Life As A Painting Quotes

#1. A novel should be as like life as a painting, but not as like life as a piece of waxwork.

Mary Russell Mitford

#2. Your art is part of the big painting of your life. You are on your own, standing by yourself in the middle of creation. In the beauty of that aloneness, and in how you respond to it, you will find your passion.

Michele Cassou

#3. When I was 18, I lived in Greenwich Village, New York, for nine months. At that time, I wanted to change the world, not through architecture, but through painting. I lived the artist's life, mingling with poets and writers, and working as a waiter. I was intrigued by the aliveness of the city.

Christian De Portzamparc

#4. Life is like a painting you reflect the image based on your feeling, emotion, character, attitude and how you made it.

Daniel Habil

#5. I studied painting and sculpting at school and became an actress by mistake ... I've had many lovers and still have romances. I am very spoiled. All my life, I've had too many admirers.

Gina Lollobrigida

#6. My aim in painting is to create pulsating, luminous, and open surfaces that emanate a mystic light, in accordance with my deepest insight into the experience of life and nature.

Hans Hofmann

#7. 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

#8. Sometimes, dear brother, I know so well what I want. I am quite able to do without God, both in my life and in my painting, but what I cannot do without, unwell as I am, is something greater than myself, which is my life, the power to create.

Vincent Van Gogh

#9. It's important to have a life and spend time outside of those things [music and politics], in order to appreciate what you've achieved as far as just spending time with people you love, and doing things like painting.

Eddie Vedder

#10. Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. I try to act in that gap between the two.
- 1959, from a catalogue

Robert Rauschenberg

#11. I have no idea what to expect I have no idea what my life will be like in this new place and I'm being nailed in the stomach by every exquisite embellishment, every lavish accessory, every superfluous painting, molding, lighting, coloring of this building. I hope the whole thing catches fire.

Tahereh Mafi

#12. The whole scene had a dreamlike quality, like a Chagall painting come to life.

Lev Grossman

#13. The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

#14. Painting is a magical process that I like, where you conjure something out of nothing; you get a little idea that leads you through ... You can go into a trance while you're doing it, so it's a nice contrast to real life.

Paul McCartney

#15. From music and dance to painting and sculpting, the arts allow us to explore new worlds and to view life from another perspective. They also encourage individuals to sharpen their skills and to nurture their imagination and intellect.

George W. Bush

#16. Anyone can put paint on a canvas, but only a true master can bring the painting to life. Anyone can kill, but only a genius can make murder an art.

Shaun Jeffrey

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. ALIF: Painting brings to life what the mind sees, as a feast for the eyes.
LAM: What the eye sees in the world enters the painting to the degree that it serves the mind.
MIM: Consequently, beauty is the eye discovering in our own world what the mind already knows.

Orhan Pamuk

#20. I see no thread running through my work; I simply get on with my life and my painting.

John Piper

#21. He that would be a master must draw from the life as well as copy from originals, and join theory and experience together.

Jeremy Collier

#22. I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, 'the ability to conceive failure as progress.'

Jerry Saltz

#23. To an untrained eye, need and love were as easily mistaken for each other as the real master's painting and a forgery.

Deb Caletti

#24. I suppose what you're doing as a painter is making a record of your trip through life. I can't think of any job that is quite as satisfactory as doing a painting.

Robert Genn

#25. I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.

Pablo Picasso

#26. The painter folded back the heavy curtain, standing in the stream of light breaking through the damp thickness of the room. He paused, still holding the drape in his hand as he considered with suspicion that a world could exist outside the window.

Thomas Lloyd Qualls

#27. The problem of a painting is physical and metaphysical, the same as I think life is physical and metaphysical.

Barnett Newman

#28. The majority of my work is from life. I spend most fine days from May to October painting outside.

John Dyer

#29. You told me a love story. I honestly believe your parents wanted the best for you, but their love almost destroyed your life. If Our Lady, as she appeared in my grandmother's painting, was treading on a snake, that indicates that love has two faces.

Paulo Coelho

#30. We must judge men not so much by what they, as by what they make us feel that they have it in them to do. If a man has done enough in either painting, music, or the affairs of life, to make me feel that I might trust him in an emergency he has done enough

Samuel Butler

#31. By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

Edvard Munch

#32. Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.

Yann Martel

#33. I want the people looking at my work to feel a sense of all the possibilities of painting, and, through that, in life as a whole. When that happens, I feel I've accomplished something useful.

Wolf Kahn

#34. 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

#35. Painting completed my life.

Frida Kahlo

#36. Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting. Life is profound in its simplicity.

Charles Bukowski

#37. It is not about painting life, it is about making painting alive.

Paul Cezanne

#38. Painting is much more than therapy to me its a way of life.

Tony Curtis

#39. My sister-in-law is a painter, and I'll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She'll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting.

Anthony Doerr

#40. 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

#41. The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.

Harold Rosenberg

#42. The only thing in life that really gives me any peace is just being lost in the process of creating something, whether it's the film or painting and drawing, which has been a big part of my life, for a long time.

Ellar Coltrane

#43. There is a larger frame to the painting than the one that bounds our life's events.

Ram Dass

#44. [Robert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008] helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art - not to mention between art and life.

Michael Kimmelman

#45. There are moments when clear images finally begin to emerge within the abstract painting of your life.

Renee Carlino

#46. If you have used colour throughout most of your artistic life, try just black and white ... it will take your painting to another dimension where tone and form in all its permutations reign supreme.

David Luiz

#47. I do believe it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply molding one's inner life. And that too is a deed.

Etty Hillesum

#48. As a young person, you have no fixed address, no studio, no money for materials, so I made things sort of on the run. That life doesn't favor the stability and spatial demands of painting.

David Salle

#49. Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk. Why shouldn't painting be too?

Edgar Degas

#50. In a way, a garden is the most useless of creations, the most slippery of creations: it is not like a painting or a piece of sculpture - it won't accrue value as time goes on. Time is its enemy' time passing is merely the countdown for the parting between garden and gardener.

Jamaica Kincaid

#51. My studio work is a central part of my life and I'd be at loose ends without it. When I'm not in my studio, I don't stop thinking about painting.

Stephen Beal

#52. It felt as if I had lived all my life inside a flat painting and only now had I stepped into the real world.

Rosamund Hodge

#53. I'm quite sure that all true professional artists, of every description, in all walks of life, whether their craft is painting, music, sculpture, medicine or anything, have one primary concern - mankind.

Chico Hamilton

#54. 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

#55. It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it.

Georgia O'Keeffe

#56. To make music I rely on other people, which is good - that's the main difference in painting and music at this stage. They are separate parts of my life really, like having two jobs, one in a bar, one in a lighthouse.

Danny Fox

#57. Regarding the creative: never assume you're the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you're masterful.

Don Roff

#58. 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

#59. Painting gave meaning to my life which without it would not have had

Francis Bacon

#60. If you construct a room in paint, you haunt it. Your life rests in every stroke. So paint only the rooms that you can bear to occupy forever. Or paint the stars instead.

Benjamin Wood

#61. Sculpture and painting are moments of life; poetry is life itself.

Walter Savage Landor

#62. You care enough, that you want your life to be fulfilled in a living way, not in a painting way, not in a writing way ... you really do want it to be involving in living, corresponding with other living objects, moving, changing, that kind of thing.

Edie Sedgwick

#63. Not everything in life can or should be explained. Part of every painting should be incomplete ... to be completed in the mind of the viewer.

Russell Chatham

#64. It's not about getting over things, it's about making room for them. It's about painting the picture with contrast.

Brianna Wiest

#65. The world somehow is always the same. The only thing that can improve is the individual life. One can live a good life. One can give life a meaning. Either by drinking oneself to death or by painting oneself to death or by loving oneself to death.

Odd Nerdrum

#66. The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that make one's life.

Georgia O'Keeffe

#67. 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

#68. One must act in painting as in life, directly.

Pablo Picasso

#69. 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

#70. 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