Top 100 The Painter Quotes
#1. The painter who is so enamoured by the beauties of the parts of a landscape, that he strives to represent all, cannot succeed. His picture will be an arrangement of a series of portraits of things without unity ... There must be variety and contrast, but in measured doses.
Walter J. Phillips
#2. The painter paints his brushes blackThrough the canvas runs a crackPortrait of the pain never answers back.
Phil Ochs
#3. The painter is not an intellectual if, when he has painted a nude woman, he gives us the idea that she is just about to put her clothes back on.
Odilon Redon
#4. Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.
Edgar Degas
#5. 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
#6. The living model never answers well the idea or impressions the painter wishes to express; one must, therefore, learn to do without one, and for that, you must acquire facility, furnish one's memory to the point of infinitude, and make numerous drawings after the old masters.
Eugene Delacroix
#7. But now I rejoice when, in my winter studio, I can spread out my summer studies and recall through them the beautiful season and places which gave them being. Here the painter feels how small things may suggest the greater - the drop of water, image the firmament.
Christopher Pearse Cranch
#8. The painter's obsession with his subject is all that he needs to drive him to work.
Lucian Freud
#9. The painter or draftsman ought to be solitary, in order that the well-being of the body not sap the vigour of the mind.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#10. The eye is complicated. It mixes the colors [it sees] for you ... The painter must unmix them and lay them on again shade by shade, and then the eye of the beholder takes over and mixes them again.
Elizabeth Borton De Trevino
#11. When I act, I feel like I am a color in someone else's painting - I can be the best blue that there is, but I'm still only part of their entire picture - but, with music, when I am performing with Reserved For Rondee, I am the painter, you know?
Billy Magnussen
#12. Claude Monet was the incomparable painter of bright daylight...Monet was the painter of light.
Christoph Heinrich
#13. The painter's only solid ground is the palette and colors, but as soon as the colors achieve an illusion, they are no longer judged.
Pierre Bonnard
#14. How aware were photographers in the past of other visual arts? "No photographer of any distinction at all could approach his work without some awareness of what was going on in other visual media, and for that matter neither the painter nor the draughtsman could ignore photography."
Aaron Scharf
#15. The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies every thing placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#16. The painter must be solitary. For if you are alone you are completely yourself, but if you are accompanied by a single companion, you are only half yourself.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#17. 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
#18. All the earth colours of the painter's palette are out there in the many miles of badlands ...
Georgia O'Keeffe
#19. That sure is a beautiful picture," she said. "Looks just like heaven or something." "Or something," said the painter.
Kurt Vonnegut
#20. 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
#21. Persecution inspires men who otherwise would have remained dormant. As pain whips the painter, his brush whips the canvas.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#22. I think the general's job is harder than the painter's; canvas doesn't fight back, after all.
Django Wexler
#23. We look at a painting to know the painter; it's his company we are after, not his skill.
James Whistler
#24. The painter has to unlearn the habit of thinking that things seem to have the color which common sense says they 'really' have, and to learn the habit of seeing things as they appear.
Bertrand Russell
#26. It wasn't that I wanted to be an artist. But when I took my first drawing class with the painter Doug Ohlson, I could never finish a drawing.
Lynne Tillman
#27. An optical impression is produced on our organs of sight which makes us classify as light, half-tone or quartertone, the surfaces represented by colour sensations. So that light does not exist for the painter.
Paul Cezanne
#28. The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement.
Lucian Freud
#29. The painter wanders and loiters contentedly from place to place, always on the lookout for some brilliant butterfly of a picture which can be caught and carried safely home.
Winston Churchill
#30. The Painter's Keys is a timeless, universal guide to lifemanship masquerading as a painting blog.
Sara Genn
#31. But in a still life, there is no end to our looking, which has become allied with the gaze of the painter; we look in and in, to the world of things, in their ambiance of cool or warm light, in and in, as long as we can stand to look, as long as we take pleasure in looking.
Mark Doty
#32. 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
#33. The purpose of the painter is simply to reproduce in other minds the impression which a scene has made upon him. A work of art does not appeal to the intellect. It does not appeal to the moral sense. Its aim is to instruct, not to edify, but to awaken an emotion.
George Inness
#34. It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.
Pablo Picasso
#35. I'm so used to being in a theater where there is always a narrative, but I'm more about the still moment, the painter inside me.
Ragnar Kjartansson
#36. I think it's really the job of the composer, the artist, the painter, the writer to present people with options. I'm just really reflecting the thoughts and actions around me.
Ian Anderson
#37. I'm like the painter with his nose to the canvas, fussing over details. Gazing from a distance, the reader sees the big picture.
Steven Saylor
#38. 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
#39. Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much of my writing is verbal painting.
Elizabeth Bowen
#40. The role of the painter ... is to project that which sees itself in him.
Max Ernst
#41. When the painter wishes to represent an event, he cannot place before us too great a number of personages; but he cannot employ too few when he wishes to portray an emotion.
Joseph Joubert
#43. Duncan's hands are long and soft, with a small, neat callus on his thumb from holding a brush - the painter's hallmark. I felt it when he shook my hand.
Priya Parmar
#44. Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements which the painter uses to express his sentiments. In a picture every separate part will be visible and ... everything which has no utility in the picture is for that reason harmful.
Henri Matisse
#45. People call me the painter of dancers, but I really wish to capture movement itself.
Edgar Degas
#46. The painter's mind is a copy of the divine mind, since it operates freely in creating the many kinds of animals, plants, fruits, landscapes, countrysides, ruins, and awe-inspiring places.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#47. Light is the photographic medium par excellence; it is to the photographer what words are to the writer; color and paint to the painter; wood, metal, stone, or clay to the sculptor.
Andreas Feininger
#48. The painter is, as to the execution of his work, a mechanic; but as to his conception and spirit and design he is hardly below even the poet.
Friedrich Schiller
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. Literature is the noblest of all the arts. Music dies on the air, or at best exists only as a memory; oratory ceases with the effort; the painter's colors fade and the canvas rots; the marble is dragged from its pedestal and is broken into fragments.
Elbert Hubbard
#52. The painter pondered the mournful puzzle of life demanding to be born and, once born, demanding to be fruitful ... to multiply and to live as long as possible - to do all that on a very small planet that would have to last forever.
Kurt Vonnegut
#53. Philosophers and aestheticians may offer elegant and profound definitions of art and beauty, but for the painter they are all summed up in the phrase: To create a harmony.
Gino Severini
#54. The Painter must leave the beholder something to guess.
Ernst Gombrich
#55. The painter's portrait and the physicist's explanation are both rooted in reality, but they have been changed by the painter or the physicist into something more subtly imagined than the photographic appearance of things.
Jacob Bronowski
#57. By poetry we mean the art of employing of words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination; the art of doing by means of words, what the painter does by means of colors.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#58. The difference between the actor and the painter is that the actor would buy somebody a knish in order to have them watch him act.
Al Pacino
#59. Only the painter who knows his business can create the impression that a picture was done in one stroke.
Auguste Renoir
#60. If you call painting dumb poetry, the painter may call poetry blind painting.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#61. The artist does not exist except as a personification, a figure of speech that represents the sum total of art itself. It is painting that is the genius of the painter, poetry of the poet, and a person is a creative artist to the extent that he participates in that genius.
Harold Rosenberg
#62. Paintings are memories. Memories of the painter who painted them. Memories that can be shared as well. Paintings are things to remember things by.
James Rosenquist
#63. It's as if the work on your canvas has a will of its own. When that happens, it can be quite exciting. But disturbing, too, when, as the painter, you are not in control of your painting.
Wally Lamb
#64. The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen.
Paul Klee
#65. It is not sufficient merely to be a great master in painting and very wise, but I think that it is necessary for the painter to be very moral in his mode of life, or even, if such were possible, a saint, so that the Holy Spirit may inspire his intellect.
Michelangelo
#66. Darker the hell, darker the life...darker the death, darker the fear..." the painter's left-hand fingers where drenched in black color, which he kept on scrolling on white paper until he made a...
"Raven...darkest like hell and life...raven darkest like fear and death...raven...nevermore
Rao Umar Javed
#67. 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
#68. the painter had no need for grammar.
words fell from his brushes
already knowing where to stand, sit, lie down.
Thomas Lloyd Qualls
#69. The painter leaves his mark. And I just put in two statues in Rhode Island that I'm working on. And I think that's going to make me last longer than me.
Anthony Quinn
#71. Atheists don't hate fairies, leprechauns, or unicorns because they don't exist. It is impossible to hate something that doesn't exist. Atheists - like the painting experts hated the painter - hate God because He does exist.
Ray Comfort
#72. The painter folded back the heavy curtain, standing in the stream of light breaking through the damp thickness of the room. He paused, still holding the drape in his hand as he considered with suspicion that a world could exist outside the window.
Thomas Lloyd Qualls
#73. The painter had achieved what we would all like to do: capture time and make it stand still
Lian Hearn
#74. The painter of genius will not waste a moment upon those smaller objects which only serve to catch the sense, to divide the attention, and to counteract his great design of speaking to the heart.
Joshua Reynolds
#75. The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the works of others as his standard.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#77. The painter makes real to others his innermost feelings about all that he cares for. A secret becomes known to everyone who views the picture through the intensity with which it is felt.
Lucian Freud
#78. My father kind of had hopes that I was going to become an artist like him - the typical thing. Of course I could play guitar better than him when I was about 12. But I couldn't paint better than him. So I went, 'I'm going to be the guitarist of the house, not the painter.'
David Russell
#79. I am not as these are, the poet saithIn youth's pride, and the painter, among menAt bay, where never pencil comes nor pem
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
#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. Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter's soul.
Vincent Van Gogh
#83. I suppose we were heretic,' he thinks out loud, But, Sandro, you're not dead ... '
'There's no time here,' the painter replied, 'Everyone who will ever die is already here.'
'Then Dante really got it wrong.'
'He knows.'
'He's in Hell too?'
'He visits on Sundays.
Emma Iadanza
#84. The painter knew that color was not something you controlled but something you set free. He believed that color knew its way home.
Thomas Lloyd Qualls
#85. 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
#86. The painter who is content with the praise of the world for what does not satisfy himself, is not an artist, but an artisan; for though his reward be only praise, his pay is that of a mechanic.
Washington Allston
#87. The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
Susan Sontag
#88. As the door closed behind them, the painter flung himself down on a sofa, and a look of pain came into his face.
Oscar Wilde
#89. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion.
Albert Einstein
#90. A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude ...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#91. The connoisseur of painting gives only bad advice to the painter. For that reason I have given up trying to judge myself.
Pablo Picasso
#92. 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
#93. Was no stain left upon it. It was bright, and glistened. As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter's work, and all that that meant. It would kill
Oscar Wilde
#94. The painter should paint not only what he has in front of him, but also what he sees inside himself.
Caspar David Friedrich
#95. Perhaps I was born too early. I was more the painter of your generation than of mine.
Paul Cezanne
#96. People aren't interested in blueprints; they want to sense the painter's involvement and pleasure in the subject ... Paint a sense of place.
Paul Strisik
#97. And painted portraits have a life of their own that comes from deep in the soul of the painter and where the machine can't go.
Vincent Van Gogh
#98. The painter puts brush to canvas, and the poet puts pen to paper. The poet has the easier task, for his pen does not alter his rhyme.
Robert Breault
#99. The eye is continually influenced by what it cannot detect; nay, it is not going too far, to say that it is most influenced by what it detects least. Let the painter define, if he can, the variations of lines on which depend the change of expression in the human countenance.
John Ruskin
#100. The painter has total control over what they're showing to the viewer.
Hideo Kojima
