Top 100 Great Painting Sayings
#1. Each part of a great painting should in itself be a great painting.
Melissa Brown
#2. A great painting or symphony or play, doesn't diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of Creation behind the Universe ..
Madeleine L'Engle
#3. I really prize and love great painting. It's so out of date now. It's slightly come back in.
John Lithgow
#4. Every great painting includes hundreds of imperfect brushstrokes" Ray White
Ray White
#5. 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
#6. Approach a great painting as thou wouldst approach a great prince.
Okakura Kakuzo
#7. Nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday.
Charles Saatchi
#8. The Academies of Art are nothing but great painting factories - those with talent are fed in at one end, and they come out as mechanical painting machines.
Edvard Munch
#9. 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
#10. Every great painting is left incomplete at the point where its completion is obvious.
Robert Breault
#12. You stand in front of a great painting and your heart just opens and your mind expands about what's possible. That, to me, is a connection to what God is.
Rosanne Cash
#13. I've enjoyed collecting. I've enjoyed art ever since - I'll tell you when - I went to Columbia. I went to the Met, and I saw Poussin's 'Rape of the Sabine Women', and it's this incredible, epic, great, great painting.
Daniel S. Loeb
#14. Keep in mind that when we talk of a great painting we are not really talking about anything great. We are talking of only a painting.
Joseph Heller
#15. Magic is the most interesting art because people not necessarily want to learn to paint after they see a great painting, but they want to learn magic after they see a great magic effect.
Amit Kalantri
#16. You know, the way art history is taught, often there's nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.
Chuck Close
#17. And if what they say is true
if every great painting is really a self-portrait
what, if anything, is Fabritius saying about himself?
Donna Tartt
#18. Everything I do, whether it's producing or signing an artist, always starts with the songs. When I'm listening, I'm looking for a balance that you could see in anything. Whether it's a great painting or a building or a sunset.
Rick Rubin
#19. There's something always instinctively visually right about nature. There's no difference, to my eye, between looking at a great painting and looking at nature. Because painting, when it's great, has the same immutable rightness, unquestioned rightness, about it.
Larry Poons
#20. Just as no great painting has ever been created by a committee, no great vision has ever emerged from the herd.
Warren G. Bennis
#21. really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular.
Donna Tartt
#22. A great painting is something that you can come back to again and again.
Bryce Dessner
#23. You can always tell a great painting, because when you get close there are all these nervous marks.
Damien Hirst
#24. If I could only have one more day, I could do a great painting.
Fritz Scholder
#25. Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is like a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle.
Balthus
#26. 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
#27. I do what I do out of pure enjoyment. Hopefully, nobody does it better. There's a beauty to making a great deal. It's my canvas. And I like painting it.
Donald Trump
#28. If a painting of mine suits me, it is right. If it does not please me, I care not if all the great masters should approve it or the dealers buy it. They would be wrong.
Arshile Gorky
#29. 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
#30. Great paintings have gradations, large and small ... They serve to lift the subject off the two-dimensionality of the canvas. Gradations are an essential abstract convention.
Robert Genn
#31. I'm compelled to paint nearly every day. I just felt like making a painting, went out and bought paints and a canvas. Now it fulfills me creatively when I'm not doing music: it's something you can do by yourself and it's totally yours. It's a great adjunct to my life.
David Johansen
#32. 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
#33. There are two ways of reasoning about painting: how to do it and how not to do it; how to d it with great deal of drawing and not much colour, how not to do it with a great deal of colour and not much drawing.
Vincent Van Gogh
#34. We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.
Patti Smith
#35. 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
#36. When we begin to lift the veils of censorship and repression in painting, a great deal of energy is unleashed.
Michele Cassou
#37. I became an American on Nov. 4, 2010, at an elegant ceremony in Great Hall of Bullfinch's Faneuil Hall, Boston, beneath a vast painting of Daniel Webster debating the preservation of the Union with Robert Hayne of South Carolina, before the Civil War.
Nigel Hamilton
#38. I tried to make everything breathe in this painting: faith, quiet suffering, religious and primitive style, and great nature with its scream.
Paul Gauguin
#39. I was never good at painting. The great turning point came when I had a block of wood and I carved a shape into the wood and put a small piece of timber into that space - like a negative - and so it made an endless column, only inward.
Carl Andre
#40. Now he stood in the farthest end of the cave, in front of the great lion chase he had watched Thorn paint so long ago. He saw again: it was by far the greatest painting in the the cave, maybe the world. Maybe it would always be the greatest painting.
Kim Stanley Robinson
#41. Occasionally, when I get mad at a woman, I'll do some great, awful painting about her.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
#42. 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
#43. It doesn't matter that your painting is small. Kopecks are also small, but when a lot are put together they make a ruble. Each painting displayed in a gallery and each good book that makes it into a library, no matter how small they may be, serve a great cause: accretion of the national wealth.
Anton Chekhov
#44. Leon Theremin's original designs are elegant, ingenious and effective. As electronics goes, the theremin is very simple. But there are so many subtleties hidden in the details of the design. It's like a great sonnet, or a painting, or a speech, that is perfectly done on more than one level.
Robert Moog
#45. Rock & roll is like a painting. Can great paintings still be done? It depends on who holds the brush.
Patti Smith
#46. When I say be creative I don't mean that you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem.
Osho
#47. If you don't have any money and you want to make a horror movie, take a six-inch wide brush for house painting and dip that in a bucket of blood, and then just flick your wrist. You'll get this great speckled splash of blood, and it will cost you nothing.
Bruce Campbell
#48. Painting the enemy as being as inhuman as possible is a great way to win a war.
Rae Carson
#49. The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.
Voltaire
#51. What one has most to work and struggle for in painting is to do the work with a great amount of labour and sweat in such a way that it may afterward appear, however much it was laboured upon, to have been done almost quickly and almost without any labour, and very easily, although it was not.
Michelangelo
#52. I certainly consider a great appreciation of painting to be the best indication of a most perfect mind ...
Leon Battista Alberti
#53. Painting is a source of endless pleasure, but also of great anguish.
Balthus
#54. Writing requires a great deal of skill, just like painting does. People don't want to learn those skills.
John Milius
#55. Painting a young maiden is similar to cavorting with great abandon. It is the finest refreshment.
Peter Paul Rubens
#56. Now that photography is a digital medium, the ghost of painting is coming to haunt it: photography no longer retains a sense of truth. I think that's great, because it frees photography from factuality, the same way photography freed painting from factuality in the mid-nineteenth century.
Vik Muniz
#57. I am adamant that we must not cut back on funding of the teaching of the arts in the schools: music, painting, theater, dance, all of it. The great thing about the arts is that the only way you learn how to do it is by doing it.
David McCullough
#58. It wasn't that I had any great dream of being an architect. I just wanted to make things. Whether it was furniture, painting, interior design, or architecture. I just wanted to create something.
Tadao Ando
#59. I do see myself as the heir to a vast, great, rich culture of painting - of art in general - which we have lost, but which places obligations on us.
Gerhard Richter
#60. At times there seems to be a million ideas worth painting. However, there are days when it's a challenge to pull any idea together. On these days I go to my studio, leaf through an art history book, and tell myself that I am part of this great tradition.
James Dean
#61. If I go to the National Gallery and I look at one of the great paintings that excite me there, it's not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me which return me to life more violently.
Francis Bacon
#62. One of the things I like about our contract is that you have relieved me of a great deal of personal interviewing and corresponding, among other things, which allows me a lot more time for painting.
E. J. Hughes
#63. If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.
Janet Malcolm
#64. Speaking of nudes, I have always had a great fondness for this subject, both in my paintings and in my photos, and I must admit, not for purely artistic reasons.
Man Ray
#65. Mr. Robertson Davies has also suggested in his Deptford Trilogy that the same great truism which applies to writing, painting, picking horses at the track, and telling lies in a sincerely believable way, also applies to magic: some people got the knack, and some people don't. Hilly didn't.
Stephen King
#66. 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
#67. I'm also inspired by anything that I consider great. It makes me want to raise my game too - Hitchcock movies, Hopper paintings, Springsteen concerts.
Harlan Coben
#68. Everything about Jocelyn had been ordinary. A Norman Rockwell painting of mom, dad, one boy, one girl. Scott was her wild storm, her great American novel, her epic story. Every extraordinary moment she experienced was because of him.
Jessica Shook
#69. Painting is a companion with whom one may walk a great part of life's journey.
Winston Churchill
#70. Acting, music, painting ... it's very subjective. So what I might think is a great actor, you might think is not a very good actor at all.
Billy Boyd
#71. In our world, in which religious images are losing their meaning, in which our customs are getting more and more secular, we are losing our sense of the eternal. I think it's a loss that has done a great deal of damage to modern art. Painting is a return to origins.
Antoni Tapies
#72. What is bad painting? Picabia made some deliberately bad paintings, but they were by him, so great in a way.
Peter Doig
#73. Is the Mona Lisa an 'accurate' representation of the actual human model for the painting? Who knows? Who cares? It's a great piece of art. It moves us. It makes us wonder, makes us gape - finally makes us look inward at ourselves.
Tim O'Brien
#74. There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry - architecture being the least banal derivative of the latter.
Edith Wharton
#75. Life matters more than any painting, novel, film, or great big diamond.
Rita Mae Brown
#76. If the imagination is shackled, and nothing is described but what we see, seldom will anything truly great be produced either in Painting or Poetry
Thomas Cole
#77. Painting is a great outlet for those inner emotions you cannot get out any other way.
Carol Brearley
#78. 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
#79. Why, if you are interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, you'll never learn to see the country.
C.S. Lewis
#80. While great leaders may be as rare as great runners, great actors, or great painters, everyone has leadership potential, just as everyone has some ability at running, acting, and painting.
Warren G. Bennis
#81. Painting is almost like a religious experience, which should go on and on. Age just gives you the freedom to do some things you've never done before. Great work can come at any stage of your life.
Will Barnet
#82. When I am halfway there with a painting, it can occasionally be thrilling ... But it happens very rarely; usually it's agony ... I go to great pains to mask the agony. But the struggle is there. It's the invisible enemy.
Richard Diebenkorn
#83. Color is one of the great things in the world that makes life worth living to me and as I have come to think of painting it is my efforts to create an equivalent with paint color for the world, life as I see it.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#84. In a purely technical sense, each species of higher organism-beetle, moss, and so forth, is richer in information than a Caravaggio painting, Mozart symphony, or any other great work of art.
E. O. Wilson
#85. As a kid, there was a painting of 'Appeal to the Great Spirit' that I would see when I would get oatmeal bowls out of the cupboard. This painting, it was so real to me that it frightened me.
Lance Henriksen
#86. Painting is still to a great extent dominated by a central image; corners in most cases are like uninvited guests at a party, uneasy and unattended.
Harold Town
#87. When you are drawing, you are always one or two marks ahead. You're always thinking, 'After what I'm doing here I'll go there, and there.' It's like chess or something. In drawing I've always thought economy of means was a great quality - not always in painting, but always in drawing.
Martin Gayford
#88. Beginning with audacity is a very great part of the art of painting.
Winston Churchill
#89. To his surprise he also discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something, whether painting or poetry, that you cared about a great deal.
Richard Russo
#90. Every painting I do blends time frames. The great thing about being an artist is I can make the past join the present in some reality of the future.
Thomas Kinkade
#91. Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.
Edward Hopper
#92. If you look at a painting that you love by one of the great masters, every time you go back to it, you see something different - a different attitude or brushstroke. 'Hamlet' is like an entire gallery of old masters.
Rory Kinnear
#93. It's a creative enterprise, just like art, just like painting, music. Creating something can be done in different categories, so to do it in film is just another expression, which is great. Because it translates so well because so many people see the work, if you're lucky.
Robert Redford
#94. I don't think it was pain that made [Vincent Van Gogh] great - I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.
David Lynch
#95. Our senses and emotions are the great source of inspiration for creating compelling and interesting art pieces (books included). Each art piece, be it a book, a song, a painting, a photograph or a product should touch our senses and evoke emotions. Emotionless art lacks purpose and interest.
Serafima
#96. Paintings are not like the Internet. They're not like movies. They're not electronic-friendly. You have to go see them. You have to stand in front of them. That's the great thing about them.
Julian Schnabel
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
