Top 100 Quotes About Painting And Art
#1. I believe all painting and art should be uplifting for the viewer.
Damien Hirst
#2. Art, if it is successful in the task of questioning reality, if it is good painting and not merely a performance of dexterity, will be an affirmation of God.
Patrick Swift
#3. Art itself, in all its methods, is the child of religion. The highest and best works in architecture, sculpture and painting, poetry and music, have been born out of the religion of Nature.
James Freeman Clarke
#4. When you start working, everybody is in your studio- the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas- all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.
John Cage
#5. He that would be a painter must have a natural turn thereto. Love and delight therein are better of the Art of Painting than compulsion.
Albrecht Durer
#6. Pop Art is not painting because painting must have content and emotion.
Grace Hartigan
#7. We often hear the terms 'positional' and 'tactical' used as opposites. But this is as wrong as to consider a painting's composition unrelated to its subject. Just as there is no such thing as 'artistic' art, so there is no such thing as 'positional' chess.
Samuel Reshevsky
#8. I've always been a creative person, and I'd always wanted to paint, so I went to art school and began painting and sculpting.
Shirley Eaton
#9. Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things.
Gustave Courbet
#10. Weirdly, an image of Adrian's Love painting came back to me. I thought of the jagged red streak, slashing through the blackness, ripping it
apart. Staring at Jill and her inconsolable pain, I suddenly understood his art a little bit better.
Richelle Mead
#11. It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.
Tom Stoppard
#12. All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time.
Otto Dix
#13. I couldn't live on the singing at first, so I worked as a cleaner, in a launderette, in a garage, face painting and doing the windows of shops at Christmas, 'cause I had been to art college.
Imelda May
#14. Initially I explored the tension between illustration and fine art when I first encountered miniature painting in my late teens. Championing the formal aspects of the Indo-Persian miniature-painting genre has often been at the core of my practice.
Shahzia Sikander
#15. Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, / Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? / That we by tracing magic lines are taught, / How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?
Marshall McLuhan
#16. Everyone who has any talent at all in sketching, painting, sculpturing or carving, should have the opportunity to use that talent. The expression is important for the person, and can tremendously enrich the lives of other people. What can you do?
Edith Schaeffer
#17. I will give a proof to demonstrate with facts that there are no rules in painting and that oppression or servile obligation of making all study or follow the same path is a great impediment for the young who profess this very difficult art.
Francisco Goya
#18. For me, it's important to experience aesthetic shock, which sets in motion our imagination, our emotions, our feelings, and our thoughts. That's the purpose of a painting and of art in general.
Pierre Soulages
#19. I don't like to make a distinction between the writer and the painter , finally , because I do both things anyway . Everybody's dreaming and trying to put down their dreams in the way that their hand knows best . I feel as much a unity , as much comradeship , with painters as I do writers .
Clive Barker
#20. [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
#21. I have never understood, for instance, why some people see contemporary art as divided between 'painting' and 'conceptual art', as though this represented a genuine division.
Michael Craig-Martin
#22. When it comes to partnership, some humans can make their lives alone - it's possible. But creatively, it's more like painting: you can't just use the same colours in every painting. It's just not an option. You can't take the same photograph every time and live with art forms with no differences.
Ben Harper
#23. ...love is as much an art as painting or living; it requires practice, finesse, determination, humility, energy and delicacy.
Hannah Mary Rothschild
#24. The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.
Harold Rosenberg
#25. Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he been believes.
J.M. Coetzee
#26. As a composer and as a musician I'm a true believer - and this is not to be overly diplomatic - I'm a believer that there's artistry in everything from a lawn gnome to a desk chair to a symphony to an Andy Warhol painting. There's art in absolutely everything.
Darren Criss
#27. Religion is like an art gallery. One painting will speak to you more than another, and there's no need to explain or defend your taste.
Michael Muhammad Knight
#28. For me, acting is about the art of it and it's about being on a film set and doing your thing, painting a blank canvas.
Shailene Woodley
#29. And since geometry is the right foundation of all painting, I have decided to teach its rudiments and principles to all youngsters eager for art.
Albrecht Durer
#30. I am doing what I want to do - painting pictures people want and understand. I have no burning ambition to create the kind of 'art' which the confused critics praise for its 'plastic significance,' 'fluid lines,' and 'inner awareness,' or 'must be understood on three levels.
Arnold Friberg
#31. The drama embraces and applies all the beauties and decorations of poetry. The sister arts attend and adorn it. Painting, architecture, and music are her handmaids. The costliest lights of a people's intellect burn at her show. All ages welcome her.
Robert Aris Willmott
#32. Art like that doesn't need words. That painting tells you something by pulling you into it and pushing you out and you know what it's saying without words being spoken.
Cath Crowley
#33. 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
#34. In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.
Theodore Bikel
#35. All art, be it writing, painting, film, dance, whatever, is a manipulation of time and space. It's an interpretation and a recreation of the facts, using various artifacts that point us in the direction of our personal truths.
Elisa Lorello
#36. I sometimes set myself thinking and imagining that I find amongst men but one single art or science, and that is drawing or painting, all others being members proceeding therefrom.
Michelangelo
#37. What lives in art and is eternally living, is first of all the painter and then the painting.
Vincent Van Gogh
#38. I had always planned to make a large painting of the early spring, when the first leaves are at the bottom of the trees, and they seem to float in space in a wonderful way. But the arrival of spring can't be done in one picture.
David Hockney
#39. I am never in a hurry to reach details. First and above all I am interested in the large masses and the general character of a picture; when these are well established, then I try for subtleties of form and color. I rework the painting constantly and freely, and without any systematic method.
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
#40. A painting is a universal language which everyone can read, understand, and interpret in his own way through the power of imagination.
Debasish Mridha
#41. Letter from Van Gogh to Gauguin: Ah! my dear friend, to make of painting what the music of Berlioz and Wagner has been before us ... a consolatory art for distressed hearts! There are as yet only a few who feel it as you and I do!!! [Letter 739, Arles, 21 January 1889]
Liesbeth Heenk
#42. 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
#44. On the opposite wall was a Damien Hirst spot painting, bought by Arabella after a decent bonus season. Roger's considered view of the painting, looking at it from aesthetic, art-historical, interior-design, and psychological points of view, was that it had cost forty-seven thousand pounds, plus VAT.
John Lanchester
#45. I enjoyed art in school. I've always done little drawings and stuff like that. I don't really know what I'm doing with the painting, but I experiment.
Alex Lifeson
#46. It was never my goal to capitalize on punk. I could never make it as a commercial artist. I didn't back then and I still don't have the temperament and don't care for drawing or painting or making art for any other purposes other my own.
Raymond Pettibon
#47. 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
#48. Nothing in the whole world is of interest to me but my painting and my flowers.
Claude Monet
#49. The subtle hues of gold and yellow and the fresh greens and the pepper red seemed to spiral into a kaleidoscope of shapes and forms that made the tips of a person's toes tingle, so that some were inclined to remove their shoes in its presence.
Jeffry R. Halverson
#50. Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity.
Damien Hirst
#51. Age in itself gives substance - what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer's mind.
Jane Hirshfield
#52. What seems most significant to me about our movement [Impressionism] is that we have freed painting from the importance of the subject. I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them flowers, without their needing to tell a story.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#53. These days, newish art can be priced between $10,000 and $25,000. When I tell artists that a new painting by a newish artist should go for around $1,200, they look at me like I'm a flesh-eating virus.
Jerry Saltz
#54. My studio is arranged so that I have a comfortable seating area for meeting with clients, an office area beyond that and a painting area, which includes room for art students to sit and watch as I work.
Doug Dawson
#55. 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
#56. I love crafting. Knitting, decoupage, scrapbooking, any "lady-ish" art form, I'm a fan. For about six months each. Then I shove all the supplies in a closet, alongside the skeletons of long dead New Year's resolutions, like saber fencing, playing the ukulele, and Japanese brush painting.
Felicia Day
#57. My mother was the most creative, fantastic person and would come up with great things for us to do. She'd buy art supplies and all of us would sit around painting. I was lucky.
Cher
#58. Writing is a unique art-form. You are painting a detailed image in someone's mind, and it will be different for every single reader.
Giuseppe Bianco
#59. Everybody thinks they know what art should be. But very few of them have the sense that is necessary to experience painting, that is the sense of sight, that sees colors and forms as living reality in the picture.
Otto Dix
#60. Painters strike me as having warm uncomplicated friendships and probably more natural generosity than the practitioners of any other art. Perhaps this is because painting is such a portable, flexible thing.
Paul Theroux
#61. I look up at the painting. It's not even that interesting. Definitely doesn't grab me and shake my brain around like the meadow scene did.
Stefan Bachmann
#62. Movie making is not like other art forms, like painting, or writing a novel, because that can be digested or interpreted ... It takes two years to make each one of these, and it's always judged on money.
M. Night Shyamalan
#63. The autonomy of art that emerged through Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Mondrian, and the Russian Constructivism had seen painting develop independent of imitations or decoration, and so the content of art became much closer to that of music.
Neville Weston
#64. Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.
Robert Smithson
#65. If a certain activity, such as painting, becomes the habitual mode of expression, it may follow that taking up the painting materials and beginning work with them will act suggestively and so presently evoke a flight into the higher state.
Robert Henri
#66. ( ... ) photography opened up quite a little Pandora's box, kiddies. ( ... ) Once we no longer had to depend on drawing and painting to record our existence - once they became an option - they mutated ... into a form of expression. And Art for its own sake, God help us, was born.
Chip Kidd
#67. He tried to make each painting capture that gently fuzzed qualit the camera gave everything, as if someone had patted away a top layer of clarity and left behind something kinder than the eye alone would see.
Hanya Yanagihara
#68. The science of design, or of line-drawing, if you like to use this term, is the source and very essence of painting, sculpture, architecture ... Sometimes ... it seems to me that ... all the works of the human brain and hand are either design itself or a branch of that art.
Michelangelo
#69. 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
#70. The Fine Arts are five in number: Painting, Music, Poetry, Sculpture, and Architecture--whereof the principle branch is Confectionery.
Marie-Antoine Careme
#71. 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
#72. If the abstract paintings show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lifes show my yearning.
Gerhard Richter
#73. She was a poem and a painting too. Everything she said sounded like a song, every silence was the music too.
Akshay Vasu
#74. ... Every day I discover even more beautiful things. It is intoxicating me, and I want to paint it all - my head is bursting ...
Claude Monet
#75. Like what Jackson Pollock used to say. He thought the creation of the painting was the art, and the painting was just what was left. He didn't know why people wanted to buy his paintings.
Andy Reynolds
#76. 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
#77. Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.
Ambrose Bierce
#78. In America, the only truly popular art form is the movies. Most people consider painting a hobby and literature, schoolwork.
Brad Holland
#79. What interests me is all the stuff that goes into abstract and abstract-figurative art. Not the styles, but the stuff that, in various combinations, make the styles: mixing and matching painting methods and ideas.
Ed Askew
#80. It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts-music, painting and writing-is magical and evocative; and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result.
William S. Burroughs
#81. The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.
Edward Hopper
#82. 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
#83. He said, one has to learn that painting well - in the academic and technical sense - comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you've got that ability. So have thousands.
John Fowles
#84. The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively
because, without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. You have to put a 'box' around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall?
Frank Zappa
#85. There are many schools of painting. Why should there not be many schools of photographic art? There is hardly a right and a wrong in these matters, but there is truth, and that should form the basis of all works of art.
Alfred Stieglitz
#86. This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.
Edvard Munch
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.
Siri Hustvedt
#90. The real self of an artiste lies in art, so when an artiste performs, all the pain, trauma and tension get released through art, be it dancing, painting, singing, writing or even martial arts.
Mrinalini Sarabhai
#91. Like most sensible people, you probably lost interest in modern art about the time that Julian Schnabel was painting broken pieces of the crockery that his wife had thrown at him for painting broken pieces of crockery instead of painting the bathroom and hall.
P. J. O'Rourke
#92. People want Art. And they are given it. But the less Art there is in painting the more painting there is.
Pablo Picasso
#93. I liked drawing and painting, because the only failure would be to listen to the doubters who wanted me to stop drawing and painting because 'you aren't going to make a living doing that.' I liked looking in art books at the work of painters.
Billy Childish
#94. In England, there is a dividing line between artists and illustrators, who are thought inferior to painters. Well, that's absolute rubbish. Some of the most creative work is being done in children's books. In Japan, everything is art. They don't say painting is better than ceramics or dress design.
Brian Wildsmith
#95. When you come up in the art world, whatevers in the air, the issues of the moment, end up becoming part of the working method or modus operandi of how you think about doing a painting. And I came up at a time when-actually painting was dead when I came up. Sculpture sort of ruled.
Chuck Close
#96. I paint for myself. I don't know how to do anything else, anyway. Also I have to earn my living, and occupy myself.
Francis Bacon
#97. Science for me is very close to art. Scientific discovery is an irrational act. It's an intuition which turns out to be reality at the end of it-and I see no difference between a scientist developing a marvellous discovery and an artist making a painting.
Carlo Rubbia
#98. I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.
Oscar Wilde
#99. 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
#100. Tiger Woods is like a piece of fine art that belongs in the Louvre, and so, too, is Scott Medlock's painting of Tiger Woods and Sergio Garcia ... a true masterpiece!
Al Michaels
