Paintings With Quotes

#1. I'm not a lyric writer to make statements. What I enjoy doing is making paintings with lyrics, creating colorful images. I think that's more what entertainment and music should be.

Chris Cornell

#2. Look upon paintings with eyes of mystery rather than judgement. Support the need to enter into the sacred space beyond evaluation.

Michele Cassou

#3. The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.

Clive Barker

#4. It seemed to me that the baker had an honest response to the painting. Van Ruijven tried too hard when he looked at paintings, with his honeyed words and studied expressions. He was too aware of having an audience to perform for, whereas the baker merely said what he thought.

Tracy Chevalier

#5. The Japanese have a wonderful sense of design and a refinement in their art. They try to produce beautiful paintings with the minimum number of strokes.

David Rockefeller

#6. It fascinates me to create beautiful paintings with the simplest means.

James Rosenquist

#7. I kept ... returning to the (ancient Roman) wall paintings with their veiled melancholy and elegant plasticity.

William Baziotes

#8. The black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings. I realized that I didn't see many paintings with black people in them.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

#9. I was making big paintings with mythological themes. When I started painting black figures, the white professors were relieved, and the black students were like, 'She's on our side.' These are the kinds of issues that a white male artist just doesn't have to deal with.

Kara Walker

#10. A few years ago, Bill Gates was boasting that we'll soon have sensors which will turn on the music that we like or show on the walls the paintings we like when we walk into a room. How boring! The hell with our preexisting likes; let's expand ourselves intellectually.

Denis Dutton

#11. Feminists amuse me more than illusionists. They are the only type of people that can make an illogical argument seem even more illogical with paintings of delusions.

Lionel Suggs

#12. The narrative oftentimes is that everything that comes out of the hood is 'real,' and so I thought, 'I'll base it on the absurd, the not real. I'll twist the idea of real on its head and see if I can get away with it. I'll make paintings that come not from a place but through an abstract gaze.'

Mark Bradford

#13. 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

#14. I picture heaven as a vast library, with unlimited volumes to read. And paintings and statues to examine galore. I picture it as a great doorway to learning ... rather than one great dull answer to all our questions

Anne Rice

#15. The illustrations in picture books are the first paintings most children see, and because of that, they are incredibly important. What we see and share at that age stays with us for life.

Anthony Browne

#16. I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.

Robert Indiana

#17. I have been taking every step toward the future every day through making many paintings and sculptures with my deep emotion hidden in my life.

Yayoi Kusama

#18. I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.

Bob Dylan

#19. With Millais's paintings, it's microscopic; when he does hair, it's extraordinary: you can see every strand.

Samuel Barnett

#20. With answering howls of rage, the vampires charged the werewolves, who met them head-on in the center of the ballroom.

The noise was like nothing Clary had ever heard. If Bosch's paintings of hell had come with a soundtrack, they would have sounded like this.

Cassandra Clare

#21. A man who has not suffered has nothing to tell with his paintings.

Irving Stone

#22. My paintings don't simply represent what I see; they present viewers with what I want them to see.

Ken Danby

#23. I am going to do some drawings or paintings ... in the mirror of my wardrobe..with myself as a figure doing something.

Gwen John

#24. The paint for the grey paintings was mixed beforehand and then applied with different implements - sometimes a roller, sometimes a brush. It was only after painting them that I sometimes felt that the grey was not yet satisfactory and that another layer of paint was needed.

Gerhard Richter

#25. I've been working with Disney all these years doing voice work, and now I'm signed with Disney Fine Arts, doing 'Beauty and the Beast' oil paintings. So it's been an ongoing wonderful job.

Paige O'Hara

#26. I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.

Pat Conroy

#27. I am very invested in the physical activity and the decision-making that is involved with making paintings - nothing else is quite like it.

Stephen Beal

#28. One of the questions that I hear over and over and over is, 'What do we do with all these paintings we do on television?' Most of these paintings are donated to PBS stations across the country. They auction them off, and they make a happy buck with 'em.

Bob Ross

#29. I like to draw, produce paintings, do something with my fingers - but I am very normal, down-to-earth person.

Marion Bartoli

#30. These women stared out from the canvases with arched brows, enormous eyes and tiny mouths, seeing much, and saying little.

Neal Stephenson

#31. I can't just have one painting - I need to cover the wall in paintings. It's the same with my music. I want to mix everything together to create more.

Florence Welch

#32. Why is comedy the only form of the arts where people think they have to agree with or approve the content? You don't walk through a museum with a towel and throw it over paintings you don't like.

Jim Norton

#33. Just as the unmusical ear is not competent to judge music, so it is likewise with pictures, whether they are paintings, drawings or photos. Only a sensitive and trained eye gives us the right to judge ...

Josef Albers

#34. A well-designed home has to be very comfortable. I can't stand the aesthetes, the minimal thing. I can't live that way. My home has to be filled with stuff - mostly paintings, sculpture, my fish lamps, cardboard furniture, lots of books.

Frank Gehry

#35. Red is one of the strongest colors, it's blood, it has a power with the eye. That's why traffic lights are red I guess, and stop signs as well ... In fact I use red in all of my paintings.

Keith Haring

#36. It is better to have a good painting with ten holes than ten bad paintings without any holes.

Edvard Munch

#37. God allows us glimpses into Heaven through beauty. We see the glimpses in nature, in paintings, we hear it in music, find it in words, but Heaven is shown to us most often, not through beautiful places, but through our love with others." "Like

Scott Thompson

#38. That by listening to some music, by reading some books, by looking at paintings, and most important by hanging out with one another - by collaborating with one another and creating your own network - you can achieve something that is much better than what is out there.

David Amram

#39. I'm interested in how paintings can change or transform - sometimes through close examination or viewed from afar; or how they hold the space of a wall or interact in a room with each other.

Stephen Beal

#40. Man is certainly not creative, but his creativity should not be concerned with God. His creativity should be concerned with making a better world, a better society, better literature, better poetry, better paintings, better sculpture, better human beings.

Rajneesh

#41. 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

#42. When she sings that song you're with that elderly couple in that pub in Deptford and the mundane becomes romantic and beautiful and I think that's probably the great thing about any sort of paintings or music or something, is just when nothing becomes everything

Jools Holland

#43. To have that powder blown up your nose is rather like being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with Baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electricity.

Wade Davis

#44. Hopper's paintings are full of women like her; women who appear to be in the grips of a loneliness that has to do with gender and unattainable standards of appearance, and that gets increasingly toxic and strangulating with age.

Olivia Laing

#45. Some of the pictures are truly mysterious to me.. which is why I so often say publicly that I don't know or don't care what they're really about. And yet I can also say that the paintings are prayers.. that they have to do with whatever it is that makes you want more than what daily life affords.

Susan Rothenberg

#46. Stories were primarily verbal to begin with. Before there were cave paintings, stories were told over generations. We tell each other thousands of stories in the course of everyday life.

David Massengill

#47. I hope to depart in no other way than looking back with love and wistfulness and thinking, oh paintings that I would have made..

Vincent Van Gogh

#48. There are artists with palettes and easels selling the kind of modern art that Soviet art critics used to critique with bulldozers. Judging by the paintings I saw, the Soviets were right the first time.

P. J. O'Rourke

#49. The old, sad art colors are gone. Now I paint bright colors. I paint paintings which are happy, where children are laughing and playing with animals. I paint paradise on Earth. I still paint sadness sometimes, but there is sadness in the world, too.

Margaret Keane

#50. Like it or not, people tend to buy paintings to match their drapes, couch or carpet. I know you want them to be so overwhelmed with your skills they can't resist hauling your art home. These three factors are what dictate most art sales.

Jack White

#51. To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing
what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.

Gerhard Richter

#52. Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on one thing only: my paintings, and everything else is sacrificed to it ... myself included.

Pablo Picasso

#53. There is no interruption between my older paintings and my cutouts. Just that with an increasing sense of the absolute, and more abstraction, I have achieved a form that is simplified to its essence.

Henri Matisse

#54. Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it, Picasso did it with Cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new paintings again.

Willem De Kooning

#55. And I started with this: I have not painted at all my childhood. In fact, I never painted. But I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything.

Josef Albers

#56. The value of writing about art is its effect on the imagination. Paintings allow us to inhabit another culture, place, and time period, and address the issues of those time periods that resonate with our own time.

Susan Vreeland

#57. Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising.

David Ogilvy

#58. Until the late 1970s there'd either be only black or white in the paintings or if there were colours it would be a small amount, not a large area, and with the color separated from other colors by black or white (which is formula for Damien Hirst's successful dot paintings, incidentally).

Matthew Collings

#59. The Realists
HOPE that you may understand!
What can books of men that wive
In a dragon-guarded land,
Paintings of the dolphin-drawn
Sea-nymphs in their pearly waggons
Do, but awake a hope to live
That had gone
With the dragons?

W.B.Yeats

#60. Gray goes with gold. Gray goes with all colors. I've done gray-and-red paintings, and gray and orange go so well together. It takes a long time to make gray because gray has a little bit of color in it.

Ellsworth Kelly

#61. 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

#62. Artists hide their identities in the brushstrokes of their paintings, the verses in their cantos, and the sentences in their novels. The true face of an artist is never on his face and this is what he prefers. Others misunderstand this displaced melancholy with an absence of melancholy.

Bruce Crown

#63. I want to make beautiful paintings. But I don't make beautiful paintings by putting beautiful paint on a canvas with a beautiful motif. It just doesn't work. I expect my paintings to be strong and surprising.

Albert Oehlen

#64. My core competency has really informed my painting. The roots of editing stem from classical paintings - classic painters intended to drive your eye from this conflict to that intrigue, ending with a caprice. That is a montage, that is editing. It became a flipbook in later generations.

Billy Zane

#65. The spot paintings, the spin paintings, they're all a mechanical way to avoid the actual guy in a room, myself, with a blank canvas.

Damien Hirst

#66. All paintings start with concept, which is another word for image or imagination. The mistake is to isolate the concept as if the idea did not need to be given permanent form.

Joseph Plaskett

#67. My paintings and sculptures, at first glance, may appear to be purely aesthetic; closer up, they are not. They hold a feeling of tentativeness, combined with a sense of arrival.

Budd Hopkins

#68. The wall between writing and painting is just good grammar.

Moderation in moderation.

Fun is scary with a happy ending.

Just love. If love doesn't transform that which annoys you, it will be easier to tolerate.

Emily Thornton Calvo

#69. All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression

Richard Diebenkorn

#70. I have tried to draw the human effigy (and all the other subjects dealt with in my paintings) in an immediate and effective way without any reference to the aesthetic.

Jean Dubuffet

#71. Working on 'Raising Hope' is a very hurry-up-and-wait activity, and I just always liked the idea of being as productive as I can be. I write because I don't just want that time to dissolve, where I'm sitting in a trailer staring blankly at the paintings of moccasins that came with the trailer.

Lucas Neff

#72. Certainly I have made comments on American society with the various pictures and have done about nine antiwar paintings. But I did them because I was incorporating my feelings into my work.

James Rosenquist

#73. I like to go to art museums and name the untitled paintings ... Boy With Pail ... Kitten On Fire.

Steven Wright

#74. Why all these paintings of you? Because I'm an artist, Emma. These pictures are my heart. And if my heart was a canvas, every square Inch of it would be painted over with you." - Julian Blackthorn

Cassandra Clare

#75. I grew up with the idea of the cyborg and the robot, but at the same time I felt this intense disconnection between the things I was engaged with and inspired by in terms of fun and play. It seemed like paintings and drawings were so static.

Aaron Koblin

#76. I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.

John Le Carre

#77. They (his Street scene paintings and drawings) originated in the years 1911-14, in one of the loneliest times of my life, during which an agonizing restlessness drove me out onto the streets day and night, which were filled with people and cars.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

#78. Poetry' is what distinguishes the cubist paintings Picasso and I arrived at intuitively from the lifeless sort of painting those who followed us tried, with such unfortunate results, to arrive at theoretically.

Georges Braque

#79. My paintings are titled after they are finished. I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me - and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I could certainly never mirror nature. I would more like to paint what it leaves with me.

Joan Mitchell

#80. When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.

J.G. Ballard

#81. Some people might think that the paintings are involved with a mythic - not just subject matter - but a certain sort of physical space that the paintings occupy ... like personages.

Julian Schnabel

#82. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.

Joan Didion

#83. What has made it work, or what makes certain paintings successful or not, has to do with my being a painter and a thinking, feeling person, more than my sex, color, height, origin.

Helen Frankenthaler

#84. We end up on the same elevator with her, and she spends the whole ride to the seventh floor chatting to Peeta about his paintings while the light of his still-glowing costume reflects off her bare breasts.

Suzanne Collins

#85. The small figures that appear in my paintings are there only because they were there when I was working from nature on my preliminary sketches with pencil.

E. J. Hughes

#86. The oversized chairs are white; the walls, covered with occasional landscape paintings, are white; and the plush carpet is the whitest of all. I'm insanely glad I didn't bring a cup of grape juice with me.

Wendy Mass

#87. The history of American art, in a way, begins with Jackson Pollock and his big paintings. This theme of bigness - all painters and sculptors have dealt with it ever since.

Michael Heizer

#88. The great paintings are the ones with the most subtle value relationships. The closer you could bring your values and still distinguish between them, the stronger you were as a painter.

John F. Carlson

#89. I rarely feel that any of my paintings ever make it to a finishing point. There's always something else I want to add to them, like a few more brushstrokes or another color. But there comes a point with every painting when I just have to stop and accept it for what it is.

Colleen Hoover

#90. Dr. Grime carries a Tide stain pen. He does not use his own spit. Art conservators do. "We make cotton swabs on bamboo sticks and moisten the swab in our mouths," says Andrea Chevalier, senior paintings conservator with the Intermuseum Conservation Association.

Mary Roach

#91. I think ... it is somehow very useful, and maybe even essential, for a fine artist to have to somehow make his peace on the canvas with all the things he cannot do. That is what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call 'personality,' or maybe even 'pain.'

Kurt Vonnegut

#92. Back in medieval times, Victorian repression hadn't come in yet. People were bawdy and wild and more in touch with their true natures. If you look at the Bosch paintings or Bruegel, you see, when people are dancing, they're totally cutting loose.

Catherine Hardwicke

#93. They were wrestling with canvases, using violent colors and huge brush strokes. I arrived with gray, silent, sober, oppressed paintings. One critic said they were paintings that thought.

Antoni Tapies

#94. And people who have kids, people with husbands and jobs and mortgages, don't much want to hear about other people's paintings.

Michele Young-Stone

#95. Art is a harmony parallel with nature

Paul Cezanne

#96. The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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

Stephane Mallarme

#98. If paintings are so important - worth so much, reproduced, cherished, and visited so often - then isn't it troubling that we can hardly make emotional contact with the artists? Few centuries, it seems, are as determinedly tearless as ours.

James Elkins

#99. I can't tell a story in the white man's language, so I say what I want to say with my paintings.

Allen Sapp

#100. Now almost every artist outside of New York is connected with some school or some museum school, and even in New York the majority are. That's an interesting fact when you take the idea of making money, making a living selling paintings. Only a dozen or two painters do that.

Ad Reinhardt