Top 100 My Painting Quotes
#1. It took me time to understand my water lilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them.
Claude Monet
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claim to praise.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#5. 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
#6. People say, 'Why don't you just paint with paintbrushes?' I say that I feel more connected to my painting using my skin. It's very tribal in a way - savage!
Meredith Ostrom
#7. Sometimes I miss out the morning's painting session and instead study my Japanese books in the open.
Gustav Klimt
#8. Initially I explored the tension between illustration and fine art when I first encountered miniature painting in my late teens. Championing the formal aspects of the Indo-Persian miniature-painting genre has often been at the core of my practice.
Shahzia Sikander
#9. If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.
Pablo Picasso
#10. Art was always my thing. I had an art scholarship before I had a football scholarship. I'm a left-handed, right-brained, painting-drawing guy. That was always my skill.
Terry Crews
#11. I think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me.
Andy Warhol
#12. I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.
Kenneth Koch
#13. I was the youngest of four kids, and Dad, who had a garden centre before he retired, came from a large Lancashire family. Every one of my uncles had their own business, including a post office, two fish and chip shops and a painting and decorating business.
Rick Astley
#14. I used to do stop motion in my own garage and Claymation and all that stuff. That led to doing backgrounds and matte paintings. I started doing matte paintings professionally back before the computer, sort of painting on glass.
Robert Stromberg
#15. 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
#16. In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.
Theodore Bikel
#17. Usually I draw in relation to my painting, what I am working on at the time. On a lucky day a surprising balance of forms and spaces will appear ... making itself, the image taking hold. This in turn moves me toward painting - anxious to get to the same place, with the actuality of paint and light.
Philip Guston
#18. I am going to do some drawings or paintings ... in the mirror of my wardrobe..with myself as a figure doing something.
Gwen John
#19. When I work, I'm thinking in terms of purely visual effects and relations, and any verbal equivalent is something that comes afterwards. But it's inconceivable to me that I could experience things and not have them enter into my painting.
Adolph Gottlieb
#20. Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness.
Edvard Munch
#21. I always sang. I wanted to be in a band with my sister, and I was, at 11. At 12, I started writing seriously, and that was my pacifier all through high school - that and painting.
Cyndi Lauper
#22. 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
#23. It's like they were worried that I'd be alone all day brooding and painting my cabin black or something - sheesh.
Melissa Walker
#24. I am trying with all my skill to do a painting that is all woman, as well as all of me.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#25. My work is an exploration of the self. I've always been concerned with how I'm living and how that reflects in the painting.
Jose Parla
#26. 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
#27. The Landscape becomes reflective, human and thinks itself though me. I make it an
object, let it project itself and endure within my painting....I become the subjective
consciousness of the landscape, and my painting becomes its objective consciousness.
Cezanne
#28. 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
#29. When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.
Brian Eno
#30. My goal is to make all my paintings clear and realistic, even more understandable than a photograph.
E. J. Hughes
#31. You don't look at a painting and ask if the artist was gay or straight. I think it's irrelevant in any situation - I don't care if my garbageman is gay or straight as long as he picks up the garbage.
Bryan Batt
#32. I was very dramatic as a kid. I loved to entertain. I was taking my bathing suits and painting them black and putting sparkles on them because I thought I was going to be on stage.
Selena Gomez
#33. If my husband ever met a woman on the street who looked like one of his paintings he would faint.
Jacqueline Roque
#34. I always liked paintings to be walls rather than windows. When we see a painting on a wall, it's a window, so I often put my paintings in the middle of the space to make a wall.
Pierre Soulages
#35. At 18 I began painting steadily fulltime and at age 20 had my first New York show at the Macbeth Gallery.
Andrew Wyeth
#36. I paint for myself. I don't know how to do anything else, anyway. Also I have to earn my living, and occupy myself.
Francis Bacon
#37. My parents felt that acting was far too insecure. Don't ask me what made them think that painting would be more secure.
John Hurt
#38. My life is like a memento more painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition.
Yann Martel
#39. I am the wood frame, the bundle of ox hair, and the creative spark ... my value unhangable.
Marina Leigh Duff
#40. As the evening mist worked its way into the scene, creating a warm filter through which the lowering sun bathed its light, it was all I could to to keep painting, and not just put my brushes down and soak it all in. Which, of course, I did for a while anyway.
Cory Trepanier
#41. What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence.
Claude Monet
#42. My paintings are the last paintings one can make.
Ad Reinhardt
#43. Sometimes I can see the whole painting from the outset in my mind's eye. But more often than not, that idea doesn't last the duration of the painting. Sometimes it comes out easy, just as I had envisaged. But that is reasonably rare.
Gary Hume
#44. I always want to do music that inspires or influences another generation. You want what you create to live, be it sculpture or painting or music. Like Michelangelo, he said, I know the creator will go, but his work survives. That is why to escape death, I attempt to bind my soul to my work.
Michael Jackson
#45. If a symbol should be discovered in a painting of mine, it was not my intention. It is a result I did not seek. It is something that may be found afterwards, and which can be interpreted according to taste.
Marc Chagall
#46. Painting is a slow process; it takes time to get there, you learn little by little and always want the next painting to be better than the last. For me, success is about this, seeing the slow progress in my work.
Ali Banisadr
#47. When I get my hands on painting materials I don't give a damn about other people's painting ... every generation must start again afresh.
Maurice De Vlaminck
#48. The paintings are transferred from my computer to a disk, and I can hand it to the printer this way; or I can modem the painting to the printer over the phone lines from my house in Hawaii.
Buffy Sainte-Marie
#49. I was painting her portrait in the little studio, and when I came to the eyes I stopped, overcome by emotion, and said to her, 'Have you understood me?' She nodded affirmatively. 'Will you be my wife?' I asked. She made the same affirmative sign.
Jules Breton
#50. I do not pose my sitters. I do not deliberate and then concoct ... Before painting, when I talk to the person, they unconsciously assume their most characteristic pose, which in a way involves all their character and social standing - what the world has done to them and their retaliation.
Alice Neel
#51. My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.
Wole Soyinka
#52. I want my paintings to look like what's going on outside my window rather than what's inside my studio.
Robert Rauschenberg
#53. Paintings helped to change my life. I'd still be living a life of disaster without it.
Eddie Cahill
#54. 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
#55. I had an idea for a technologically advanced luxury watch. I got involved in digital art and neon painting and put on shows of my work.
Giorgio Moroder
#56. I think love to another human can't be wrong in any way. And to show that by painting my nails in rainbow colours, is a simple way to hopefully spread a little joy.
Emma Green Tregaro
#57. I have found in my still-life work that I seem to be able to tell what objects are important to me by what tends to stay in the painting as it develops.
Richard Diebenkorn
#58. 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
#59. I went over to the painting and looked closely. It had changed in my absence, something paintings liked to do.
Peter Heller
#60. I'm never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.
Claude Monet
#61. The day the producers aren't minting money, or the fans are done with me and, most of all, I as a person get bored of acting, I will stop and pursue my other interests. There is a lot to do: painting, writing, direction.
Salman Khan
#62. 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
#63. I've had a fan who made a painting of my face with her fingers. I have put it up in my room. It was sweet and very different.
Virat Kohli
#64. What I could have done in real life only by throwing a bomb which would have led to the scaffold I tried to achieve in painting by using color of maximum purity. In this way I satisfied my urge to destroy old conventions, to disobey in order to re-create a tangible, living, and liberated world.
Maurice De Vlaminck
#65. I graduated from college with a 3.92 GPA with a degree in computer programming and a BFA in fine arts and animation. My first job was painting a mural in the Grimaldi's in Queens.
JWoww
#66. When I became tired of oil painting at one stage, I used collage and this proved to be influential in the design and composition of my later works.
Myfanwy Pavelic
#67. As a teenager, I loved acting, painting, photography, and making films with my friend's Super 8 camera. But I always loved writing the best. I chose writing even before I knew poetry was available to me.
Denise Duhamel
#68. I would have rebelled against parental authority, no matter what. When I was 15, I started painting my face and making my own clothes.
Grace Jones
#69. 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
#70. I'll enter some faculty or other, get a degree in a sunject that doesn't interest me but that will help me earn a living. Painting will just recede to the background, and I'll end up forgetting my vocation.
Paulo Coelho
#71. Outline of your frame
My paper witness your silhouette
Sipping in coffee
My muse, my Juliet.
Afternoon spent,
In hungry desires
Ending with a kiss
On your coffee lips.
Saiber
#72. I think one's art goes as far and as deep as one's love goes. I see no reason for painting but that. If I have anything to offer, it is my emotional contact with the place where I live and the people I do.
Andrew Wyeth
#73. I'm old fashioned. I really think you should know how to draw before you start painting. I use charcoal and graphite; I put a skylight in. In my house, I turned the garage into an art studio. So I'm awash in art studios.
Peter Falk
#74. Mount Tamalpais became my house. For Cezanne, Sainte-Victoire was no longer a mountain. It was an absolute. It was painting.
Etel Adnan
#75. I find I can't get rid of my trashiness as an artist. A lot of my themes in painting, to the extent that there are intentional themes, are meant to bring that conundrum into high relief.
John Currin
#76. When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing.
Jackson Pollock
#77. I was always very ... impatient about showing my paintings to people.
Julian Schnabel
#78. It is not my intention to make anything comprehensible. I am of the opinion that there are sufficient paintings which one understands after a shorter or longer delay, and that therefore some incomprehensible painting would now be welcome. I am at pains to deliver such, as far as possible.
Rene Magritte
#79. My degree was in sculpture. I always think that drawing is a sculptural process. I always feel like I'm carving the image out rather than painting the image. I'm carving it out with erasers and tools like that. I've always had this fondness for sculpture.
Robert Longo
#80. My art tends toward the literary. My pictures tend toward the outskirts of painting: But why generalize? It is possible to realize one thing or another, according to the impressions gained from one point of view or another. But it is too difficult to make a general rule.
James Ensor
#81. I try to be aware of technology and Japanese animation and old Belgian paintings, and get all my references from bits of everywhere.
Guido Palau
#82. The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't.
Jean-Luc Godard
#83. When I was growing up, I wanted to be a house painter like my father, but I was always screwing up when I went to work with him. I had a talent for knocking over paint and painting myself into corners. I also realized fairly quickly that painting bored me.
Markus Zusak
#84. At 16, I decided to do something brave: I went on a prehistoric dig. In fact, I've had my name in a museum since I was 18 years old, not for my painting but for the prehistoric objects I found. That's how I started thinking about art.
Pierre Soulages
#85. I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush and it is the same river who before I can bring my friends to view his work erases it forever from human view. After that it exists only in my mind's eye.
Aldo Leopold
#87. I move with him, letting him touch me, kiss me, taste my body like I'm his canvas and he's painting me with his tongue.
Lauren Blakely
#88. I wrote 'My Name is Red' just to remember painting, where the hand does it before the intellect. When I'm captive to it, I'm a happier person. Kierkegaard tells us that a happy person is someone who lives in the present; the unhappy person, someone who lives either in the past or the future.
Orhan Pamuk
#89. I weave the papers through the branches, in a long loop. Up and down, my knees bending. My arms above my head, like the girls I saw once in a painting in a cave. There is a rhythm to this, a keeping of time. I wonder if I'm dancing.
Ally Condie
#90. Your main contribution is spray painting your nickname on other people's things. And my cousin, who's a 'gangster', he's like, 'No, Tash, you don't understand; you throw a fat piece up there, that piece is yours.' I'm like, 'No one thinks you own Costco.'
Natasha Leggero
#91. 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
#92. I don't think the meaning in my paintings comes from just using broken dishes.
Julian Schnabel
#93. If my time has come I shall have nothing to complain of. For fifty-tree years I have been painting; so I have been able to devote myself entirely to what I loved best in the world. I had never suffered poverty; I had good parents and excellent friends; I can only thank God.
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
#94. My nervous system is very much weakened - nothing but painting in oil can keep me going.
Paul Cezanne
#95. My music is more than me writing a flashy soul song. They're heartfelt songs about my family and true stories. I have also songs that aren't personal, but just painting a picture. I don't like being put under labels, but my music is going to continue to stay classic and timeless forever.
Leon Bridges
#96. If you listen to one of my albums, you can tell I do a lot of different things. In the case of 'Vincent', I thought of his picture 'Starry Night.' It was a beautiful road-map for a song. I used a lot of imagery from that painting.
Don McLean
#97. When I was 12 years old, I went to Natchitoches, La.; it was summer vacation with my family. We visited a plantation, Melrose. And I met an Afro-American woman who was a painter. I already had some idea of what I wanted to do in life, and one of the things that interested me was painting.
Robert Wilson
#98. Because I'm so busy and because I think of myself as a painter, I desperately guard the time that I have to paint. And sometimes I'm irresponsible to my career in order to paint. Because painting is obsessive. I forget to eat. I forget to sleep.
Joni Mitchell
#100. I never want to stop painting. I'm 94 now. What's my secret? I just keep thinking about the painting I'm going to do tomorrow.
Pierre Soulages
