Self Painting Quotes

#1. Painting is self-discovery. You arrive at the image through the act of painting.

Adolph Gottlieb

#2. If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.

Edward Hopper

#3. Victoria was an innocent country gentlewoman who spent her time reading, teaching the local children, painting, gathering armfuls of heather in the meadow. Vivien, by contrast, was pleasure-loving and self-serving... with a moral compass that was most definitely skewed.

Lisa Kleypas

#4. We need to insist on making culture out of our desire: making paintings, novels, plays and films potent and seductive and authentic enough to undermine and overwhelm the Iron Maiden.

Naomi Wolf

#5. Painting is a means of self-enlightenment.

John Olsen

#6. A veteran artist counsels a less experienced one to start a painting using colors in the middle range so that the painter can move to more extreme colors as the work progresses.

David McCullough

#7. I loved surrealism and abstract painting, and anything related to those. I always thought painting was the highest form of art. What led me to drawing was seeing so much self-important, pretentious, conceptual-type art in university. I wanted to reject that by making quick, fun art.

Neil Farber

#8. Painting is a means of saying something about one's self in a beautiful or powerful way that people would like to see, but not hear.

David Luiz

#9. A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of anxiety, but a Kokoschka painting, or a Schiele self-portrait, reveals what an anxiety state really feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of the mind, yet they are rarely brought together.

Eric Kandel

#10. You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.

Henri Matisse

#11. And if what they say is true
if every great painting is really a self-portrait
what, if anything, is Fabritius saying about himself?

Donna Tartt

#12. Painting is a self-disciplined activity that you have to learn by yourself.

Romare Bearden

#13. The ego must be developed, not for its own sake, but because it is needed by society. If you are only interested in self-realization then you cannot make a good painting. To do this you have to have thought about forming, and about how ideas of forming stem from history.

Joseph Beuys

#14. Writing, playing, composing, painting, reading, listening, looking-all require that we submit to being swept away by Eros, to a transformation of self of the kind that happens when we fall in love.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

#15. Painting self-portraits without clothes on has also given me some publicity.

Cleo Moore

#16. Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.

Ray Bradbury

#17. Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is like a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle.

Balthus

#18. I don't think my paintings are self-conscious but you feel the consciousness of them. Without them being self-conscious.

Julian Schnabel

#19. Psychoanalysis comes down to the process itself - the self, and life. I think I can say that I'm friends with the unconscious life, but I've never tried to make a painting directly from a dream.

Malcolm Morley

#20. I don't express myself in my paintings. I express my not-self.

Mark Rothko

#21. Of the autistically interior, dreaming, reading, erotic, self-sufficient child in Balthus' painting we have practically no image at all. Balthus' children are not being driven to succeed where their parents failed, or to be popular, adjusted, or a somebody.

Guy Davenport

#22. Painting a picture is writing a poem with paint.

Debasish Mridha

#23. Action painting has to do with self-creation or self-definition or self-transcendence; but this dissociates it from self-expression, which assumes the acceptance of the ego as it is, with its wound and its magic.

Hannah Arendt

#24. SELF PORTRAIT: Throwing Armfuls of Air into the Air

Jandy Nelson

#25. If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.

Vincent Van Gogh

#26. The painting is always done very much with [the model's] co-operation. The problem with painting a nude, of course, is that it deepens the transaction. You can scrap a painting of someone's face and it imperils the sitter's self-esteem less than scrapping a painting of the whole naked body.

Lucian Freud

#27. Comedy is the one absolutely self-aware art form. Actually, hip-hop's another one, I suppose. Because in your songs you're talking about how good a hip-hop artist you are. It's like a painter painting a panting of himself painting a painting.

Bo Burnham

#28. 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

#29. My work is an exploration of the self. I've always been concerned with how I'm living and how that reflects in the painting.

Jose Parla

#30. I come alive when I'm painting. I like to work in oils and acrylics, and the full sensory engagement and self-expression is very stimulating to me.

Carmen Ejogo

#31. Painting is a kind of call and response. During the act of painting one is listening, paying attention to a self, a voice simultaneously recognizable and foreign.

Squeak Carnwath

#32. Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

Jackson Pollock