Top 100 Quotes About A Painter
#1. After a sound public education, I attended Penn and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. After being drafted into the military and studying Indonesian, I emerged as a writer, not a painter.
Allan Gurganus
#2. I have tried to preserve in my relationship to the film the same closeness and intimacy that exists between a painter and his canvas.
Norman McLaren
#3. Lat at nigh have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were mean to be? Are you a writer who doesn't write, a painter who doesn't pain, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.
Steven Pressfield
#4. The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.
Jane Hirshfield
#5. A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude ...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#7. It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.
Henry Moore
#8. As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language.
Pablo Picasso
#9. I wanted to be a painter and an artist. And it's interesting that in some of my later musical works, I refer so often and associate myself with works of art.
Gunther Schuller
#10. I had no natural gift to be anything - not an athlete, not an actor, not a writer, not a director, a painter of garden porches - not anything. So I've worked really hard, because nothing ever came easily to me.
Paul Newman
#11. A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art.
Wassily Kandinsky
#12. You remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. Under different circumstances I would rather have been a painter than to bother with these god-damn words. I never actually thought of myself as a poet but I knew I had to be an artist in some way.
William Carlos Williams
#13. As a painter I shall never signify anything of importance. I feel it Absolutely.
Vincent Van Gogh
#14. I wish there was a painter who could paint as well as Ted Williams could hit.
Jack Levine
#15. I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having pushed paint around.
Chuck Close
#16. Just as a musician loves music and not nightingales, and a poet loves poetry and not sunsets, a painter is not primarily a person who responds to figures and landscapes. He is primarily one who loves pictures.
Andre Malraux
#17. I've done what I could as a painter and that seems to me to be sufficient. I don't want to be compared to the great masters of the past, and my painting is open to criticism; that's enough.
Claude Monet
#18. I wanted to study painting and become a painter, but I had a huge flip-over in my life when I was about 18 or 19. I was part of a criminal environment; I got arrested and convicted, and I had to start thinking in a new way.
Aksel Hennie
#19. [On the English climate:] People get a bad impression of it by continually trying to treat it as if it was a bank clerk, who ought to be on time on Tuesday next, instead of philosophically seeing it as a painter, who may do anything so long as you don't try to predict what.
Katharine Whitehorn
#20. What's so astonishing about not understanding? There are so many things in art, beginning with art itself, that one doesn't understand. A painter doesn't see everything that he has put in his painting.
Henri Matisse
#21. Art doesn't alter things. It points things out, but it doesn't alter them. It can't, no matter what a painter wants to do.
Arthur Boyd
#23. As a poet or a novelist or a painter, you are pushing yourself all the time, always looking for a new way to approach something, challenging yourself and never, never trying to write the same book twice.
Paul Auster
#24. As a painter today you have to work without that essential platform. But if one does not deceive oneself and accepts this lack of certainty, other things may come into play.
Bridget Riley
#25. A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure.
Lucian Freud
#26. Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is.
Henri Matisse
#27. When a painter thinks to disengage from the world outside himself and fantasies unprecedented forms he thinks he will make a painting, he finds in this expression the same effect - I would even say the same picture - that he had unconsciously acquired by his habit to experience reality intensely.
Pierre Alechinsky
#28. One is a painter because one wants so-called freedom; one doesn't want to go to the office every morning.
Marcel Duchamp
#29. One fine day as my mother was putting the bread in the oven, I went up to her and taking her by her flour-smeared elbow I said to her, Mama I want to be a painter.
Marc Chagall
#30. I haven't the slightest idea what art is, but to be a painter is something of which you have to prove.
Wayne Thiebaud
#31. To become a painter or a sculptor or a graphic designer is quite an isolated way to spend your life.
Cate Blanchett
#32. All my siblings became artists. One's a novelist, my brother is a painter, my sister was a costume designer.
Caio Fonseca
#33. My mom is a painter, so I've been doing drawings and paintings as early as I can remember. Then there was this gap where I was doing graffiti in high school and making as much [traditional] art.
Alec Monopoly
#34. I believe everything creative is somewhat collaborative. If you're a painter and someone stretches your canvas, it was collaborative on some level.
Ron White
#35. I always wanted to be a painter. I loved painting. I went on three different art courses but had no talent whatsoever.
John Burnside
#36. My dream, maybe because of my family, of course, was to be a painter. I chose in one moment the direction of textiles; from textiles I went to fashion.
Roberto Cavalli
#37. A poet needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a director an army.
Orson Welles
#38. Who's going to ask a painter to see a diploma? They'd say, 'Can I see your paintings?', wouldn't they?
David Hockney
#39. I also want the figurative like a painter who only paints abstract colors but wants to show that he does so because he chooses to, not because he can't draw.
Clarice Lispector
#40. What I find horrible nowadays is that people are always trying to find a personality for themselves. Nobody bothers about what you might call a painter's ideal ... the kind that's always existed ... No. They couldn't care less about that.
Pablo Picasso
#41. The reason I do this job is because I started to be a painter. Making money in art was difficult. The easiest way to make money was to use art for some other reason. One of the easiest and most interesting from an economic point of view was fashion. Fashion pays.
Franco Moschino
#42. Berthe Morisot was a painter full of eighteenth-century delicacy and grace; in a word, the last elegant and 'feminine' artists since Fragonard.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#43. I've always worn a hat when I work. I think it also comes from a picture of Rothko I saw with a painter's hat on.
Brice Marden
#44. Death is pitch-dark, but colors are light. To be a painter, one must work with rays of light.
Edvard Munch
#45. My father was in the ad business, and he wanted to be a painter.
Bruce Campbell
#46. Virtue runs before the muse,
and defies her skill;
she is rapt and doth refuse
to wait a painter's will.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#47. If you're a painter, it's simply taken for granted that you'll spend a lot of time in museums studying great paintings, but if you're a cartoonist, it used to be very hard to see an original cartoon drawing.
Bill Watterson
#48. Everything that a painter did or that a writer wrote was a part of his training and preparation for what he was to do.
Ernest Hemingway,
#49. A painter paints, a musician plays, a writer writes - but a movie actor waits.
Mary Astor
#50. I trained as a painter, and I still love painting, but eventually I became aware that the physical aspect of painting didn't really suit me. I didn't enjoy working in the medium. It's very messy. I prefer to have it clean, with a nice computer.
Loretta Lux
#51. Anyone who tries to make a living as a painter knows you can't lounge about waiting for inspiration to hit; nothing motivates like keeping a roof over your head.
Nita Engle
#52. The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquillity . I was a painter before I was a writer and a painter never wants the subject right under his nose; he wants to stand back and study a landscape with half-closed eyes.
Isak Dinesen
#53. Well, the first thing I wanted to be was a carpenter. Then I wanted to be a painter and then a singer. It was when I first saw 'Lawrence of Arabia' that I wanted to be an actor.
Michael Pitt
#54. I sometimes question whether I'm even an artist or just a painter.
Martin Mull
#55. Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
John Ashbery
#56. Now I'm a painter. That was another opportunity I was able to pursue, I've been painting all my life, now it's become a second career because of my success in the movies.
Tony Curtis
#57. There is no "End" to be written, neither can you, like an architect, engrave in stone the day the garden was finished. A painter can frame his picture, a composer can notate his coda, but a garden is always on the move.
Mirabel Osler
#58. It is not that love is blind. It is that love sees with a painter's eye, finding the essence that renders all else background.
Robert Breault
#59. Though colour may appear at first a part of painting merely mechanical, yet it still has its rules, and those grounded upon that presiding principle which regulates both the great and the little in the study of a painter.
Joshua Reynolds
#60. I love art. My sister is an artist and my mother is a painter, so it is very much in the family. I haven't ever wanted to be a fine artist myself - my sister robbed me of my artistic talent, I think.
Douglas Booth
#61. Acting is a creative process, and directing and music. I think creative people - and I take myself as a creative person and it doesn't mean you have to be an actor, a musician, or a painter - but I think if you are in a creative profession or a creative business you do have a heightened awareness.
Anthony Hopkins
#62. I grew up wanting to be a painter and paint pictures.
Paul Simonon
#63. I was 100 percent sure when I left university that I was going to be a painter.
Rebecca Miller
#64. Photographers, along with dentists, are the two professions never satisfied with what they do. Every dentist would like to be a doctor and inside every photographer is a painter trying to get out.
Pablo Picasso
#65. Many a painter has lived in affluence, in high esteem, who lacked the divine spark, and who is utterly forgotten to-day.
Walter J. Phillips
#66. I'm not a painter who's saying, "I want people to see my work when I die; it will be this and that." That's not satisfying to me.
Paul Feig
#67. We must, like a painter, take time to stand back from our work, to be still, and thus see what's what ... True repose is standing back to survey the activities that fill our days.
William McNamara
#68. Don't you want to be anything. An architect or a gardener, or perhaps a painter?'
'No, I don't ... I'd like to do entirely different things. I'd like to understand what robins say to each other. ... I'd like to see how trees manage to drink water with their roots and get to be so big.
Hermann Hesse
#69. There isn't a single person or landscape or subject which doesn't possess some interest, although it may not be immediately apparent. When a painter discovers this hidden treasure, other people are immediately struck by its beauty.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#70. Picasso, Michelangelo, possibly, might be verging on genius, but I don't think a painter like Rembrandt is a genius.
Damien Hirst
#71. What if she was supposed to be a painter, but no one ever gave her a brush?
Adi Alsaid
#72. I won't ever set the world on fire as a painter,' Dickie said, 'but I get a great deal of pleasure out of it.
Patricia Highsmith
#73. It seems to me it's a painter's duty to try to put an idea into his work.
Vincent Van Gogh
#74. Michael's Powell art director was a painter and they had a wonderful friendship and artistic understanding. Michael himself, in the way he designed his own house, it was always with bright colours. Very un-English!
Thelma Schoonmaker
#75. An artist who has no faith is like a painter who was born blind.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#76. I just get excited ... like a painter with a blank canvas.
Kenny Florian
#77. I am just beginning to understand what it is to paint. A painter should have two lives, one in which to learn, and one in which to practice his art.
Pierre Bonnard
#78. For a painter, the Mecca of the world, for study, for inspiration and for living is here on this star called Paris. Just look at it, no wonder so many artists have come here and called it home. Brother, if you can't paint in Paris, you'd better give up and marry the boss's daughter.
Alan Jay Lerner
#79. If you cut a painter's hands off, he'd still feel the urge to pick up a brush.
Jil Sander
#80. I understood that I was inventing myself, and that I was doing this more in the way of a painter than in the way of a scientist. I could not count on precision or calculation; I could only count on intuition.
Jamaica Kincaid
#81. There is nothing that special to see when looking at me. I'm a painter who paints day in day out, from morning till evening - figure pictures and landscapes, more rarely portraits.
Gustav Klimt
#82. Writing changed my life. It has an existential dimension, and that's the same for every writer. Every artist has a moment of awakening, of happening upon an idea that grabs hold of you, regardless of whether you are a painter or a writer.
Imre Kertesz
#85. The two greatest strokes of luck that can happen to a painter are (1) to be Spanish, (2) to be called Dali
Salvador Dali
#86. Knowing what paint a painter uses or having an understanding of where he was in the history of where he came from doesn't hurt your appreciation of the painting.
Jodie Foster
#87. There are some people who may not like precision in their art. They may like it to be grittier and more gestural, more of a direct expression in the way that a painter would put his strokes on canvas.
Adrian Tomine
#88. A painter's tastes must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what it is suitable for him to do in art.
Lucian Freud
#89. Cummings' career as a writer - and a painter - was as wobbly as his love life. He tried his hand at playwriting, satirical essays, and even a dance scenario for Lincoln Kirsten.
Billy Collins
#90. Free time keeps me going. It's just something that's always been a part of my life. I was originally a painter, and I made films sort of as an extension of that, and then I started to try to make dramatic films because the early films were experimental films.
Gus Van Sant
#91. I hope to be a producer, a musician, a painter, a photographer - I'm going to push myself to do as many things as I can and see where it goes.
Lucas Grabeel
#92. I photograph like a documentarian, but I print like a painter
Todd Hido
#93. Use anger to emotionalize whatever thing you intend to do in life - being a painter, a poet or a photographer
Gordon Parks
#94. Not to compare an actor to a painter, but you can go through different phases and still be the same artist, y'know?
Jennifer Jason Leigh
#95. A painter is a man who paints what he sells; an artist, on the other hand, is a man who sells what he paints.
Pablo Picasso
#96. I started doing cartoons when I was about 21. I never thought I would be a cartoonist. It happened behind my back. I was always a painter and drawer.
Lynda Barry
#97. Huguette Clark was an artist, a painter and doll collector.
Bill Dedman
#98. Take away a painter's vanity, said a famous landscape painter, and he will never touch a pencil again.
Walter J. Phillips
#99. For the collection, I am like a painter or a writer. I may or may not be a character in my own story.
Sonia Rykiel
#100. I went to art high school and thought I'd be a painter. Unfortunately I didn't finish high school, but that's always been part of my work.
David LaChapelle
