Quotes About Painters

#1. I've seen only painters and fishermen and I think they're both the same kind of men who made a different choice one time in their lives. The fisherman held a rod in his hand and said yes and the painter held a brush in his hand and said yes and sometimes I hold a beer in my hand and say yes.

Sherman Alexie

#2. Painters and sculptors and designers, they take raw materials and turn them into art. Dancers turn themselves into art. We are poetry in motion when we do our jobs right, and we can stop your heart with the point of a toe or the angle of a limb. But

Seanan McGuire

#3. Listen to the advice of others, but follow only what you understand and can unite in your own feeling. Be firm, be meek, but follow your own convictions. It is better to be nothing than an echo of other painters.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

#4. The prejudice of the race appears stronger in the States that have abolished slaves than in the States where slavery still exists. White carpenters, white bricklayers, and white painters will not work side by side with the blacks in the North but do it in almost every Southern State ...

Alexis De Tocqueville

#5. Painters ... are the most lively observers of what passes in the world about them, and the closest observers of what passes in their own minds.

William Hazlitt

#6. I am into drones and one chord freak outs and the paintings I am into are more minimal things the New York colour field painters and the soviet schools of the early/mid 20th century suprematism and constructionism.

Will Sergeant

#7. Why do writers write? Why do actors act? Why do painters paint? It doesn't pay much, unless you're very successful. It's who we are.

Lori Lesko

#8. As they clean the walls with wet cloths and sponges, they uncover the earlier paints, most prevalent a stark blue that must have been inspired by Mary's blue robes. Renaissance painters could get that rare color only from ground lapis lazuli brought from quarries in what is now Afghanistan.

Frances Mayes

#9. Make your faces so that they do not all have the same expression, as one sees with most painters, but give them different expression, according to age, complexion, and good or bad character.

Leonardo Da Vinci

#10. A photo is like a map, a way of giving me a foot into a kind of reality I want ... I'm not trying to make paintings look like photos. I want to make paintings using photos as a reference, the way painters did when photography was first invented.

Peter Doig

#11. My father's parents were carpenters. They were also builders partly. They were painters. And several of them were very, active in the theatre and all such nonsense, you know.

Josef Albers

#12. I'm very happy to hear that my work inspires writers and painters. It's the most beautiful compliment, the greatest reward. Art should always be an exchange.

Nick Cave

#13. For together with those who themselves being normal, had long put intellects above bodies, were writers, painters, musicians and scholars, men and women who, set apart from their birth, had determined to hack out a niche in existence.

Radclyffe Hall

#14. At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.

Alice Walker

#15. I know that some of the great painters and some of the great artists didn't even start to 'peak', as you say, till they were in their fifties and sixties. And God knows, history is full of artistic people that weren't even recognized till they were dead and gone.

Joe Perry

#16. Artists - musicians, painters, writers, poets - always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life.

Billy Joel

#17. A lot of painters listen to music, I think, while they paint. But I hate to do that. It's a horror. I can't really listen to the music. I'm not really concentrating on it, and I'm not really concentrating on the painting.

David Lynch

#18. When you educate yourself about clitoredectomies, infibulation, forced prostitution, rape as a war tactic, patriarchal religions, women painters, filmmakers, poets, writers, activists, politicians, sex-industry workers, historians, archelogoists and musicians, that's self-protection.

Inga Muscio

#19. Usually when painters use photographs, they enlarge and copy them and simply make a large, boring painting of a large, boring photograph.

Duane Michals

#20. Theoretical scientists who probe the secrets of the universe and philosophers who seek answers to existence, as well as painters such as Paul Klee who find the thoughts of men of science compatible with art, influence me far more than most photographers.

Wynn Bullock

#21. The men resent a woman getting any honour in what they consider is essentially their field. Men painters mostly despise women painters. So I have decided to stop squirming, to throw any honour in with Canada and women.

Emily Carr

#22. The painters could be identified by dirty fingernails; the writers by conversation in labored monosyllables and aggressive vulgarities which disguised their minds.

William Gaddis

#23. How many impressionist painters painted the same damned thing? How many actors have played the same part in renditions of a play or dancers do the same dances,

Paul Provenza

#24. When an artist begins to count strokes instead of regarding nature he is lost. This preoccupation with technique, at the expense of truth and sincerity, is the principal fault I find in much of the work of modern painters.

Joaquin Sorolla

#25. Writers and painters alike are in the business of consulting their own imaginations, and stimulating the imaginations of others. Together, and separately, they celebrate the absolute mystery of otherness.

Lynne Truss

#26. My faith is that I don't believe in fate! We are not puppets or zombies of destiny. We are the main painters of our life's canvas.

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#27. I arrived on earth in 1928. Born into a milieu of painters, I acquired my taste for painting with my mother's milk.

Yves Klein

#28. Painters tend to ignore the challenges and thrills that sculptors enjoy daily - volume ... like the perfect, imperfect voluminous oval of the egg.

Sara Genn

#29. Too many modern painters set themselves satisfied with just a coincidence, the spot in its raw, meaningless form.

Pierre Alechinsky

#30. Write with your eyes like painters, with your ears like musicians, with your feet like dancers. You are the truthsayer with quill and torch. Write with your tongues of fire. Don't let the pen banish you from yourself.

Gloria E. Anzaldua

#31. Novelists and poets are the landscape artists and portrait painters; academic writers are the people with big paint sprayers who repaint your basement.

Paul J. Silvia

#32. In chess, computers show that what we call 'strategy' is reducible to tactics, ultimately. It only looks creative to us. They are still just glorified cash registers. This should make us feel uncomfortable, whether or not we think computers will ever be good composers of music or artistic painters.

Tyler Cowen

#33. I wanted to show that the fables and mythic tales which the ancients have handed down to us and in which painters and sculptors never cease to find mindless pleasure are the hieroglyphics of a secret, inexhaustible wisdom. I sometimes thought I felt its breath, as though coming from behind a veil.

Hugo Von Hofmannsthal

#34. It is true that I have thought more and that my daydreams are more extended and magnificent, but they want (as the painters call it) KEEPING; and I greatly need a friend who would have sense enough not to despise me as romantic, and affection enough for me to endeavour to regulate my mind.

Mary Shelley

#35. [New Mexico is] the only landscape . . . where Nature is as aesthetic as Art; the only landscape that can compete with the great painters.

Leo Stein

#36. All inspired painters are impressionists, even though it be true that some impressionists are not inspired.

Joaquin Sorolla

#37. The ... promptitude with which many painters, on arriving at an entirely new and unfamiliar place, settle down to work at once, never fails to astonish me: it seems indecent, like button-holing a complete stranger.

Augustus John

#38. Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time.

J.J. Abrams

#39. Very few people are accepted as creative: A few painters, a few poets - one in a million. This is foolish! Every human being is a born creator. Watch children and you will see: all children are creative. By and by, we destroy their creativity.

Rajneesh

#40. Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.

Oscar Wilde

#41. San Francisco has long been a leader in the arts, nurturing generations of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and performing artists and innovators of every kind.

Gavin Newsom

#42. All the painters who appear in our museums are
failures at painting; the only people ever talked
about are failures; the world is divided into two
categories of people: failures and those unknown.

Francis Picabia

#43. 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

#44. Most important ... develop your technical ability. You are handicapped if you do not develop well enough to hold the subconscious process so as not to have problems of inexperienced painters ...

Sergei Bongart

#45. Most painters want recognition, especially by their peers.

Bob Ross

#46. I recommend that you should work actively ... and study the artistic structures of Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Watteau, Poussin, and other painters, even Chardin, where he is an artist. Study very closely their dabbing manner of execution and try to copy a small piece of canvas, just one square inch.

Kazimir Malevich

#47. Most artists, most painters, even composers would want to come back and redo their work. They've got a new perspective on it, they've got more resources, they have better technology, and they can fix or finish the things that were never done.

George Lucas

#48. her nose was not handsome - it was pretty; neither straight nor curved, neither Italian nor Greek; it was the Parisian nose, that is to say, spiritual, delicate, irregular, pure, - which drives painters to despair, and charms poets.

Victor Hugo

#49. My earliest drawing is a supposed Carracci. It wasn't very expensive, I guess, because they don't know if it's a real Carracci. But it has all these seals on it of people who've owned it, and one of the great portrait painters of England, Reynolds, had owned it, so that's the earliest.

Ellsworth Kelly

#50. Colter was so particular about the colors she used in decorating that she sometimes mixed her own. For the interior of Bright Angel Lodge she made a special shade of blue, and she was so insistent that the painters mix the shade exactly as she wanted it that they dubbed it "Mary Jane Blue.

Virginia L. Grattan

#51. Too many young painters of the day work for the crowd, and not for art. But, then, should not the painters of the day work for the education of the crowd?

M. E. W. Sherwood

#52. It's the duty of all novelists, all painters, all musicians, all people who try to make art move: to look for something they feel authentically, without paying attention to styles.

Nathalie Sarraute

#53. I wanted to be a visual artist because I grew up around a lot of painters and photographers and had a very artistic upbringing. And I fantasized about being a drug-dealer when I was a kid. I thought it would be a good opportunity; I knew that the market would be strong. Is that bizarre?

Jared Leto

#54. Filmmakers are going to make films, just like painters are going to paint.

Richard Linklater

#55. Youth must go ahead and prosper. These young painters are all very talented people, but they all paint frescoes.

Edvard Munch

#56. Cold exactitude is not art ... The so-called consciousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring. People like that, if they could, would work with the same minute attention on the back of their canvas.

Eugene Delacroix

#57. I suppose I have become a sort of living monument in Portugal. But I come from a family with roots all over the world, so the idea of patriotism is not very strong in me. My country is the country of Chekhov, Beethoven, Velasquez - writers I like, painters and artists I admire.

Antonio Lobo Antunes

#58. Words in books can remind us of truth, and help awaken us to it. But in themselves, words are just paint and writers are just painters ... Let us not overestimate the power of any form of literature.

David James Duncan

#59. Painting is a field that attracts a lot of lazy people. You can just sort of sit and wait for things to come to you. I know a lot of painters who'll sit and chat it up all night. But God, I just can't do that.

Jamie Wyeth

#60. Most of them won't have a book in the house, though, when they have to, they'll talk about the latest book that's selling millions of copies around the world. Our readers may not read books, but they are fascinated by great eccentric painters who sell for billions.

Umberto Eco

#61. When I was about seven, one or two people encouraged me, and art became an enormous and important refuge. By adolescence, I was absolutely passionate about it and felt those paintings and those painters, whether they lived a few hundred years ago or were still alive, were somehow my companions.

John Berger

#62. Few of the early houses in New England were painted, or colored, as it was called, either without or within. Painters do not appear in any of the early lists of workmen.

Alice Morse Earle

#63. What a trade! Poor painters! They always wish to be understood, and they are analysed instead.

Pablo Picasso

#64. It is this research into pure painting that is the problem at the present moment. I do not know any painters in Paris who are really searching for this ideal world.

Robert Delaunay

#65. Other artists - poets, painters, sculptors, musicians - produce something which lives after them and enshrines their memories in positive evidences of their divine mission; but we, - we strut and fret our hour upon the stage, and then the curtain falls and all is darkness and silence.

Charlotte Saunders Cushman

#66. Only a small percentage of novelists, painters, musicians, scientists, anywhere in the world, are talented. But there are many more in Hollywood than one would expect from looking movies.

Hortense Powdermaker

#67. To me there is no past or future in my art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was ...

Pablo Picasso

#68. The original painters of angels mistook our aura of light for wings, so they depicted us with wings in their paintings, and we appear to you this way so that you will know

Doreen Virtue

#69. Philosophy can forsake too easily the details of experience ... many writers and painters have demonstrated that thinking long about what art is or ought to be ruins the power to write or paint.

Robert Adams

#70. The best painters, as they progress in reputation and towards perfection, are found to dispense more and more with the technique of the art, for simpler methods. Simplicity never fails to charm.

Honore De Balzac

#71. I took to wearing a black tie known as the Ascot, with long drooping ends. I had seen pictures of painters, sculptors, poets, wearing this style of tie.

Carl Sandburg

#72. It is impossible to repeat in one period what was done in another.The pointof view isnotthesame, anymorethan are the tools, the ideals, the needs, or the painters' techniques.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

#73. The New York action painters want their pictures to jump off the walls and chase you down the street.

Mason Cooley

#74. To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

Wallace Stevens

#75. The photographic industry was the refuge of all the painters who couldn't make it, either because they had no talent or because they were too lazy to finish their studies. Hence this universal infatuation was not only characterized by blindness and stupidity, but also by vindictiveness.

Charles Baudelaire

#76. Out in the sun, some painters are lined up. The first is copying nature, the second is copying the first, the third is copying the second ... You see the sequence.

Paul Gauguin

#77. But I was in awe of the painters; I mean I was new in New York, and I thought the painting that was going on here was just unbelievable.

Robert Rauschenberg

#78. Painters and poets alike have always had license to dare anything! We know that, and we both claim and allow to others in their turn this indulgence.

Horace

#79. I have lived among enough painters and around studios to have had all the theories - and how contradictory they are - rammed down my throat. A man has to have a gizzard like an ostrich to digest all the brass-tacks and wire nails of modern art theories.

D.H. Lawrence

#80. Representational painters: place your works in a larger context. Give your work not only breadth but breath. Do not 'copy' what you see outwardly but give it 'spirit.

Joshua L. Goldberg

#81. Every good composition is above all a work of abstraction. All good painters know this. But the painter cannot dispense with subjects altogether without his work suffering impoverishment.

Diego Rivera

#82. Most people who think they can't live up to the great painters of the past, often times have a group of people they think they're better than.

Laura Owens

#83. Painters get up and paint. Writers get up and write. I like to get up and act. It's not a big deal. It makes me happy.

Samuel L. Jackson

#84. 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

#85. Good art theory must smell of the studio, although its language should differ from the household talk of painters and sculptors.

Rudolf Arnheim

#86. It is not right for painters to think that painting is like prostitution, that 'first you do it for love, then you do it for others, and finally you do it for money.

Ad Reinhardt

#87. For the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done before him.

Virginia Woolf

#88. The local painters were my idols ... These artists, too, were grown-ups, but they were grown-ups who could still see! Their eye was still in love! Like mine!

Frederick Franck

#89. While great leaders may be as rare as great runners, great actors, or great painters, everyone has leadership potential, just as everyone has some ability at running, acting, and painting.

Warren G. Bennis

#90. The fact that in the last 10 years only five of the 40 Turner Prize nominees have been painters tells you more about curators than about the state of painting today.

Charles Saatchi

#91. David is purely a conceptual artist. He didn't play any instruments or paint or anything. We were painters.

Tina Weymouth

#92. 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

#93. Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the truly passionate painter who dares-and who has once broken the spell of 'you can't.'

Vincent Van Gogh

#94. They dabbled in dark magic like finger painters in first grade art class, and then most of them were either killed by their creations or ran the other way from the nightmares they unleashed.

Katherine McIntyre

#95. Sculptors are obliged to follow the manners of the painters, and to make many ample folds, which are unsufferable hardness, and more like a rock than a natural garment.

John Dryden

#96. Real painters understand with a brush in their hand.

Berthe Morisot

#97. An aged painter cannot help but accept the fact that his work belongs in the past. Younger painters have leaped into the phenomenon called contemporary, where it would be foolish of me to try to enter. But I can claim my own phenomenon ...

Joseph Plaskett

#98. It has always been difficult for historians to fully grasp the intelligence of painters.

Dore Ashton

#99. Ill-informed intuition is fantastic - it's what great art is. So really old painters or writers or actors are brilliant, because they've finally reached the point when they can let go of al technique.

Helen Mirren

#100. Also usually employed one or more resident physicians, barbers, priests, painters, musicians, minstrels, secretaries and copyists, an astrologer, a jester, and a dwarf, besides pages and squires.

Barbara W. Tuchman