Top 100 Quotes About Paintings
#2. The question before me, now that I am old, is not how to be dead, which I know from enough practice, but how to be alive, as these worn hills still tell, and some paintings of Paul Cezanne, and this mere singing wren, who thinks he's alive forever, this instant, and may be.
Wendell Berry
#3. Biology keeps culture on a leash, which is why you can't teach a dog to play poker, never mind all those lying paintings.
Gregory Cochran
#4. I'm getting more and more into Chinese art and Japanese, some of those scroll paintings are amazing. You follow the change of the seasons. It's really something. These guys were great masters and of course the use of space.
Robert Barry
#5. By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.
Edvard Munch
#6. 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
#7. I didn't paint my paintings to hang in some rich guy's living room,
Ralph Fasanella
#8. 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
#9. Why does no one speak of the cultural advantages of the country? For example, is a well groomed, ecologically kept, sustainably fertile farm any less cultural, any less artful, than paintings of fat angels on church ceilings?
Gene Logsdon
#10. 'Tell me, please,' Van Gogh asked, 'is it justifiable that a person wastes his only life by selling worthless paintings for fools?
Irving Stone
#11. And yes, there are things I want to keep, that I like around me - especially when there's very little left. I just want to keep those little bits of reminders of my past. There are certain drawings from the '60s; certain little paintings from the '60s that I keep.
Robert Barry
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. It is important that we are occasionally, perhaps even frequently, depressed by books, challenged by films, shocked by paintings, maybe even disturbed by music. But do they have to do all these things all the time? Can't we let them console, uplift, inspire, move, cheer?
Nick Hornby
#16. 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
#17. In anything there has to be dark and light. There's a lot of joy in my paintings and a lot of darkness.
Gloria Vanderbilt
#18. If someone stands in front of one of my paintings and says, 'This is just a mess', the word 'just' is not so good, but 'mess' might be right. Why not a mess? If it makes you say, 'Wow, I've never seen anything like that', that's beautiful.
Albert Oehlen
#19. I had bohemian parents in Seattle in the last '60s living in a houseboat. My dad wrote science fiction novels and painted big murals and oil paintings.
Rainn Wilson
#20. I give away thousands of paintings for free.
Banksy
#21. Each painting is its own world, but a lot of times I do see the paintings as one page from a story. You can imagine what has happened before or after. Sometimes they are worded as being a part of a story, especially the paintings where characters are in conversation.
Neil Farber
#22. I like to go to art museums and name the untitled paintings ... Boy With Pail ... Kitten On Fire.
Steven Wright
#23. 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
#24. Piano performances by Condoleezza Rice are better than Hitler's paintings.
Evgeni Kostitsyn
#25. There's plenty of stuff that I don't feel dissident about: I really like tea, I don't have any problem with that. I like lots of paintings.
China Mieville
#26. In all my paintings, the animal is at the centre. Surrounding it are the things that define the animal. This is how beauty is characterized. You need to characterize beauty by association.
I have learned to worship beauty. Not ordinary beauty but that in its stormiest nature.
Anuradha Bhattacharyya
#27. 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
#28. My ideas come, wh-pheww. And I draw. Just recently, when I'm searching for ideas for paintings and sculptures, I wait for ideas, and it's always visual.
Ellsworth Kelly
#29. Looking at paintings was a huge part of finding my way into the lush world of the 18th century.
Rebecca Miller
#30. I want my paintings to have a light of their own, they must glow from inside ...
Douglas Portway
#31. Paintings! They're like TV, but they don't move.
A. J. Jacobs
#32. I have often seen quite demented patients recognize and respond vividly to paintings and delight in the act of painting at a time when they are scarcely responsive, disoriented, and out of it.
Oliver Sacks
#33. I also paint and enjoy acrylic medium; some of my close friends have paintings I did for them.
Kiana Tom
#34. It fascinates me to create beautiful paintings with the simplest means.
James Rosenquist
#35. Who's going to ask a painter to see a diploma? They'd say, 'Can I see your paintings?', wouldn't they?
David Hockney
#36. I never had any flesh and blood children, you know. Only words, and paintings, and images of light that flickered in the darkness, and were too soon over.
Neil Gaiman
#37. 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
#38. I'm a huge science fan; I read a lot of science books. But I'm not a scientist, my interest in science is I love the facts, but I like to interpret those facts. They become the raw materials for stories and paintings and things.
Dave McKean
#39. Art, he said, isn't your little paintings and comic books. Art is the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Joey Comeau
#40. Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.
Ansel Adams
#41. When you feel concentrated within the intensity of making paintings, you know exactly what you are doing.
Luc Tuymans
#42. Friends are discovered rather than made; there are people who are in their own nature friends, only they don't know each other; but certain things, like poetry, music, and paintings are like the Freemason's sign, they reveal the initiated to each other.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#43. It was van Gogh's madness that prevented him from working; the paintings themselves are ineffably sane, if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis.
Robert Hughes
#44. My paintings are certainly nonobjective. They're just horizontal lines.
Agnes Martin
#45. Sometimes I'll dream that I saw a show and then I'll wake up in the morning and realize that I didn't see the show, that it was my dream. And I just remember what the paintings look like in the dream and I think, "Oh, nobody painted those. I can do that."
Julian Schnabel
#46. I'm not one of those artists having people there lying around on their paintings, you know, like Hockney or whoever.
Peter Doig
#47. All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion ... What you see is what you see.
Frank Stella
#48. Sure, but don't expect great observations. Mostly I just looked for dirty pictures hidden within the artwork. Did you know Monet put a boob in all his paintings? Apples and Grapes - get it? I mean, come on. The guy was a horn-dog.
Penny Reid
#49. However," he continued, "this canvas is preferable to the paintings of that varlet Rubens, with his mountains of Flemish flesh sprinkled with vermilion, his waves of red hair and his medley of colors.
Honore De Balzac
#50. I noticed that the large windows between the paintings [in the Musee d'Art Moderne] interested me more than the art exhibited. From then on, painting as I had known it was finished for me.
Ellsworth Kelly
#51. Nothing so clearly and inevitably reveals the inner man than movement and gesture. It is quite possible, if one chooses, to conceal and dissimulate behind words or paintings or statues or other forms of human expression, but the moment you move you stand revealed, for good or ill, for what you are.
Doris Humphrey
#52. 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
#53. I think I tend to destroy the better paintings, or those that have been better to a certain extent. I try and take them further, and they lose all their qualities, and they lose everything. I think I would say that I destroy all the better paintings.
Francis Bacon
#54. If you're a guest [at my $113 million house], you'll be able to call up on screens throughout the house almost any image you like - presidential portraits, reproductions of High Renaissance paintings, pictures of sunsets, airplanes, skiers in the Andes, a rare French stamp, the Beatles in 1965.
Bill Gates
#55. 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
#56. Good evening, and welcome to a private showing of three paintings, displayed here for the first time. Each is a collectors' item in its own way - not because of any special artistic quality, but because each captures on a canvas, and suspends in time and space, a frozen moment of a nightmare.
Rod Serling
#57. Through the 13th century, paintings of Angels exhibit a predominantly masculine appearance. Over the next 300 years, their images become more delicate, gentle, and feminine, until Angels are shown as androgynous or even distinctly female.
David Connolly
#58. There's a lot of difference between being well known and being notorious and the black paintings didn't make me well known - they made me notorious.
Frank Stella
#59. All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they're about dead people. Paintings you don't think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I'm looking at something dead.
David Bailey
#60. Kinkade estimated that one of his paintings hung in every twenty homes in America. Yet the art world unanimously ignores or reviles him. Me included.
Jerry Saltz
#61. My pictures had and have secret lives, and so there were things I did not tell, a lot of stuff I did not say back then which I'm saying now ... I intend to continue allowing forms of secret life to paintings I'm working on right now because it excites me to do that ...
R. B. Kitaj
#62. What is real for me are the illusions I create with my paintings. Everything else is quicksand.
Eugene Delacroix
#63. When there's a painting in the room, my eye goes right to it. It's like if you go into a bar and there's a television on, you can't take your eyes off the television. Paintings have that effect on me. It's where my eye settles.
Joe Bradley
#64. 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
#65. My mother is a great artist, but she always treated her paintings like minor postcards. Had she pursued it, she would have been a great artist. Instead, she looked down on her art.
Isabel Allende
#66. I'm from Holland and the history of "Admiral" is something you would read about when you're at school. Nobody knows about these stories and when you go to any museum in Holland, you will see these paintings of these 17th century sea beckels that the Dutch were in to, so it always intrigued me.
Roel Reine
#67. The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation.
Michelle Obama
#68. In aristocratic societies, rich people used to commission exquisite paintings for their walls.
Brad Holland
#69. But really, all memories are like paintings: They can be incredibly vivid and lifelike. But in the end, they both just remind us that we only get to live any particular moment once, even if we remember it forever.
Gwendolyn Heasley
#70. Galleries in the West have probably been looking for exoticism. That's the reason my paintings initially sold well, I think. And then once they started selling, people said my works were very detailed. They may have represented something Japanese to them.
Takashi Murakami
#71. Like writing, paintings seem to hint at a topsy-turvy world in which, so to speak, time's arrow moves the other way.
Martin Amis
#72. I'm able to sign my name to the paintings. That is really a blessing.
Margaret Keane
#73. I work day and night without sleep. The paintings keep me fired up.
Jules Olitski
#74. The way I create music is maybe like a painting, to compose in a more visual way. Basically it's the music that I want to hear- that's my inspiration and bottom line. I just try to get ideas from books, movies, paintings.
Ikue Mori
#75. I try to be aware of technology and Japanese animation and old Belgian paintings, and get all my references from bits of everywhere.
Guido Palau
#76. I like all paintings. I always look at the paintings, good or bad, in barbershops, furniture stores, provincial hotels. I'm like a drinker who needs wine. As long as it is wine, it doesn't matter which wine.
Pablo Picasso
#77. I began observing, making paintings of my surroundings, taking a vow of silence, listening, composing music, writing, and making time for formal education. Then I started telling stories.
John Francis
#79. Like Salvador Dali's paintings of watches melting in the sand, time wanders at its own curious pace whenever you're on vacation in a foreign country.
Laurie Nadel
#80. I'd like to give people leaden boots in galleries, so they'd be a bit slower in front of my paintings. And that's because I spend so much time looking at them. I can look at them a long, long time without getting bored. I disappear.
Gary Hume
#81. Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.
Siri Hustvedt
#82. I've been attracted to imagery and occasionally I've drawn from it, but I never thought I'd be painting these paintings. I didn't have any desire to. I didn't think there was any reason to.
William Wiley
#83. I kept ... returning to the (ancient Roman) wall paintings with their veiled melancholy and elegant plasticity.
William Baziotes
#84. One of the best things about paintings is their silence - which prompts reflection and random reverie.
Mark Stevens
#85. And I certainly wouldn't demonize an entire people on the basis of 3 blurry photos and a few paintings
Guy Delisle
#86. I still have a lot of pleasure doing them, but as time goes by I come to appreciate more clearly which paintings are good and which should be discarded.
Claude Monet
#87. It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.
Alain De Botton
#88. Within the category of Kitsch we can thus distinguish between more and less successful paintings. Kitsch, too has its masterpieces.
Karsten Harries
#89. All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation.
Ellsworth Kelly
#90. All still lifes are actually paintings of the world on the sixth day of creation, when God and the world were alone together, without man!
Robert Musil
#91. Not only are most of our citizens fathomlessly ignorant of the glories of American literature, a fast-growing percentage of our students are no longer taught much about any works of American art, be they novels, paintings, symphonies or ballets.
Terry Teachout
#92. Paradise endangered: garden snakes and mice are appearing in the shadowy corners of Dutch Old Master paintings.
Mason Cooley
#93. I was always very ... impatient about showing my paintings to people.
Julian Schnabel
#94. 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
#95. Art, after all, is traditionally displayed against vacancies: paintings on dun walls, sculptures in empty spaces, music in quiet halls.
John Hart
#96. Modern paintings are like women, you'll never enjoy them if you try to understand them.
Freddie Mercury
#97. It is not my intention to make anything comprehensible. I am of the opinion that there are sufficient paintings which one understands after a shorter or longer delay, and that therefore some incomprehensible painting would now be welcome. I am at pains to deliver such, as far as possible.
Rene Magritte
#98. 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
#99. If I hung one of my paintings next to someone else's, I knew mine would kind of pop off the wall.
Julian Schnabel
#100. She pondered the arrangements of the paintings on a wall like a writer pondered commas.
Jonathan Franzen
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