Top 100 Quotes About Life Painting
#1. 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
#2. Maybe poets express more directly a sense of sympathy for other human beings. Painting is a little bit more of a retreat from human beings in real life; painting is more about the extreme moments when speech doesn't help anymore.
Francesco Clemente
#3. Strange story about Degas. He hated women, didn't want to be with them. Yet he spent much of his life painting them. He had seen his father maltreat his mother, must have had a deep fear that he'd do the same thing.
Irving Stone
#4. My still-life painting has more to do with light and shadow than with the objects themselves.
William C. Wright
#5. I'm quite sure that all true professional artists, of every description, in all walks of life, whether their craft is painting, music, sculpture, medicine or anything, have one primary concern - mankind.
Chico Hamilton
#6. It felt as if I had lived all my life inside a flat painting and only now had I stepped into the real world.
Rosamund Hodge
#7. My studio work is a central part of my life and I'd be at loose ends without it. When I'm not in my studio, I don't stop thinking about painting.
Stephen Beal
#8. 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
#9. Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk. Why shouldn't painting be too?
Edgar Degas
#10. As a young person, you have no fixed address, no studio, no money for materials, so I made things sort of on the run. That life doesn't favor the stability and spatial demands of painting.
David Salle
#11. I do believe it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply molding one's inner life. And that too is a deed.
Etty Hillesum
#12. It is not about painting life, it is about making painting alive.
Paul Cezanne
#13. There are moments when clear images finally begin to emerge within the abstract painting of your life.
Renee Carlino
#14. [Robert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008] helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art - not to mention between art and life.
Michael Kimmelman
#15. There is a larger frame to the painting than the one that bounds our life's events.
Ram Dass
#16. The only thing in life that really gives me any peace is just being lost in the process of creating something, whether it's the film or painting and drawing, which has been a big part of my life, for a long time.
Ellar Coltrane
#17. The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.
Harold Rosenberg
#18. It's a shock for me to go through and see all those years of painting my life, which is very personal for me. It's a very difficult thing for an artist to look back at his work.
Andrew Wyeth
#19. My sister-in-law is a painter, and I'll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She'll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting.
Anthony Doerr
#20. Painting is much more than therapy to me its a way of life.
Tony Curtis
#21. 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
#22. Painting, art in general, enchants me. It is my life. What else matters? When you put all your soul into a work, all that is noble in you, you cannot fail to find a kindred soul who understands you, and you do not need a host of such spirits. Is not that all an artist should wish for?
Camille Pissarro
#23. 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
#24. One must act in painting as in life, directly.
Pablo Picasso
#25. I'm compelled to paint nearly every day. I just felt like making a painting, went out and bought paints and a canvas. Now it fulfills me creatively when I'm not doing music: it's something you can do by yourself and it's totally yours. It's a great adjunct to my life.
David Johansen
#26. The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that make one's life.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#27. The world somehow is always the same. The only thing that can improve is the individual life. One can live a good life. One can give life a meaning. Either by drinking oneself to death or by painting oneself to death or by loving oneself to death.
Odd Nerdrum
#28. It's not about getting over things, it's about making room for them. It's about painting the picture with contrast.
Brianna Wiest
#29. Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all this. I think work is the best. (Frida Kahlo, p. 157)
Martha Zamora
#30. You care enough, that you want your life to be fulfilled in a living way, not in a painting way, not in a writing way ... you really do want it to be involving in living, corresponding with other living objects, moving, changing, that kind of thing.
Edie Sedgwick
#32. Molly grabbed a vase off the mantel and flung it at the wall, knocking it into a painting of a mountain scene. The vase shattered and the picture frame swayed back and forth on the wall, taunting her with an image of what life was supposed to be like. . .
Susan Rose
#33. If you construct a room in paint, you haunt it. Your life rests in every stroke. So paint only the rooms that you can bear to occupy forever. Or paint the stars instead.
Benjamin Wood
#34. Painting gave meaning to my life which without it would not have had
Francis Bacon
#35. We're painting the same people all our life - it's just the way we look at them that changes. If you experience trauma, you can speak about it in so many different ways. You can speak about landscape, you can speak about your food; it's always different. Trauma is the beginning of life as an artist.
Christian Boltanski
#36. Regarding the creative: never assume you're the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you're masterful.
Don Roff
#37. To make music I rely on other people, which is good - that's the main difference in painting and music at this stage. They are separate parts of my life really, like having two jobs, one in a bar, one in a lighthouse.
Danny Fox
#38. 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
#39. The majority of my work is from life. I spend most fine days from May to October painting outside.
John Dyer
#40. A sad fact of life lately at the Museum of Modern Art is that when it comes to group shows of contemporary painting from the collection, the bar has been set pretty low.
Jerry Saltz
#41. 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
#42. Anyone can put paint on a canvas, but only a true master can bring the painting to life. Anyone can kill, but only a genius can make murder an art.
Shaun Jeffrey
#43. From music and dance to painting and sculpting, the arts allow us to explore new worlds and to view life from another perspective. They also encourage individuals to sharpen their skills and to nurture their imagination and intellect.
George W. Bush
#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. The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.
Jackson Pollock
#46. The whole scene had a dreamlike quality, like a Chagall painting come to life.
Lev Grossman
#47. I have no idea what to expect I have no idea what my life will be like in this new place and I'm being nailed in the stomach by every exquisite embellishment, every lavish accessory, every superfluous painting, molding, lighting, coloring of this building. I hope the whole thing catches fire.
Tahereh Mafi
#48. Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. I try to act in that gap between the two.
- 1959, from a catalogue
Robert Rauschenberg
#49. It's important to have a life and spend time outside of those things [music and politics], in order to appreciate what you've achieved as far as just spending time with people you love, and doing things like painting.
Eddie Vedder
#50. Sometimes, dear brother, I know so well what I want. I am quite able to do without God, both in my life and in my painting, but what I cannot do without, unwell as I am, is something greater than myself, which is my life, the power to create.
Vincent Van Gogh
#51. Living is art.
Breathing and heart beating is music.
Seeing is painting the world with our eyes.
Touching is sculpting the shape of everything.
Life is the most intense art of all.
Jacob Nordby
#52. My aim in painting is to create pulsating, luminous, and open surfaces that emanate a mystic light, in accordance with my deepest insight into the experience of life and nature.
Hans Hofmann
#53. I studied painting and sculpting at school and became an actress by mistake ... I've had many lovers and still have romances. I am very spoiled. All my life, I've had too many admirers.
Gina Lollobrigida
#54. Life is like a painting you reflect the image based on your feeling, emotion, character, attitude and how you made it.
Daniel Habil
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting. Life is profound in its simplicity.
Charles Bukowski
#59. Form and substance are one and the same. Form is the life expression and substance the living painting.
Asger Jorn
#60. Among the guitarists, Wes Montgomery is fantastic. He's always good to let you know what the art form is all about. It's the same still life that everybody is painting, but in comes Wes Montgomery, and it's right there!
Bill Cosby
#63. My life is like a memento more painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition.
Yann Martel
#64. I've reached a point in my life where my Truman Show boat has hit the painting.
Kanye West
#65. When you want to make the main color pure and bright, don't just keep adding bright colors on it. Just make the colors around the spot darker and dull. It will give the scene dramatical effects.
I think the life is the same.
Hiroko Sakai
#67. My whole life has been singing and painting. I just do those two things.
Tony Bennett
#68. It's not a matter of painting life, it's a matter of giving life to painting.
Pierre Bonnard
#69. As an artist I have always tried to be faithful to my vision of life, and I have frequently been in conflict with those who wanted me to paint not what I saw but what they wished me to see.
Diego Rivera
#70. A picture was a motionless record of motion. An arrested representation of life. A picture was the kiss of death pretending to possess immutability.
Ivan Klima
#71. I wanted to make sure the last chapters of my life were full, and painting, it turns out, has helped occupy not only space but opened my mind.
George W. Bush
#72. When I say be creative I don't mean that you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem.
Osho
#73. The literature of the immediate future will inevitably turn away from painting, whether respectably realistic or modern, and from daily life, whether old or the very latest and revolutionary, and turn to artistically realized philosophy.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#74. Man needs music, literature, and painting - all those oases of perfection that make up art - to compensate for the rudeness and materialism of life.
Fernando Botero
#75. A painting is life and a painting is death ... the picture is our own legacy left by tomorrow's dead for tomorrow's living.
Ivan Albright
#76. But painting can be too lonely ... I like being with people too much to have ever made that my life's work.
Marie Windsor
#77. For me, filmmaking combines everything. That's the reason I've made cinema my life's work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.
Akira Kurosawa
#78. If you're going to be an artist, all life is your subject. And all your experience is part of your art. A youngster told me recently that he was going to give himself a year to see if he has talent. A year! It takes a lifetime to see if you have it. Painting is total engagement.
Ben Shahn
#79. It is an awesome tragedy in this life that, when asking what a person is and they reply doctor or lawyer or engineer, we don't say Well thats a nice little hobby, but why don't you take up writing or painting or music?
D.A. Botta
#80. Sculpture is more than painting. It is greater To raise the dead to life than to create Phantoms that seem to live.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#81. A novel should be as like life as a painting, but not as like life as a piece of waxwork.
Mary Russell Mitford
#82. I want it to be more universal than that - like a painter doesn't have to explain his life story away to justify his painting.
Beth Orton
#83. We make our own music.
We paint our own future.
A.P. Sweet
#84. I am unable to make any distinction between the feeling I get from life and the way I translate that feeling into painting.
Henri Matisse
#85. I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly - poetry, literature - this speculative attitude toward life.
Rafael Moneo
#86. Without painting, sculpture, music, poetry, and the emotions produced by natural beauty of every kind, life would lose half its charm.
Herbert Spencer
#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. When I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.
Jackson Pollock
#89. As the saturating colors of sun-life fade from sight, the ominous moon reaches out its long arm and applies the dark dyes of night.
Daniel J. Rice
#90. It wasn't that I had any great dream of being an architect. I just wanted to make things. Whether it was furniture, painting, interior design, or architecture. I just wanted to create something.
Tadao Ando
#91. If I go to the National Gallery and I look at one of the great paintings that excite me there, it's not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me which return me to life more violently.
Francis Bacon
#92. Never look back. The past is done. The future is a blank canvas. Work on creating a masterpiece. Only you have the power to make your painting beautiful.
Suzy Kassem
#93. Life is like a painting. Imagine it, hit and try drawing with the pencil of first steps, fill in the colors of happiness, correct the mistakes with eraser of love and forgiveness; thus, one dream project is accomplished. Create such masterpieces just like that.
Vikrmn
#94. Any artist, the work you do, if it's a painting or if it's a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else's life. That's what's fun about sharing art.
Matthew McConaughey
#95. I frequently lock myself in my studio. I do not often see the people I love, and in the end I shall suffer for it ... painting is one's private life.
Edgar Degas
#96. [Pablo] Picasso really changed my life. It's strange to say so, but I started to see some Picasso paintings very early. I was very young, and he was not so much known.
Agnes Varda
#97. Otherwise he stayed in the background, a small figure in a painting, while life was played out in the foreground. However,
Nina George
#98. Painting reflects. It kills you in a colourful shower of emptiness. Flatness. Randomness. And beauty. Yes, it is the most pure beauty I have ever felt in my life.
Nigel Tomm
#99. Gotta have opposites, light and dark and dark and light, in painting. It's like in life. Gotta have a little sadness once in awhile so you know when the good times come. I'm waiting on the good times now.
Bob Ross
#100. You see, the catch about portrait painting
I've looked into the thing a bit - is that you can't start
painting portraits till people come along and ask you to, and
they won't come and ask you to until you've painted a lot first.
This makes it kind of difficult for a chappie.
P.G. Wodehouse
