Painting Ideas Quotes

#1. To accept some idea of truth without experiencing it is like a painting of a cake on paper which you cannot eat.

Shunryu Suzuki

#2. I like the idea of the painting looking at the viewer than the other way around.

Joseph Raffael

#3. Some people ... cling to the idea that the photograph is an inherently real or honest image and as such is always on a different plane from an obviously subjective form of visual communication such as painting.

Tibor Kalman

#4. The environment becomes inspiration. My response to it becomes idea. And idea becomes purpose and action through interpretation and painting.

Gerald Brommer

#5. The way I create music is maybe like a painting, to compose in a more visual way. Basically it's the music that I want to hear- that's my inspiration and bottom line. I just try to get ideas from books, movies, paintings.

Ikue Mori

#6. There may or may not be an idea, and the meaning may just be that the painting exists.

Jasper Johns

#7. I realized that I had things in my head not like what I had been taught - not like what I had seen - shapes and ideas so familiar to me that it hadn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to stop painting, to put away everything I had done, and to start to say the things that were my own.

Georgia O'Keeffe

#8. I think about women and their thoughts and ideas, and I suppose when I'm painting them I'm getting to be them, in a sense. That is why I plainly paint women.

Chantal Joffe

#9. Never fear having your ideas stolen. Your creative idea is a image you are painting like a picture on a canvas, they may "steal" your idea, however they cannot steal your paints.

Sumner Davenport

#10. When I paint figures it's never the idea of painting the beauty of the figure, it is using the figure to get across how I feel.

Jason Shawn Alexander

#11. My problem is to bring together in a painting two seemingly conflicting, impossibly unmixable ideas. One is that the finished work shall evoke a sense of recognition, of the mysteriously familiar ... the other is that in order to do the first I must deeply know my subject ...

Keith Crown

#12. For me, at some point, the idea of struggling through the process was not as interesting as doing tests and executing the painting after I figured out all of its elements and how they were going to work together.

Laura Owens

#13. It may be that just as tonality recurs in music and realism in painting, so the idea of liberalism recurs in politics-though each time in a different vein.

Eva Hoffman

#14. Finn said art isn't about drawing or painting a perfect bowl of fruit. It's about ideas. And you, he said, have enough good ideas to last a lifetime.

Carol Rifka Brunt

#15. Painting' and 'religious experience' are the same thing. It is a question of the perpetual motion of a right idea.

Ben Nicholson

#16. Start a painting with fresh ideas, and then let the painting replace your ideas with its ideas.

Walter Darby Bannard

#17. Success is the 'discovery,' the creation of an idea, pulling something out of the depths of your mind that never existed before. To further complete that success, a painting is made as a communication tool for that idea.

Jim Rowe

#18. Content is more than 'subject matter.' It is all the feelings and ideas you bring to your painting.

Rene Huyghe

#19. I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing.

Peter Greenaway

#20. Ideas are to literature what light is to painting.

Paul Bourget

#21. DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.)

Gustave Flaubert

#22. Paintings are painted with paint, not with ideas.

Stephane Mallarme

#23. Abstract art is only painting. And what's so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint.

Pablo Picasso

#24. I paint the way I do because I can keep on putting more and more things in - like drama, pain, anger, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas of space. It doesn't matter if it differs from mine, as long as it comes from the painting, which has its own integrity and intensity.

Willem De Kooning

#25. I've always dabbled. I've always nearly written a book, I've always tried painting, I've always tried to make something out of ideas, really. It was never a plan. I never thought, Right. First I'll get famous, and then I'll do a book.

Ricky Gervais

#26. I'm now painting with all the elan of a Marseillais eating soup, which won't surprise you when I tell you I'm painting large sunflowers. The idea? To decorate the studio, now there's hope of Gauguin living here. I aim at a dozen panels of sunflowers in the room I've set aside for Gauguin ...

Vincent Van Gogh

#27. While in college, I used to get my ideas from photographs in 'National Geographic.' I started painting palm trees and motorboats.

Peter Saul

#28. What is to be done about these literary people, who will never understand that painting is a craft and that the material side comes first? The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

#29. The painting is finished when the idea has disappeared.

Georges Braque

#30. You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.

Henri Matisse

#31. The freedom he gave himself to work and change shape and change ideas and work all the time with joy, the joy of painting was in [Publo] Picasso, which I found beautiful.

Agnes Varda

#32. The ego must be developed, not for its own sake, but because it is needed by society. If you are only interested in self-realization then you cannot make a good painting. To do this you have to have thought about forming, and about how ideas of forming stem from history.

Joseph Beuys

#33. If history were a photograph of the past it would be flat and uninspiring. Happily, it is a painting; and, like all works of art, it fails of the highest truth unless imagination and ideas are mixed with the paints.

Allan Nevins

#34. I'm painting an idea not an ideal. Basically I'm trying to paint a structured painting full of controlled, and therefore potent, emotion.

Euan Uglow

#35. All paintings are abstract ideas, not representations of a true reality.

Mike Svob

#36. What interests me is all the stuff that goes into abstract and abstract-figurative art. Not the styles, but the stuff that, in various combinations, make the styles: mixing and matching painting methods and ideas.

Ed Askew

#37. Where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

#38. 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

#39. Before I put brush to canvas, I question, 'Is this mine? ... Is it influenced by some idea which I have acquired from some man? ... I am trying with all my skill to do a painting that is all of women, as well as all of me.

Georgia O'Keeffe

#40. It's helpful for me to get ideas - the physical action of painting. Sometimes it frees up your writer brain. It's nice for me now that the writing has become a serious career that painting can become more like a hobby.

Erin Morgenstern

#41. I was interested in ideas, not in visual products. I wanted to put painting again in the service of the mind.

Marcel Duchamp

#42. 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

#43. You usually want to get something out of a painting other than the ideas that you had in your head.

Alex Katz

#44. 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

#45. Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

Georges Braque

#46. But I owe something to Vincent, and that is, in the consciousness of having been useful to him, the confirmation of my own original ideas about painting. And also, at difficult moments, the remembrance that one finds others unhappier than oneself.

Paul Gauguin

#47. A lot of ideas don't translate very well into art. To say, "Oh my god, the grass is green ... " You're going to end up with a big green painting.

John Baldessari

#48. To me, photography was a completely new medium, and I did not ... feel the urge to transfer to it my ideas about painting.

John Gutmann

#49. 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

#50. I'm not interested in 'abstracting' or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it - drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea.

Willem De Kooning

#51. Painting someone's portrait is, of course, an impossible task. What an absurd idea to try and distil a human being, the most complex organism on the planet, into flicks, washes, and blobs of paint on a two-dimensional surface.

David Cobley

#52. When you start working, everybody is in your studio- the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas- all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.

John Cage

#53. I almost never start with an image. I start with a painting idea, an impulse, usually derived from my own world.

Robert Motherwell

#54. Photography suits the temper of this age - of active bodies and minds. It is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately.

Edward Weston

#55. Ideas for work are coming to me in abundance ... I'm going like a painting-locomotive.

Vincent Van Gogh

#56. We constantly have ideas and experiences that go beyond what we can say or know. Most often these are expressed in art, in painting, in music. Music, everyday confronts us with a form of knowing that doesn't depend on words.

Karen Armstrong

#57. Every race of people since time began who have attempted to describe God by words or painting, or by carvings, have conveyed their idea that the God who made them and shaped their destinies was symbolized in themselves ...

Henry McNeal Turner

#58. Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?

Sergei Eisenstein

#59. I'm not a critic. I'm not a journalist. I'm not a philosopher. Arguing that punk has run its course is like saying painting ran its course after the Renaissance. Punk is an idea. It's freedom. And it'll be around 200 years from now for the people who want it.

Patti Smith

#60. I'm not a political artist in any way, but if an idea takes me somewhere or something is emotionally impactful, I find a way to make a painting that encapsulates it.

Idris Khan

#61. People who believe in painting ... realize there is something greater than just coming up with an idea, and executing it.

Sam Messer

#62. Illustrating is more about communicating specific ideas to a reader. Painting is more like pure science, more about the act of painting.

Shaun Tan

#63. Girls seemed to like artists! I felt very drawn to the idea of power, really, and doing painting as a power trip, in a sense. This idea of power has always driven me.

Malcolm Morley

#64. I have a completely romantic idea about making paintings, I guess.

Julian Schnabel

#65. I use the gallery as if it were a doctor. I come for ideas and help - to look at situations within painting, rather than paintings.

Lucian Freud

#66. 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

#67. On occasion I have drawn as a release from painting. The economy in using paper, pencil, charcoal and crayon can help towards a greater gamble and higher rewards. I also find that drawing can generate ideas more rapidly than painting.

William Scott