Top 100 The Painter Quotes
#1. No one wants my painting because it is different from other people's peculiar, crazy public that demands the greatest possible degree of originality on the painter's part and yet won't accept him unless his work resembles that of the others!
Paul Gauguin
#2. The painter who strives to represent reality must transcend his own perception. He must ignore or override the very mechanismsin his mInd that create objects out of images(symbols) ... The artist, like the eye, must provide true images and the clues of distance to tell his magic lies.
Colin Blakemore
#3. I never knew any painter worthy of the name who paid the smallest attention to what a critic says, even in conversation.
Robert Baldwin Ross
#4. The photographer can arrange his picture just as the painter does, only sometimes he must go about it in a different way.
Laura Gilpin
#5. When we speak of the perfection of art, we must recollect what the materials are with which a painter contends with nature. For the light of the sun he has but patent yellow and white lead - for the darkest shade, umber or soot.
John Constable
#6. I was born in Den Bosch, where the painter Hieronymus Bosch named himself after. And so I've always been very fond of this painter who lived and worked in the 15th century.
Frans De Waal
#7. The thinker requires exactly the same light as the painter, clear, without direct sunshine, or blinding reflection, and, where possible, from above.
August Wilhelm Von Schlegel
#8. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. I'll share the formula I learned while forging my way forward as a full-time painter for forty-four years. The steps all break down to one simple sentence: Make art that connects with enough folks for you to earn a splendid living.
Jack White
#9. Which was how Britteny ended up nestled next to Mickey, under the shelter of a painter's drop cloth.
She felt no pain.
She saw no light.
She heard, but barely.
Her heart was still and silent.
Yet she did not die.
Michael Grant
#10. The artist had captured a moment that went on suggesting other moments in the mind of the beholder. This, Timmon told me, was what every painter, every singer, every craftsman sought to create.
Jim Grimsley
#11. One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.
Virginia Woolf
#12. The key role of entrepreneurs, like the most crucial role of scientists, is not to fill in the gaps in an existing market or theory, but to generate entirely new markets or theories ... They stand before a canvas as empty as any painter's; a page as blank as any poet's.
George Gilder
#13. The hardest part of training a painter is showing him how to introduce emotion into his work,
Robyn Carr
#14. With a painter or a sculptor, one cannot begin to alter his works, but an architect has to put up with anything, because he makes utility objects - the building is there to be used, and times change.
Arne Jacobsen
#15. I didn't respond to him. Couldn't speak at all. Couldn't look at his self-mutilation
not even the clean, bandaged version of it. Instead, I looked at my own rough, stained house painter's hand. They seemed more like puppets than hands. I had no feelings in it either.
Wally Lamb
#16. What lives in art and is eternally living, is first of all the painter and then the painting.
Vincent Van Gogh
#17. I am not a follower of Monet. I am not an admirer or follower of De Kooning. I am not an action painter. I am not an abstract expressionist. I am not younger or older. I will not take my hat off to any other artist living or dead in all the world. I know this.
Milton Resnick
#18. Damn everything but the circus! ... The average 'painter' 'sculptor' 'poet' 'composer' 'playwright' is a person who cannot leap through a hoop from the back of a galloping horse, make people laugh with a clown's mouth, orchestrate twenty lions.
E. E. Cummings
#19. How may paintings have preserved the image of a divine beauty which in its natural manifestation has been rapidly overtaken by time or death. Thus, the work of the painter is nobler than that of nature, its mistress.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#20. A good painter is to paint two main things, men and the working of man's mind.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#21. I'm just a landscape painter. I look out the window and I see what's going on, and I paint it. While I'm painting it, I also write thoughts about what I see going on out there.
William Wiley
#22. "Work" does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.
Marshall McLuhan
#23. Sometimes you need to live with a painting for a while. Starting a painting can be easy, but finishing it ... that's the skill of the painter, how you finally know when it's done.
Elizabeth Neel
#24. A painter may be looking at the world in a way which is very different from everyone else. If he's a craftsman, he can get other people to see the world through his eyes, and so he enlarges our vision, perception, and there's great value in that.
Edward De Bono
#25. The sculptor, and the painter also, should be trained in these liberal arts: grammar, geometry, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, perspective, history, anatomy, theory of design, arithmetic.
Lorenzo Ghiberti
#26. A photographer's art is more in his perceptions than his execution. In a painter, I think the perception is only the first step, and then you have a kind of hard road of execution.
Jay Maisel
#27. People call me the painter of dancing girls. It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes.
Edgar Degas
#28. The wilderness is cracked and browned But through the water pale and thin Still shine the unoffending feet And there above the painter set 15 The Father and the Paraclete. .
T. S. Eliot
#29. But where does by far the bulk, the whole ambulance load, of pain really come from? Where must it come from? Isn't the true poet or painter a seer? Isn't he, actually, the only seer we have
on earth? Most apparently not the scientist, most emphatically not the psychiatrist.
J.D. Salinger
#31. I considered that the painter's personality should be kept out of things, and therefore pictures should be anonymous. It was I who decided that pictures should not be signed, and for a time Picasso did the same.
Georges Braque
#32. The English mist is always at work like a subtle painter, and London is a vast canvas prepared for the mist to work on.
Arthur Symons
#33. The process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than is the picture. The process in fact is habit-forming
Lucian Freud
#34. The painter locks himself out of his own studio. And then has to break in like a thief.
Jackson Pollock
#35. The photographer has almost as much control over his subject matter as a painter. He can control light and shade, form and space, pattern and texture, motion and mood, everything except composition.
Andreas Feininger
#36. 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
#37. Listen: if I am a painter and I do your portrait, have I or haven't I the right to paint you as I want?
Oriana Fallaci
#38. Dali was the great painter then and surrealism was a way of life.
Vincente Minnelli
#39. Only the human figure exists; landscape is, and should be, no more than an accessory; the painter exclusively of landscape is nothing but a bore.
Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec
#40. I am a night painter, so when I come into the studio the next morning the delirium is over.
Philip Guston
#41. The only kind of sublimity which a painter or sculptor should aim at is to express by certain proportions and positions of limbs and features that strength and dignity of mind, and vigor and activity of body, which enables men to conceive and execute great actions.
Edmund Burke
#42. The ability to make somebody feel something: that's art. However you look at it, whether you're an author, a painter, a singer, a rapper, a spoken-word artist - art.
Wale
#43. To me, a painter, if not the most useful, is the least harmful member of our society.
Man Ray
#44. As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there.
Oscar Wilde
#45. The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.
Willa Cather
#46. The painter must enclose himself within his work; he must respond not with words, but with paintings.
Paul Cezanne
#47. A painter was asked why, since he made such beautiful figures, which were but dead things, his children were so ugly; to which the painter replied that he made his pictures by day, and his children by night.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#49. A painter like Picasso, who runs through many periods and phases, ends up by saying all those things which are on the tip of the tongue of the age to say, and finally sterilizes the originality of his contemporaries and juniors.
Norbert Wiener
#50. My talent lies in the expression of my life and creative power through light, colour and form. As a painter I can convey the essence of life.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
#51. No high-minded painter of the last fifty years has been able to come to terms with his art without coming to terms with the problem of cubism.
Walter Darby Bannard
#52. There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.
Henri Matisse
#53. I do paint, and I wanted to actually be a painter. Sometimes I'll whip out paints. It's tough to find the motivation, but it's also a solitary, lonely occupation. What I like about acting is that it is such a collaborative thing.
Dichen Lachman
#54. Any critic of Cezanne who described him as a painter of country scenes would be moving in the wrong direction. You must begin with the question of style ...
Charles Tomlinson
#55. Every minute becomes a yesterday and is lost forever.
R.K. Narayan
#56. A record ... is a statement, it's its own statement, its own entity, rather than being about something else. If I was a painter ... I don't paint the chair, I would paint feelings about the chair.
Bob Dylan
#57. I always think about what's the difference between being tenacious and having an inability to learn from failures. The difference between the homeless guy who wanted to be a great painter and the guy who is a great painter could be anything.
Neil Burger
#58. Drawing is the basis of art. A bad painter cannot draw. But one who draws well can always paint.
Arshile Gorky
#59. The painter saw what was, an alternate
Candor and secrecy inside the skin.
Thom Gunn
#60. 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
#61. If people call me a Sunday painter I'm a Sunday painter who paints every day of the week!
L. S. Lowry
#62. If the world would only build temples to Machinery in the abstract then everything would be perfect. The painter and sculptor would have plenty to do, and could, in complete peace and suitably honored, pursue their trade without further trouble.
Wyndham Lewis
#63. The work ethic at art school is completely different than the work ethic amongst people who get into music. People who paint, it's an honorable thing to spend all day and all night in front of your canvas - that is the romantic vision of the painter.
Nick Cave
#64. I have a talent for happiness. I look with the eyes of a painter, and I see beauty.
Sylvia Kristel
#65. I don't give a shit what the world thinks. I was born a bitch, I was born a painter, I was born fucked. But I was happy in my way. You did not understand what I am. I am love. I am pleasure, I am essence, I am an idiot, I am an alcoholic, I am tenacious. I am; simply I am ... You are a shit.
Frida Kahlo
#66. Writers who can't invent stories often substitute style for narrative. They remind me of the painter who couldn't paint people, so he painted chairs.
Bernard Malamud
#67. The term 'renaissance man' is always bandied about. I don't think that applies to me. You think about Leonardo da Vinci, and he was a painter and a physicist and an architect, and that is a true renaissance man.
Moby
#68. All the earth colours of the painter's palette are out there in the many miles of badlands ...
Georgia O'Keeffe
#69. Has the painter not always gone to an art school, or at least to an established master, for instruction? And the composer, the sculptor, the architect? Then why not the writer? Good poets, like good hybrid corn, are both born and made.
Paul Engle
#70. Pure souls, didn't I tell you not to be seduced by this colorful world for I am the Ultimate Painter.
Rumi
#71. I love art. My sister is an artist and my mother is a painter, so it is very much in the family. I haven't ever wanted to be a fine artist myself - my sister robbed me of my artistic talent, I think.
Douglas Booth
#72. I think the general's job is harder than the painter's; canvas doesn't fight back, after all.
Django Wexler
#73. Photographers, along with dentists, are the two professions never satisfied with what they do. Every dentist would like to be a doctor and inside every photographer is a painter trying to get out.
Pablo Picasso
#74. Biggie was a lyrical genius: he was a musical painter with words. As he rapped, you would see the picture come to life as you heard his story. You hear a lot of rappers rap; you hear a lot of singers sing, but you don't see the movie in your head the way you do when you hear Biggie rap.
R. Kelly
#75. I understood that I was inventing myself, and that I was doing this more in the way of a painter than in the way of a scientist. I could not count on precision or calculation; I could only count on intuition.
Jamaica Kincaid
#76. Man has used human rhythmic movement as raw material out of which to create works of art, as the composer of music uses sound, the sculptor uses stone and wood, the painter his pigments, and the writer - words.
Ted Shawn
#77. A young painter who cannot liberate himself from the influence of past generations is digging his own grave.
Henri Matisse
#78. Art is something given, not reproduced ... the painter paints what he sees with his innermost senses, the expression of his being ... for him every other impression becomes an inner expression.
Herwarth Walden
#79. The French painter Rousseau was once asked why he put a naked woman on a red sofa in the middle of his jungle pictures. He answered, 'I needed a bit of red there.'
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#80. I didn't say try to fail. Try and risk failing. That's how people learn.
Melissa Turner Lee
#81. At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act-rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or express an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.
Harold Rosenberg
#82. The role of the painter ... is to project that which sees itself in him.
Max Ernst
#83. I write because I write - as anyone in the arts does. You're a painter because you feel you have no choice but to paint. You're a writer because this is what you do.
Richard Price
#84. When a painter is working he is aware of the means which are available to him - these include his materials, the style he inherits, the conventions he must obey, his prescribed or freely chosen subject matter - as constituting both an opportunity and a restraint.
John Berger
#85. Light - dews - breezes - bloom - and freshness; not one of which ... has yet been perfected on the canvas of any painter in the world.
John Constable
#86. My father was in the ad business, and he wanted to be a painter.
Bruce Campbell
#87. Light: the greatest painter and photographer of all. At every single moment of our lives we see different images, different pictures.
Abbas Kiarostami
#88. People call me the painter of dancers, but I really wish to capture movement itself.
Edgar Degas
#89. My dream, maybe because of my family, of course, was to be a painter. I chose in one moment the direction of textiles; from textiles I went to fashion.
Roberto Cavalli
#90. Entertain only those thoughts which bring health, vitality and happiness in your life. Start now and think right for you are the painter of the canvas of your life.
Sanchita Pandey
#91. It often takes two to do a good painting - one to paint it, and another to rap the painter smartly with a hammer before he or she can ruin it.
Richard Schmid
#92. I haven't the slightest idea what art is, but to be a painter is something of which you have to prove.
Wayne Thiebaud
#93. The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies ... Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.
George Eliot
#94. I adore the elegance of botanical realism but I also can't help but dream of my very own neo-surrealistic fantasy flowers, and so I paint and illustrate both; I always find myself between both of those worlds.
Minnelli Lucy France
#95. It's not so hard to become the best painter in Canada ... The rest just quits!
Paterson Ewen
#96. The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#97. Lat at nigh have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were mean to be? Are you a writer who doesn't write, a painter who doesn't pain, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.
Steven Pressfield
#98. I have tried to preserve in my relationship to the film the same closeness and intimacy that exists between a painter and his canvas.
Norman McLaren
#99. I still think as a painter - especially in terms of structuring a picture ... I carefully choose the models, costumes, requisites, and backdrops of my photographs.
Loretta Lux
#100. my mother kept quoting Picasso's mother. "Picasso's mother told him if he got into the army, he'd be a general. If he became a monk, he'd be the pope. Instead he was a painter and became Picasso. That's exactly how I feel about you. So do, Rachel, what you love.
Katy Evans
