, that makes the earth powerful and creates death's memory. Because the land will not remember by itself, but the artist will.
Sally Mann
#52. I feel like I became an artist by default. I went to art college, but my interest was always more towards film than painting or sculpture.
Sam Taylor-Johnson
#53. Whether it is drawing or painting, skilled Artists usually deliver a faster result without jeopardizing the quality, simply because they don't have to waste their time on fixing mistakes.
Igor Babailov
#54. Art is nothing tangible. We cannot call a painting 'art' as the words 'artifact' and 'artificial' imply. The thing made is a work of art made by art, but not itself art. The art remains in the artist and is the knowledge by which things are made.
Ananda Coomaraswamy
#55. An artist makes a painting, and nobody bugs him or her about it. It's just you and your painting. To me, that's the way it should be with film as well.
David Lynch
#56. I have been surrounded by artists and paintings throughout my life. My father Ted Dyer is an artist, and from a very early age I have spent time painting and drawing.
John Dyer
#57. The process of drawing is ... the process of putting the visual intelligence into action, the very mechanics of visual thought. Unlike painting and sculpture ... the artist makes clear to himself and not to the spectator what he is doing. It is a soliloquy before it becomes communication.
Michael Ayrton
#58. Every artist is supposed to get emotional. You're painting pictures of emotions.
Wale
#59. From since I could remember I've always been an artist, drawing, painting and so forth. I would also always draw made up rock n' roll characters in a band who each had their own style and personalities. I think by accident I was already becoming a fashion designer.
Ashley Purdy
#60. Our best canvas is all around us, in everything we touch and do.
Fennel Hudson
#61. 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 ... ?
Hiroko Sakai
#62. I'm often painted as the bad guy, and the artistic part of me wants to hand out the brush.
Criss Jami
#63. With rare exceptions, I respond most to painting that cuts across grain rather than following it. I think the artist here can get in touch with that grain rather than simply feel its flow. And he really can't cut right across it anyway.
Richard Diebenkorn
#64. In French, there is an old expression, la patte, meaning the artist's touch, his personal style, his 'paw'. I wanted to get away from la patte and from all that retinal painting.
Marcel Duchamp
#65. I saw a painting once where the artist had actually done that
signed his work in blood ... When I saw that, I thought it was as if the man who had painted the picture wanted to say to me, Well, you did ask what this actually cost.
Neil Bartlett
#66. You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.
Rick Riordan
#67. It is through observation and perception of atmosphere that he [the artist] can register the feeling that he wishes his painting to give out.
Lucian Freud
#68. I've explored a variety of directions and themes over the years. But I think in my painting you can see the signature of one artist, the work of one wrist.
Helen Frankenthaler
#69. Painting is an unspoken and largely unrecognized dialogue, where paint speaks silently in masses and colors and the artist responds in moods.
James Elkins
#70. Does it bother me that some people are burning their own System CDs and taking money out of my pocket? Not really. This has always been about putting the best possible version of the song in the fans hands. It was like selling an artist's painting before he had finished it.
Daron Malakian
#71. The activity of painting: A thrilling tussle between the artist's materials and his inspiration.
Mervyn Levy
#72. I barely knew I wanted to be an artist. I liked my art classes and painting was fun, I guess, but I didn't realize that seeing the country was going to inspire me to further explore that ... but that's what it did.
Edward Ruscha
#73. I grew up painting and playing piano so when I was a little kid I thought I was going to be an artist or a painter but my mom had me taking piano lessons for about 10-12 years as a young kid.
Mike Shinoda
#74. Jo told me once that she was an old woman everywhere but in her studio. "There I'm only myself," she'd said. Standing in the middle of masterpieces that only Jo had ever seen and touched, I knew what she meant.
Laura Anderson Kurk
#75. My dad's an artist, and my grandfather paints - he's not a painter; my grandfather's a butcher - but he does a lot of crafts, stained glass, painting, that stuff. There is art in our family, and I was an art major in college along with being a theater major.
Brett Dalton
#76. When I need some striking inspiration about deep depression for my new painting, I just need to go to check my bank account ...
Hiroko Sakai
#77. Painting expresses the depth and insight, the spiritual quality of the artist. If art is about life, then, while the depth to which the artist has drunk from the well of life may not guarantee success, it must surely improve the quality of his/her work.
Millard Sheets
#78. What we hope for from the artist is help in discovering the significance of a place. In this sense we would choose in most respects for thirty minutes with Edward Hopper's painting Sunday Morning to thirty minutes on the street that was his subject; with Hopper's vision we see more.
Robert Adams
#79. I had serious training of painting styles from different historical periods ... But to have all this training is not enough to be an artist. You have to add a new page to history; otherwise you are not making a contribution. But making history is not easy.
Liu Dan
#80. When you paint late at night, drinking beer or wine or both, you gotta be very careful to watch what you are doing ...
Hiroko Sakai
#81. - except for the fact that your scars mean you've been hurting, I am one-hundred-percent cool with having them in the painting. Some models, especially the professional ones, it's like painting air-brushed people. Give me something raw any day.
J. Kenner
#82. The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself.
Andre Malraux
#83. What a funny thing painting is. The abstract painters always insist on their connection with the visible reality, while the so called figurative artists insist that what they really care about, is the abstract qualities of life.
Marlene Dumas
#84. She was like an outline of the painting of the Holy Virgin that an artist has sketched in black and white, but not yet filled with colour.
Karen Maitland
#85. My great longing is to learn to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodellings, changes of reality, so that they may become, yes, untruth if you like - but more true than the literal truth.
Vincent Van Gogh
#86. If an artist has no experience before he makes a painting or a sculpture, he is not an artist.
Naum Gabo
#87. I was making big paintings with mythological themes. When I started painting black figures, the white professors were relieved, and the black students were like, 'She's on our side.' These are the kinds of issues that a white male artist just doesn't have to deal with.
Kara Walker
#88. My father is a well known artist, Ted Dyer, who has been painting for many years. Our work is very different, but growing up surrounded by paintings, paints, easels and art books does have an effect.
John Dyer
#89. We were perfectly willing to go in there and rest, but it could not be done. It was only another delusion - a painting by some ingenious artist with little charity in his heart for tired folk.
Mark Twain
#90. Technically, a makeup artist's canvas is the face and body. The difference is that my painting of makeup is integrated into the painting of the flesh and not on top of it. I think in some ways it is more difficult to expressively deploy makeup.
Richard Phillips
#91. We need to insist on making culture out of our desire: making paintings, novels, plays and films potent and seductive and authentic enough to undermine and overwhelm the Iron Maiden.
Naomi Wolf
#92. Jobs was a strong-willed, elitist artist who didn't want his creations mutated inauspiciously by unworthy programmers. To him it would be as if someone off the street added some brush strokes to a Picasso painting or changed the lyrics to a Dylan song.
Walter Isaacson
#93. Having a great golf swing helps under pressure, but golf is a game about scoring. It's like an artist who can get a two-inch brush at Wal-Mart for 20 cents or a fine camel-hair brush from an art store for 20 dollars. The brush doesn't matter - how the finished painting looks is what matters.
Jerry Pate
#94. think of daily life as an ever-moving three-dimensional painting with you as the artist,
Jane Roberts
#95. The artist has the master picture in his mind, before he begins to paint.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#96. Because fashion essentially is art, and as an artist and someone who is also a musician and an artist in regards to drawing and painting, anything I can do that expresses my feelings is something I'm really drawn to.
Ruby Rose
#97. The artist does not exist except as a personification, a figure of speech that represents the sum total of art itself. It is painting that is the genius of the painter, poetry of the poet, and a person is a creative artist to the extent that he participates in that genius.
Harold Rosenberg
#98. The Best of the artist's art, which will one day be in a Museum wall, the Painting that sets the artist apart of all other artist artists.
Kelly Miller
#99. I have to take it as a given that I have got a certain ability to do something. I can be an artist, which is take something and transform it into another thing. I can just see something, and I can see my painting.
Gary Hume
#100. Part of what we admire about a painting or a piece of music is the order which the artist has imposed upon what would otherwise have appeared disconnected or chaotic.
Anthony Storr
