Top 100 Painting Of Quotes
#1. The erasure itself became the action. It seemed to suggest a moment in terms of how sad or pessimistic you can feel in a political environment or a historical situation. But it felt like a really hopeful gesture in the painting.
Julie Mehretu
#2. If you keep pushing paint when you're tired of it, you lose sensitivity. I can only focus on painting for a few hours, so I'll stop and work on something quite different.
Gary Panter
#3. In every form of art, you really want the experience of the images to transcend the medium, for the medium to disappear into the greater experience of viewing the work. So that you forget you are looking at a painting, or a photograph.
Bill Henson
#4. 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
#6. Weirdly, an image of Adrian's Love painting came back to me. I thought of the jagged red streak, slashing through the blackness, ripping it
apart. Staring at Jill and her inconsolable pain, I suddenly understood his art a little bit better.
Richelle Mead
#7. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.
Jackson Pollock
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. I was totally absorbed. I was in another world, or another dimension; all sense of time evaporated.
Prince Charles
#11. People are always trying to find the next groovy thing, and it hasn't gone back to painting ... I'd like it to go back to painting. I'm sick of all this photography and video. There's so much of it, it's almost annoying.
Cindy Sherman
#12. During my youth, I was fascinated by the colors of Van Goth's paintings
Joseph Pisani
#13. 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
#14. For me, painting means the continuation of dreaming by other means.
Neo Rauch
#15. I have, and do sometimes, work with other media. But there is something about the physical activity and the directness of painting that I find fascinating. I am very attracted to the materiality of paintings and the visual phenomena of hue and value.
Stephen Beal
#16. Critic asks: 'And what, sir, is the subject matter of that painting?' - 'The subject matter, my dear good fellow, is the light.
Claude Monet
#17. I've been asked which of the other arts novel-writing is most like, and I have come to believe it is acting. Of course, in terms of pattern it can be like music, in terms of structure it can be like painting, but the job to me is most like acting.
Andrew O'Hagan
#18. So about twenty years ago I gave up on painting - and got into terrible debt after buying a load of camera gear!
Nigel Dennis
#19. In the 'Nude Descending a Staircase,' I wanted to create a static image of movement: movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn't descending an equally real staircase.
Marcel Duchamp
#20. Regardless of the country it is practised in, most of hospital medicine is painting over the cracks rather than fixing the wall.
Benjamin Daniels
#21. To me, photography is like a quest, or a pilgrimage, or a hunt. I love painting, I love music, but photography is what has allowed me to get outside of myself.
Edouard Boubat
#22. Whether a watercolor is inferior to an oil [painting], or whether a drawing, an etching, or a photograph is not as important as either, is inconsequent. To have to despise something in order to respect something else is a sign of impotence.
Paul Strand
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. I like rap music. But bragging about being rich to poor people is really offensive. I want to hear a rap song about buying a Cy Twombly painting or dating a museum curator. I want to hear about that kind of rich.
John Waters
#26. Painting is much more than therapy to me its a way of life.
Tony Curtis
#27. Haven, don't ask me to define the boundaries of normal. You know how I was raised. My father once struck strands of his own pubic hair onto a painting and sold it for a million dollars.
Lisa Kleypas
#28. The theme, or harmony, of a painting can be created by any one of its visual elements. A single colour ... repetition of shapes ... Light can be a theme.
Mike Svob
#29. 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
#30. A painting works only on the edge of not working. Then what is ungraspable comes near.
Kazuaki Tanahashi
#32. I am doing what I want to do - painting pictures people want and understand. I have no burning ambition to create the kind of 'art' which the confused critics praise for its 'plastic significance,' 'fluid lines,' and 'inner awareness,' or 'must be understood on three levels.
Arnold Friberg
#33. A man that has a taste of music, painting, or architecture, is like one that has another sense, when compared with such as have no relish of those arts
Joseph Addison
#34. Lets tell young people the best books are yet to written; the best painting, the best government the best of everything is yet to be done by them.
John Erskine
#35. I never want to abandon my roots. I want to give my past and the history of painting the importance it deserves, including the masters like Rembrandt, who built up the surface of the canvas with transparent layers.
Jose Parla
#36. Too much sparkle can detract from the focal point of the painting, so I blend some areas to tone down the look of the pastels in less important areas.
Paul Murray
#37. Only the four corners of the background remained. It was terribly difficult to fix my eyes on all of them at the same time. My experience was that the most difficult thing of all in art is painting in all four corners at the same time.
Arnulf Rainer
#38. I am never in a hurry to reach details. First and above all I am interested in the large masses and the general character of a picture; when these are well established, then I try for subtleties of form and color. I rework the painting constantly and freely, and without any systematic method.
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
#39. A painting is a universal language which everyone can read, understand, and interpret in his own way through the power of imagination.
Debasish Mridha
#40. Writing must certainly be one of the hardest professions - writing and painting.
Anjelica Huston
#41. 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
#42. Painting keeps me occupied in those moments when travel can be aimless and even disorienting. Mainly it is a way to register at least some of the new impressions of a foreign place, when its thrilling barrage can sometimes overwhelm you.
Susan Minot
#43. I think of Terrence Malick's movie Days of Heaven - one of Richard Gere's first movies - you can push pause on almost any image in the movie and it looks like a painting.
Owen Wilson
#44. Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God.
Rembrandt
#45. I've gradually fooled myself into becoming a real painter ... I really just like to sit in my air-conditioned Rome painting studio surrounded by Medieval and Renaissance architecture and to hold a tube of Alizarin Madder Lake in my artist's hand and marvel at the shiny goop inside.
Mark Kostabi
#46. Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings.
Gerhard Richter
#47. A painting, you know, it's all dirty material. But it's about transformation. Taking that earth, that heavy earthen kind of thing, turning it into air and light.
Brice Marden
#48. The subtle hues of gold and yellow and the fresh greens and the pepper red seemed to spiral into a kaleidoscope of shapes and forms that made the tips of a person's toes tingle, so that some were inclined to remove their shoes in its presence.
Jeffry R. Halverson
#49. Until I saw Chardin's painting, I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents' house, in the half-cleared table, in the corner of a tablecloth left awry, in the knife beside the empty oyster shell.
Marcel Proust
#50. 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
#52. Sometimes you need to live with a painting for a while. Starting a painting can be easy, but finishing it ... that's the skill of the painter, how you finally know when it's done.
Elizabeth Neel
#53. If light is the spiritual quality of painting, color is surely its heart and passion.
Robert Reynolds
#54. Sometimes I freeze in front of the canvas, full of the knowledge that if I keep painting, sooner or later I will fail her
Julie Orringer
#55. Nearly always in Dutch painting and often in the works of Giorgione or Titian, it is entirely independent of anything definitely poetical in the subject, a kind of form and choice in workmanship which is itself entirely satisfying, and is (as the Greeks would say) an end in itself.
Oscar Wilde
#56. This is an occupation known as painting, which calls for imagination, and skill of hand, in order to discover things not seen, hiding themselves under the shadow of natural objects, and to fix them with the hand, presenting to plain sight what does not actually exist.
Cennino Cennini
#57. When we did Cubist paintings, our intention was not to produce Cubist paintings but to express what was within us. No one laid down a course of action for us, and our friends the poets followed our endeavour attentively but they never dictated it to us.
Pablo Picasso
#58. I do not distinguish between the construction of a book and that of a
painting and I always proceed from the simple to the complex. - 1946
Henri Matisse
#59. I really am a character actor, in my heart of hearts, because I really do like developing characters and painting a past for them.
Dylan McDermott
#60. The pride taken by the Italians in their gifted women is among the most important facts in the history of their Renaissance.
Walter Shaw Sparrow
#61. Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole ...
Alain De Botton
#62. 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
#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. 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
#65. I believe that painting should come through the avenues of meditation rather than the canals of action.
Mark Tobey
#66. Mathematics is an activity governed by the same rules imposed upon the symphonies of Beethoven, the paintings of DaVinci, and the poetry of Homer.
Edward Kasner
#67. Like what Jackson Pollock used to say. He thought the creation of the painting was the art, and the painting was just what was left. He didn't know why people wanted to buy his paintings.
Andy Reynolds
#68. I turned, painting in hand, to show it to her, and then realized she wasn't there. Or - she was there and she wasn't. Part of her was there, but it was invisible. The invisible part was the important part. This was something I hadn't understood before.
Donna Tartt
#69. 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
#70. I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.
John Ruskin
#71. As for the various kinds of montage photography, they are in reality not photography at all but a kind of painting in which photography is used - as pastiches of textiles are used in crazy-quilts - to form a mosaic. Whatever value the montage may have derives from painting rather than the camera.
Lewis Mumford
#72. It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts-music, painting and writing-is magical and evocative; and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result.
William S. Burroughs
#73. How painting surpasses all human works by reason of the subtle possibilities which it contains.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#74. I stopped painting in 1990 at the peak of my success just to deny people my beautiful paintings, and I did it out of spite.
Vincent Gallo
#75. Who among us has not gazed thoughtfully and patiently at a painting of Jackson Pollock and thought "What a piece of crap?"
Rob Long
#76. Styling is my form of painting. I can understand the process behind it, the being afraid to start, and the diving into it. I've learned not to be afraid of doing something that might not be right. If you don't try then you won't know.
Lori Goldstein
#77. 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
#78. He said, one has to learn that painting well - in the academic and technical sense - comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you've got that ability. So have thousands.
John Fowles
#79. Painting doesn't mean just describing; it's a state of spirit.
Caryl Churchill
#80. Poetry ... is the music and painting of the mind.
Sonia Orwell
#81. I affirm that any sort of photograph is superior to any sort of painting aiming at the same result.
Alvin Langdon Coburn
#82. My first sense of myself was as an artist, a painter. I would see a Van Gogh painting and just love it, the more emotional and passionate the more it attracted me.
Philip Schultz
#83. Painting cannot be the only activity of a mature artist.
Ad Reinhardt
#84. In abstract painting, I worried about the limited range of possibilities that, as time went on, became increasingly important to me. I wanted to express or deal with differences that an all-over paint and canvas 'presence' neutralized.
Richard Diebenkorn
#85. Parks are works of art just as a painting or sculpture is.
Thomas Hoving
#86. Like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler's Equation reaches down into the very depths of existence.
Keith Devlin
#87. Remember the enemy of all painting is gray: a painting will almost always appear grayer than it is, on account of its oblique position under the light.
Eugene Delacroix
#88. When you talk about painters and you talk about painters painting masterpieces, there is no painter who painted only one painting and that was a masterpiece. You have to do a whole bunch of paintings to get to the place of mastering your craft.
Walter Mosley
#89. Just as I am astonished that a bank clerk never eats a cheque, so too am I astonished that no painter before me ever thought of painting a soft watch.
Salvador Dali
#90. 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
#91. What do artists do? Artists give people something they didn't know they were missing: a dance, a piece of music, a painting, a piece of sculpture. Catering to that need is the best business strategy.
Daniel H. Pink
#92. I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.
P.J. Harvey
#93. In England, there is a dividing line between artists and illustrators, who are thought inferior to painters. Well, that's absolute rubbish. Some of the most creative work is being done in children's books. In Japan, everything is art. They don't say painting is better than ceramics or dress design.
Brian Wildsmith
#94. When you come up in the art world, whatevers in the air, the issues of the moment, end up becoming part of the working method or modus operandi of how you think about doing a painting. And I came up at a time when-actually painting was dead when I came up. Sculpture sort of ruled.
Chuck Close
#95. In the exhibition at Galerie Perrotin, they have the Sarajevo painting - I think it's very good to nail down this story of Pol Pot and other people, not all dictators but most of them.
Erro
#96. The photograph is the only picture that can truly convey information, even if it is technically faulty and the object can barely be identified. A painting of a murder is of no interest whatever; but a photograph of a murder fascinates everyone.
Gerhard Richter
#97. 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
#98. If painting is no longer needed, it seems a pity that some of us are born into the world with such a passion for line and color.
Mary Cassatt
#99. It's a waste of time to think that if you colored a painting red what might have happened if you painted it black.
Yoko Ono
#100. Each artist comes to the painting or sculpture because there he can be told that he, the individual, transcends all classes and flouts all predictions. In the work of art, he finds his uniqueness confirmed.
Ben Shahn
