Old Painting Quotes

#1. It looked nothing like America. It looked like an old painting, but real - everything achingly idyllic in the morning light - and I thought about how wonderfully strange it would be to live in a place where almost everything had been built by the dead.

John Green

#2. I still have an old painting the Colonel gave me. It was the first time the Colonel had been back to the Hilton since Elvis had passed away.

Mac Davis

#3. Treasure is the kind of thing you dig up ... or bury! And when people say, 'Oh, he's an icon,' well, an icon is a very old painting hanging in a Russian church! If you want to say something, say something nice about me. Don't call me a national treasure.

Terry Wogan

#4. It looked like an old painting, but real.

John Green

#5. Like dust brushed from an old painting, as we journey beneath the surface layers of life, another landscape is revealed.

Atalina Wright

#6. I should've known the eyes. Wide, bright blue, and something about the delicate arc of the lids: a cat's slant, a pale jeweled girl in an old painting, a secret.

Tana French

#7. Age in itself gives substance - what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer's mind.

Jane Hirshfield

#8. 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

#9. She did not care what a ludicrous picture she might be painting, a fat happy old lady in her night gown, swinging on a small little swing in the dead of the night.

Srividya Srinivasan

#10. 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

#11. Being with my wife and children in Kauai, seeing old friends there, being on the beach, painting, paddleboarding. Sitting under a Kauai moon with a bonfire going, buddies around. Those are the things that kind of make my world turn.

Pierce Brosnan

#12. Picasso didn't stop painting when he was 41 years old because he felt he wasn't relevant, but he kept going and the painting he made before he died are now worth 40 million dollars.

Peter Frampton

#13. 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

#14. It is the bareness of drawing that I like. The act of drawing is what locates, suggests, discovers. At times it seems enough to draw, without the distractions of color and mass. Yet it is an old ambition to make drawing and painting one.

Philip Guston

#15. 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

#16. Making a painting is like having sex for a month or something. Then I go through this period of elation at finishing the work. Then you drop off - you know, 'post-coital man is sad,' as the old saying goes.

Tim Zuck

#17. At one point, I was painting shells and selling them at gas stations for five cents. I was six years old or something.

Joshua Greenberg

#18. 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

#19. The air we see in the paintings of the old masters is never the air we breathe.

Edgar Degas

#20. 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

#21. In old times men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith, in later times they use the objects of faith to show their powers of painting.

John Ruskin

#22. It takes more time to rework a painting than it takes to fill in the canvas in the first place. I wish I could get them all right with the first coat like many of the old masters could, but seem destined to have to rework to make them even passable.

E. J. Hughes

#23. 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

#24. Painting for a whole morning gives one as excellent an appetite for one's dinner, as old Abraham Tucker acquired for his by riding over Banstead Downs.

William Hazlitt

#25. We are attacked by radio and television and visual communication at such speed and with such force that painting seems very old fashioned ... why shouldn't it be done with that power and gusto [of advertising], with that impact.

James Rosenquist

#26. Seeing Cubism paintings at the Beaubourg makes me very happy and also old films.

Yves Saint-Laurent

#27. I often use an old canvas and I particularly enjoy painting over something I've already done, allowing bits to come jumping through accidentally.

Myfanwy Pavelic

#28. When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.

Denis Diderot

#29. as those old engravings of the 'Cenacolo,' or that painting by Gentile Bellini, in which one sees, in a state in which they no longer exist, the masterpiece of Leonardo and the portico of Saint Mark's. We

Marcel Proust

#30. 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

#31. Molly grabbed a vase off the mantel and flung it at the wall, knocking it into a painting of a mountain scene. The vase shattered and the picture frame swayed back and forth on the wall, taunting her with an image of what life was supposed to be like. . .

Susan Rose

#32. I'm 38 years old and Limp Bizkit is just something I do. If I was a painter, it would just be a type of painting I make.

Fred Durst

#33. The faintly lit hatchway lay in the dark of the yard like a grave yawning at judgement day in some old apocalyptic painting.

Cormac McCarthy

#34. He's a sculpture. Painstakingly chiseled into perfection over the course of years, until arias could be written about his eyebrows, his cheekbones, the freaking shape of his nostrils. And me? Well, I'm probably a finger-painting. Done by a three-year-old. Without supervision.

Julie Johnson

#35. The Prelude to Tristan and Isolde reminds me of the old Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel.

Eduard Hanslick

#36. In a way, painting is like wine: it is as old, as simple, as primitive and as varied. Like wine, it is a very specific means of expression, with a limited vocabulary, but vast in its expressive potential.

Robert Motherwell

#37. There's a Chinese proverb that says it all: Painting is an old man's art.

David Hockney

#38. The literature of the immediate future will inevitably turn away from painting, whether respectably realistic or modern, and from daily life, whether old or the very latest and revolutionary, and turn to artistically realized philosophy.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

#39. Painting seems an old man's business. After a certain time you're out of it, and you just paint masterpieces.

Alex Katz

#40. This is the second Old Master I have encountered that has the signatures of another artist forged over it. A painting that has been created by another artist entirely. It's like they played mix and match.

Dayna S. Rubin

#41. 'Pomegranate,' started with my imagining a bullet going through the fruit and causing it to bleed. My initial associations were with pomegranates in old masters painting and their Judeo-Christian symbolism.

Ori Gersht

#42. Unlike painting, sculpture, or music, typefaces must be useful to someone. Fortunately for designers, the digital age has produced new problems to solve - developing typefaces that work on mobile phones, for one - and enabled better solutions to old problems.

Virginia Postrel

#43. The irony is that the more we fight age, the more it shows. Paint on a 50-year-old face brings to mind a Gilbert and Sullivan comic figure. Smooth the cheeks, and suddenly the ear lobes and hands look out of place. Do we run around in October, painting the gold leaves green?

Karen DeCrow

#44. Why do you paint, Nona?"...

'I paint first to honor God who paints the sunsets and oceans and human hearts. And second, I paint so I don't get cranky like so many of the old people in this world.

Kimberly Stuart

#45. A beautiful woman is like a painting and remains beautiful no matter how old she is.

Chloe Thurlow

#46. The first painting that I realised I liked was 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' by Hieronymus Bosch, when I was six years old, at the Prado in Madrid. I still find myself returning there every time I'm in the city.

Carolina Herrera

#47. 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

#48. Symbols are important. The Christians followed the pagans there, carving and painting their one God as the old ones carved and painted the many. Neither understand that the one is part of the many, the many part of the one.

Nora Roberts