Top 100 Painting Time Quotes
#1. Painting seems an old man's business. After a certain time you're out of it, and you just paint masterpieces.
Alex Katz
#2. When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.
Madeleine L'Engle
#3. Every time I started painting it was like a new experience, but they all came out the same.
LeRoy Neiman
#4. Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.
Chuck Close
#5. I really like my life right now. I have friends around me all the time. I've started painting more. I've been working out a lot. I've started to really take pride in being strong. I love the album I made. I love that I moved to New York. So in terms of being happy, I've never been closer to that.
Taylor Swift
#6. I'm so busy writing and editing two books a year that I don't have time for painting anymore.
Janet Evanovich
#7. I still have a lot of pleasure doing them, but as time goes by I come to appreciate more clearly which paintings are good and which should be discarded.
Claude Monet
#8. Painting is a way of thinking visually, so whatever is happening with me at the time gets reflected in the work.
Ali Banisadr
#9. I had stopped painting around 2000, which I guess was when the music thing started getting pretty busy. I just didn't have enough time to pursue it properly.
Kurt Wagner
#10. I get so tired of painting. I've been trying to give it up all the time, if we could just make a living out of movies or the newspaper business or something. It's so boring, painting the same picture over and over.
Andy Warhol
#11. I have often seen quite demented patients recognize and respond vividly to paintings and delight in the act of painting at a time when they are scarcely responsive, disoriented, and out of it.
Oliver Sacks
#12. The time that I devote to painting is not a lot of time, but I do it 100 percent while I am working, and then there's nothing else that counts.
Margrethe II Of Denmark
#13. As I had collaborated with visual artists before whether on installations, on performance pieces, in the context of theatre works and as I had taught for a time in art colleges the idea of writing music in response to painting was not alien.
Gavin Bryars
#14. 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
#15. I wish to have no status as a man. I am equally content to be a worm or a rat, and am only glad that I am not becuase they have such a rough time without the pleasure of painting.
Stanley Spencer
#16. Painting should educate and enrich. Modern painting merely offers a split-second emotion: You see it, you have an instant reaction and move on. Instead, real painting can be looked at over and over again and each time it has something new.
Igor Babailov
#17. We have a nasty habit of flushing down the memory hole "the people who lost." Or demonizing them. Going back in time and painting Snidely Whiplash mustaches on their luckless countenances.
Bill Kauffman
#18. It was just an ordinary night. He didn't think anything extraordinary would happen. Until it did. Turning a corner onto the bustling night time street, he saw her all in blue. The woman from his painting was a living, breathing thing ... and she was so completely still.
L. H. Cosway
#19. She didn't have words for what Levi was. He was a cave painting. He was The Red Ballon. She lifted her heels and pulled him forward until his face was so close, she could look at only one of his eyes at a time. "You're magic," she said.
Rainbow Rowell
#20. Paintings. Or the collapse of time in images.
Paul Auster
#21. If I had a musical identity that was definable then it would be time to get into painting or something else. Race car driving.
Chris Cornell
#22. Paintings exist in the present tense, yet somehow, because of how it's structured, it can move backwards through time as well.
Joe Bradley
#23. I don't like food that's too carefully arranged; it makes me think that the chef is spending too much time arranging and not enough time cooking. If I wanted a picture I'd buy a painting.
Andy Rooney
#24. We have to have the money to do the work we want to do, as well as to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. Fat commissions are good, but not always easy to come by, and each new painting takes its time. So we need to find every way possible to earn extra income from our work.
Elizabeth Aston
#25. I continue to make paintings of people and their moments in our time because I am of that time. Out of that I hope to make pictures that are timeless.
Burton Silverman
#26. The beginning of a painting is a very energized, exciting time, and it generates most of the energy I have. If I've gotten 75 per cent of it down, then it takes an effort to really get up that kind of energy to finish it in the same way it's begun.
Burton Silverman
#27. My work is a fusion of personal experiences and influences - moody atmospheres, victorian-inspired couture, and timeless elements all laced with clandestine symbolism. The figures I paint exist in their own esoteric realm and time, and each painting offers a glimpse into their anomalous world.
Lori Earley
#28. Painting doesn't freeze time. It circulates and recycles time like a wheel that turns. Those who were first might well be last. Painting is a very slow art. It doesn't travel with the speed of light. That's why dead painters shine so bright.
Marlene Dumas
#29. Here are my politics: I love music and painting; a good book is an event for me; I'm going on forty-four. How much time do I have left? Fifteen, twenty, thirty years at most? Very well! I maintain that in thirty years ministers will be a bit shrewder, but just about as honest as they are today.
Stendhal
#30. Painting is like breathing to me. It's what I do all the time. Every day I make art, whether it is painting, writing or making a movie.
Julian Schnabel
#31. I spend as much time as I can sketching from nature, Dartmoor contains such a rich variety of landscape, as many boulders, foaming rivers and twisted trees as my heart could ever desire ... When I look into a river, I feel I could spend a whole lifetime just painting that river.
Alan Lee
#32. What do you see when you look at a representational painting? Most of the time, the first thing I see is a flat piece of canvas covered with colored patterns.
Terry Teachout
#33. Victoria was an innocent country gentlewoman who spent her time reading, teaching the local children, painting, gathering armfuls of heather in the meadow. Vivien, by contrast, was pleasure-loving and self-serving... with a moral compass that was most definitely skewed.
Lisa Kleypas
#35. Well, I'm a painter, I was trained as a painter ... I seem to have spent a little less time painting than I might've done ... But it didn't transcend the feeling of playing at UFO and those sort of places with the lights and that, the fact that the group was getting bigger and bigger.
Syd Barrett
#36. When I'm painting outdoors, I only have time to think about what I'm saying, not how I'm saying it.
Matt Smith
#37. In general, my paintings are multifocal. You can't call it unfocused space, but not being fixed to a single focus is very much of our time.
Bridget Riley
#38. The passage of time, which transformed the volatile present into that finished, unalterable painting called the past, a canvas man always executed blindly, with erratic brushstrokes that only made sense when one stepped far enough away from it to be able to admire it as a whole. -pg. 19
Felix J. Palma
#39. I do not see why the loss of faith in the known image and symbol in our time should be celebrated as a freedom. It is a loss from which we suffer, and this pathos motivates modern painting and poetry at its heart.
Philip Guston
#40. Quality and perfection are achieved with time. You do not create a perfect painting or a perfect poem by hurrying. Time is always coming.
Satish Kumar
#41. I lost my job and started painting houses with a friend. The marriage had ended about the same time the career did.
John Dufresne
#42. If I want to pursue the art of painting - or music or writing or sculpture - it requires only my time and a few dollars for materials. If, however, I want to produce a motion picture I have to go out and raise a million dollars!
Orson Welles
#43. 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
#44. I enjoy painting, cutting the lawn and working in the garden when I have time. That's therapy for me. I enjoy working with my hands.
Billy Williams
#45. Whoever can endure unmixed delight, whoever can tolerate music and painting and poetry all in one, whoever wishes to be rid of thought and to let the busy anvils of the brain be silent for a time, let him read in the "Faery Queen."
James Russell Lowell
#46. Leonardo's Mona Lisa sure would have lost out if he had spent only 2 of the 4 or 5 years he took to complete it. It is thinking about him and Ryder, among others, that partly makes me feel so awful to send away a 'half-baked' painting.
E. J. Hughes
#47. I tried painting for a short time and realized that I was not a child prodigy at painting.
Kim Weston
#48. 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
#49. Every painting I do blends time frames. The great thing about being an artist is I can make the past join the present in some reality of the future.
Thomas Kinkade
#50. Reading haiku is like viewing a photograph or a painting. A haiku is a moment of time, isolated, and held up for viewing.
Harley King
#51. 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
#52. Oh. Well was this your first time painting a live model?"
She nodded her head, with an almost guilty look on her face.
"What's it like?"
"Hard," she replied.
Zack Love
#53. I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.
David Bowie
#54. I wish I felt energetic and could paint all the time, because there are so many paintings I'd like to do.
Wanda Koop
#55. The dance is the mother of the arts. Music and poetry exist in time; painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space.
Curt Sachs
#56. I wish you would recollect that Painting and Punctuality mix like Oil and Vinegar, and that Genius and regularity are utter Enemies and must be to the end of time.
Thomas Gainsborough
#57. You can't work in the movies. Movies are all about lighting. Very few filmmakers will concentrate on the story. You get very little rehearsal time, so anything you do onscreen is a kind of speed painting.
John Malkovich
#58. Painting is the only universal language. All nature is creation's picture book. Painting alone can describe every thing which can be seen, and suggest every emotion which can be felt. Art reaches back into the babyhood of time, and is man's only lasting monument.
William Morris Hunt
#59. 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
#60. I try to not get to the point where one is making wallpaper, or simply painting money. I want to make sure that I am at least trying to weigh myself down, that there's a challenge each time.
Martin Mull
#61. Within one hour of touching the brush to canvas for the first time, my students have a total, complete painting.
Bob Ross
#62. People think you can get out your canvas and paint any time you have a free moment. You can't. Commercial art and painting are entirely different. Painting takes a different mental approach. You have to get the right attitude, the right mood.
Pierre Alechinsky
#63. For those of us who have come to believe that unless we are thinking we are wasting time, it may be challenging to simply linger with a beautiful sunset, an exquisite painting, or an arresting piece of music. The intellect often reacts to the seductions of beauty by attempting to recapture us.
Carolyn Baker
#64. At a time when painting itself often seems to be a threatened, even despised, form of artistic activity, Andrew Salgado emerges as a dazzlingly skillful advocate for the medium he has chosen to embrace.
Edward Lucie-Smith
#65. Little by little, I've reached the stage of using only a small number of forms and colors. It's not the first time that painting has been done with a very narrow range of colors. The frescoes of the tenth century are painted like this. For me, they are magnificent things.
Joan Miro
#66. 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
#67. It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.
Jason Newsted
#68. God exists only if adored
Time is nothing if one has not dreamed
("Painting")
Pierre Reverdy
#69. This land, like so much of the French countryside, was a painting, but Mercier felt his heart touched with melancholy and realized, not for the first time, that beautiful places were hard on lonely people.
Alan Furst
#70. Pain. You overwhelm me," he said quietly. "And every time I see you or think of you, I can't grab a brush fast enough. I thought I couldn't paint you, but it turns out I've been painting you all along, from the beginning, before I even knew you.
Joey W. Hill
#71. I was totally absorbed. I was in another world, or another dimension; all sense of time evaporated.
Prince Charles
#72. 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
#73. I used to split my time between writing, music and painting. I would work on a book and then abandon it, start a band, do an album, quit music, then do a gallery show. Eventually I decided to give writing a serious shot.
Isaac Marion
#74. If you want to get one hour of good painting in, you have to have four hours of uninterrupted time.
David Lynch
#75. And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission.
Robert Rauschenberg
#76. I never succeed in painting scenes, however beautiful, immediately upon returning from them. I must wait for a time to draw a veil over the common details ...
Thomas Cole
#77. But not only medicine, engineering, and painting are arts; living itself is an art in fact, the most important and at the same time the most difficult and complex art to be practiced by man.
Erich Fromm
#78. 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
#79. Painted time is a different zone. This is why I don't believe that a painting - although I've been accused of it many times now - can be truly topical. A painting's physicality gives it a different persistence and a different perception.
Luc Tuymans
#80. A painting is both exactly the same and entirely different every single time you look at it.
Jandy Nelson
#81. I didn't know what to expect from a famous movie star; maybe that he'd be sort of stuck-up, you know. But not Gary Cooper. He horsed around so much ... that I had a hard time painting him.
Norman Rockwell
#82. It took some time before the public learned that to appreciate an Impressionist painting one has to step back a few yards, and enjoy the miracle of seeing these puzzling patches suddenly fall into one place and come to life before our eyes.
Ernst Gombrich
#83. Painting is the act of discovery and you're constantly enlarging your horizon or finding yourself every time you paint.
Romare Bearden
#84. Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material ... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.
Brian Eno
#85. I remember one day when Juan Gris told me about a bunch of grapes he had seen in a painting by Picasso. The next day these grapes appeared in a painting by Gris, this time in a bowl; and the day after, the bowl appeared in a painting by Picasso.
Jacques Lipchitz
#86. When the painting is hanging on your wall for a long time, you don't notice it. You get tired of it, even if it's a Picasso. When the next generation inherits the painting, they sell it. I don't want to be sold.
Julio Iglesias
#87. Every good picture leaves the painter eager to start again, unsatisfied, inspired by the rich mine in which he is working, hoping for more energy, more vitality, more time - condemned to painting for life.
John French Sloan
#88. The proletarian writer is a writer with a purpose; he thinks no more of art for art's sake than a man on a sinking ship thinks of painting a beautiful picture in the cabin; he thinks of getting ashore - and then there will be time enough for art.
Upton Sinclair
#89. Philologists, who chase A painting syllable through time and space Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's Ark.
William Cowper
#90. 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
#91. You get a painting idea, and you go do that. You get a cinema idea, and you go in to do that. The difference is, even though the paintings might take some time to make, with cinema you are booked for a year and a half, minimum.
David Lynch
#92. I have always wanted to make paintings that are impossible to walk past, paintings that grab and hold your attention. The more you look at them, the more satisfying they become for the viewer. The more time you give to the painting, the more you get back.
Cecily Brown
#93. Cinema informed my painting by the sheer geography - on locations, there is so much downtime. And when you're spending all this time creating art by committee, the concept of the singular voice is a pleasant antidote.
Billy Zane
#94. In 1946 there was no money in art, no dealer galleries, no craft shops. After the war we started to teach art in every school for the first time. Our generation played a crucial role. We were the stepping stones towards today's galleries.
Theresa Sjoquist
#95. A painting has a lot of advantages over other forms of communication. Unlike a movie, you don't have to put it into a machine and turn it on. It's just there every day. It's not limited by the element of time. It's a constant part of the home.
Thomas Kinkade
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. You have the 20th century wrapping up and everything is moving at this breakneck speed? And then, painting is still walking. It's just a very human activity that takes time.
Joe Bradley
#99. The arts which need interpretation are the arts of time
music and poetry
and not the arts of space
sculpture and painting.
Salvador De Madariaga
#100. 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
