Great Painter Quotes

#1. A great painter does not content himself by affecting us with his masterpieces; ultimately, he succeeds in changing the landscape of our minds. Once

Orhan Pamuk

#2. I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot.

Evan Hunter

#3. To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life.

Algernon Charles Swinburne

#4. Michael Jordan didn't become a great basketball player because he wanted to do product endorsements. Van Gogh didn't become a great painter because he dreamed that one day his paintings would sell for $50 million.

Jack D. Schwager

#5. What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero.

Pablo Picasso

#6. Clem had made it known that Pollock was a great painter.

Kenneth Noland

#7. Everyone said to Vincent van Gogh, "You can't be a great painter, you only have one ear." And you know what he said? "I can't hear you.

Steve Carell

#8. A GREAT PAINTER will know a great deal about how he did it, but still he will say, "How did I do it?" The real artist's work is a surprise to himself.

Robert Henri

#9. Whenever a great painter ... does a work which appears to be false and lying, that falsity is very true.

Michelangelo

#10. The great painter has something to say. He does not paint men, landscapes, or furniture; but an idea.

Robert Henri

#11. Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.

H.P. Lovecraft

#12. I always think about what's the difference between being tenacious and having an inability to learn from failures. The difference between the homeless guy who wanted to be a great painter and the guy who is a great painter could be anything.

Neil Burger

#13. No, I'm not a great painter. Neither am I a great poet.

Claude Monet

#14. To be a great painter means to be a great poet: someone who transcends the limits of his language.

Octavio Paz

#15. Dali was the great painter then and surrealism was a way of life.

Vincente Minnelli

#16. Many have genius, but, wanting art, are forever dumb. The two must go together to form the great poet, painter, or sculptor.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

#17. It reflects no great honour on a painter to be able to execute one thing well.

Leonardo Da Vinci

#18. In order for me to be successful ... In order to be a great artist - musician, actor, painter, whatever - you must be able to be private in public at all times. That is what we do.

Lady Gaga

#19. Though colour may appear at first a part of painting merely mechanical, yet it still has its rules, and those grounded upon that presiding principle which regulates both the great and the little in the study of a painter.

Joshua Reynolds

#20. I won't ever set the world on fire as a painter,' Dickie said, 'but I get a great deal of pleasure out of it.

Patricia Highsmith

#21. When the painter wishes to represent an event, he cannot place before us too great a number of personages; but he cannot employ too few when he wishes to portray an emotion.

Joseph Joubert

#22. Well, in order for me to be successful ... In order to be a great artist - musician, actor, painter, whatever - you must be able to be private in public at all times.

Lady Gaga

#23. If you're a painter, it's simply taken for granted that you'll spend a lot of time in museums studying great paintings, but if you're a cartoonist, it used to be very hard to see an original cartoon drawing.

Bill Watterson

#24. I've done what I could as a painter and that seems to me to be sufficient. I don't want to be compared to the great masters of the past, and my painting is open to criticism; that's enough.

Claude Monet

#25. When I was nine, my great grandfather, a landscape painter, taught me to mix colors. With his strong hand surrounding my small one, he guided the brush until a calla lily appeared as if by magic on a page of textured watercolor paper.

Susan Vreeland

#26. No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

John Ruskin

#27. The great paintings are the ones with the most subtle value relationships. The closer you could bring your values and still distinguish between them, the stronger you were as a painter.

John F. Carlson

#28. The painter of genius will not waste a moment upon those smaller objects which only serve to catch the sense, to divide the attention, and to counteract his great design of speaking to the heart.

Joshua Reynolds

#29. At one point Trudeau mentioned to me that the National Gallery wanted to buy a masterpiece by the great Italian painter Lotto, and it needed a million dollars from the Treasury Board. "Is that Lotto-Quebec or Lotto-Canada?" I joked, but I got the message, and the National Gallery got the painting.

Jean Chretien

#30. My mother's father was from Brazil - a painter, and not a famous one - and was always broke. But he was a free spirit, a great grandfather.

Claire Denis

#31. It is not sufficient merely to be a great master in painting and very wise, but I think that it is necessary for the painter to be very moral in his mode of life, or even, if such were possible, a saint, so that the Holy Spirit may inspire his intellect.

Michelangelo

#32. In his lifetime the great French impressionist painter Corot painted 2000 canvases. Of that number, 3000 are in the United States.

Morley Safer

#33. Van Gogh cut off his ear
gave it to a
prostitute
who flung it away in
extreme
disgust.
Van, whores don't want
ears
they want
money.
I guess that's why you were
such a great
painter: you
didn't understand
much
else.

Charles Bukowski

#34. My father was a painter. There was a lot of singing. We hung around with a lot of folk musicians. My family knew a lot of great folk musicians of the time, like Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Leadbelly. They were all people we knew.

Alan Arkin

#35. I do have great respect for painting, but I am definitely not a painter. I make drawings of paintings, and I'm jealous of painting for sure, but, for me, the paper gives my work a limit.

Robert Longo

#36. A painter may be looking at the world in a way which is very different from everyone else. If he's a craftsman, he can get other people to see the world through his eyes, and so he enlarges our vision, perception, and there's great value in that.

Edward De Bono

#37. The poet and the painter are only truly great by the mutual influences of their studies, and the jealousy of glory has only produced an idle contest.

Isaac D'Israeli

#38. The concealment of art by the actor is as great a mark of genius as it is in the painter.

Francois Delsarte

#39. I am just doing photo shoots. It's not something that extraordinary. I'm not a great artist, I'm not writing books, I'm not a painter, and people in the streets ask me for a picture or a note, and I say, 'Why?'

Carine Roitfeld

#40. The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness.

Loren Eiseley

#41. In a perfect world, I would be a painter. I love working with my hands. I don't get to do it as much as I like, but I am finding a way to make more time as life goes on because it's a really great outlet for me to express myself.

Halle Berry

#42. The great poet is a great artist. He is painter and sculptor. The greatest pictures and statues have been painted and chiseled with words. They outlast all others.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#43. I would much rather be known as the mother of a great son than the author of a great book or the painter of a great masterpiece.

Rose Kennedy

#44. The great thing about a painter is that he or she lives on - I mean, Andrew Wyeth is more in his paintings than he was walking around.

Jamie Wyeth

#45. The only kind of sublimity which a painter or sculptor should aim at is to express by certain proportions and positions of limbs and features that strength and dignity of mind, and vigor and activity of body, which enables men to conceive and execute great actions.

Edmund Burke

#46. It takes a long time to make a painter - even with a good artist's education - but without one it tries the patience of Job; it is a great thing if one does not go backward.

Edward Lear

#47. He said, I suppose there are people who are purely moved by great art. I never met a painter who was. I'm not. All I think of when I see that picture is that it has the supreme mastery I have spent all my life trying to attain. And shall not. Ever.

John Fowles

#48. I decided to become a painter when my first four paintings where all published and attracted a great deal of interest. I exhibited one of them and it was sold.

John Dyer

#49. A great writer weaves words like a painter mixes colors.

James D. Maxon

#50. 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