Top 100 To Canvas Quotes
#1. A sincere artist is not one who makes a faithful attempt to put on to canvas what is in front of him, but one who tries to create something which is, in itself, a living thing.
William Dobell
#2. Before I put brush to canvas, I question, 'Is this mine? ... Is it influenced by some idea which I have acquired from some man? ... I am trying with all my skill to do a painting that is all of women, as well as all of me.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#3. Within one hour of touching the brush to canvas for the first time, my students have a total, complete painting.
Bob Ross
#4. My way is to seize an image the moment it has formed in my mind, to trap it as a bird and to pin it at once to canvas. Afterward I start to tame it, to master it. I bring it under control and I develop it.
Joan Miro
#5. You can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas ... when you actually do something physical.
Twyla Tharp
#6. An art critic is someone who hopes to see his ideas translated to canvas without having to learn how to paint.
Robert Breault
#7. 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
#8. Subject becoming less relevant, each painting having a life of its own, each stroke leading to the next. It is more about the connection of body and spirit to canvas, over mind to canvas.
Ken Gillespie
#9. The camera was waiting for me by predestination and I took to it as a musician takes to the piano or a painter to canvas. I found that I was master of the elements, that I could work miracles.
Alfred Stieglitz
#10. Where is automatism in the work of Chirico or Tanguy? Even Dali had to renounce it in order to be able to organize the space of the canvas according to the combined laws of dreams and pictorial aesthetics.
Dumitru Tepeneag
#11. It's to paint directly on the canvas without any funny business, as it were, and I use almost pure turpentine to start with, adding oil as I go along until the medium becomes pure oil. I use as little oil as I can possibly help, and that's my method.
Edward Hopper
#12. Sargent, when he painted the size of life, placed his canvas on a level with the model, walked back until canvas and sitter were equal before his eye, and was thus able to estimate the construction and values of his representation ...
William Rothenstein
#13. I love having played Walter because I suppose any actor brings a certain aspect of their own personality to their work, and I had a fairly broad canvas to paint on with the different versions.
John Noble
#14. It's like painting the same blank canvas over and over and over and over and over. Once the concept is known, you don't need to see two. And that was in the back of my head, that I was really done artistically with what I had created or pastiched.
Steve Martin
#15. Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.
Janet Fitch
#16. Her departure was a gradual thing, like a watercolor left in the sun, every day fainter until one day the canvas was bare and you had to rely on memory to recapture the image.
Catherine McKenzie
#17. Even though I know who I am, musically I'm a blank canvas. I know what colors I want to use, but I don't know what picture I want to paint yet.
Becky G
#18. It's so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas.
Paul Cezanne
#19. I do what I do out of pure enjoyment. Hopefully, nobody does it better. There's a beauty to making a great deal. It's my canvas. And I like painting it.
Donald Trump
#20. To return to the moment of radical innocence. To paint. To stretch canvas. To find the point of originality. It wasn't a hippie idea. Both of us always hated the hippies, their flowers, their poems, their one idea. We were the furthest thing from hippies. We were the edge, the definers.
Colum McCann
#21. The physical world exists, but that's only the paint and canvas; that's only the instrument we use to make music; that's only the stage where the play is performed.
Dennis Vickers
#22. I throw down the gauntlet to chance. For example, I prepare the ground for a picture by cleaning my brush over the canvas. Spilling a little turpentine can also be helpful.
Joan Miro
#23. My app is the same juicy paint used by Vincent Van Gogh; my screen is the woven canvas of Titian. Painting by hand, I've come to figure, is a certain kind of love.
Robert Genn
#24. If you go too far with naturalism, there is no need to even organize; just look ... and paint what you see until the canvas ends.
David Hockney
#25. An artist who wants to transpose a composition onto a larger canvas must conceive it over again in order to preserve its expression; he must alter its character and not just fill in the squares into which he has divided his canvas.
Henri Matisse
#27. Put a colour upon a canvas - it not only colours with that colour the part of the canvas to which the colour has been applied, but it also colours the surrounding space with the complementary.
Henri Matisse
#28. In particular, I'm drawn to the stories that have big, high concepts and real characters at their heart. And I love where those two worlds meet, and 'Edge of Tomorrow' is the perfect canvas to explore that.
Doug Liman
#29. Life is a canvas, so make your life as an ageless art. Everybody will be able to look at it and enjoy it. And, with time, it will get more valuable.
Debasish Mridha
#30. I decided to make pictures of fragments, images that would spill off the canvas instead of recede into it like a medicine cabinet. I wanted to find images that were in a 'nether-nether-land': things that were a little out of style but hadn't reached the point of nostalgia.
James Rosenquist
#31. The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires. Thus always the human condition faces a beautifully empty canvas. We possess only this moment in which to dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence which we share and create.
Frank Herbert
#32. There are times you can't really see or even feel how sweet life can be. Hopefully its mountains will be higher than its valleys are deep. I know things that are broken can be fixed. Take the punch if you have to, hit the canvas and then get up again. Life is worth it.
Queen Latifah
#33. 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
#34. My job is to be a blank canvas & embody the characters that I'm playing.
Charlize Theron
#35. I'm constantly thinking about design, shapes, patterns and colors, so I just want to be more of a blank canvas. But there is a comfort in knowing what you're going to wear, and that probably comes from Catholic school, where I wore a uniform for 10 years.
Prabal Gurung
#36. We must offer ourselves to God like a clean, smooth canvas and not worry ourselves about what God may choose to paint on it, but at each moment, feel only the stroke of His brush.
Jean-Pierre De Caussade
#37. By comparison with such lives, our days were inconsequential indeed, and yet even though our canvas was small, still we could paint a masterpiece - as long as we were content for it to be a miniature.
Alexander McCall Smith
#38. An uninspiring canvas becomes a glamorous masterpiece when it is reattributed to a better-known artist.
Arthur Smith
#39. He wants his lover to trust him. To surrender herself to him completely. To let him orchestrate the pleasures of her body. But he leaves the ultimate choice up to her. He lets her have one hand free, and that is the moment Blaine captured on the canvas.
J. Kenner
#40. Doing things like playing music, something that's so natural and basic to human function, running around in nature, eating delicious food. These things are intrinsic in basic, primordial to human beings, so that's sort of a way to return to a blank canvas, allowing my true personality to return.
Ezra Miller
#41. I never want to abandon my roots. I want to give my past and the history of painting the importance it deserves, including the masters like Rembrandt, who built up the surface of the canvas with transparent layers.
Jose Parla
#42. Great paintings have gradations, large and small ... They serve to lift the subject off the two-dimensionality of the canvas. Gradations are an essential abstract convention.
Robert Genn
#43. I got into photography because of the immediacy of the medium. I used to sit in front of a canvas for weeks trying to create something. Now I can see the image right away.
Mario Sorrenti
#44. Music is painted upon a canvas of silence. Mozart used to say, "Silence is the greatest effect in music.
Josef Lhevinne
#45. It is for the artist ... in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features.
James Whistler
#46. Just dash something down if you see a blank canvas staring at you with a certain imbecility. You do not know how paralyzing it is, that staring of a blank canvas which says to the painter: you don't know anything.
Vincent Van Gogh
#47. Every dream, every vision is a masterpiece canvas on the wall of our minds. So as artists we should make an effort to bring the artwork to the the exhibition.
Euginia Herlihy
#48. You take a painting, you have a white, virginal piece of canvas that is the world of purity, and then you put your imagery on it, and you try to bring it back to the original purity.
Louise Berliawsky Nevelson
#49. Kraut was a stand-up guy in the old tradition, in a strange way reminiscent of my father in his steadfast refusal to abandon a position once he had taken it. It was a quality I lacked, and so admired in others when they weren't using it to beat me to the canvas or break my heart.
Miles Watson
#50. It is the custom of Venice to paint on canvas, either because it does not split and is not worm-eaten, or because pictures can be made of any size desired, or else for convenience ... so that they can be sent anywhere with very little trouble and expense.
Giorgio Vasari
#51. Keep this little canvas, it is a promise for the future. When I say 'keep this canvas,' I mean for the influence on yourself. When one does a good thing, it's well to keep it to show how foolish we are at other times.
Charles Webster Hawthorne
#52. I'm compelled to paint nearly every day. I just felt like making a painting, went out and bought paints and a canvas. Now it fulfills me creatively when I'm not doing music: it's something you can do by yourself and it's totally yours. It's a great adjunct to my life.
David Johansen
#53. An artist does his most difficult work when he steps back from the blank canvas and thinks about what he is going to create.
Michelangelo
#54. I believe that the great painters with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions.
Edward Hopper
#55. I've started to experiment [in the studio] with texturing the canvas, building up the surface with large brushes, palette knife or fingers. I want to say more in my art.
T. Allen Lawson
#56. The Balopticon [a machine that projects photos on canvas to trace the lines] is an evil, inartistic, habit-forming, lazy and vicious machine! It also is a useful, time-saving, practical and helpful one. I use one often-and am thoroughly ashamed of it. I hide it whenever I hear people coming.
Norman Rockwell
#57. I'd paint long strips of canvas and abandon them on the beach, or put bread out in geometric patterns for the pigeons downtown. I wanted people to find something nice and intriguing to puzzle over. Then I'd go back to see if the things were still there, or if anyone would notice.
Jenny Holzer
#58. 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
#59. The only other things I got from the abstract expressionists is the absolute belief that this canvas is the complete total area of struggle, this is the arena, this is where the fight is taking place, the battle. Everybody believes that, but you have to really believe that and work that way.
Aaron Siskind
#60. I was wondering if you would like to come over and assist me in going over those photographs." Malcolm said without any preamble. His voice was distracted and distant, and it rankled me.
"I don't know," I told him. "Are you going to stick your tongue in my twat and then run away again?
Ava Lore
#61. Canvas tarpaulin, and a piece of old carpet. I'm not sure that they didn't lay an old wardrobe on top of that, just to
Bill Bryson
#62. I see the canvas and I begin ... It's a necessary evil to get into the work, and it's pretty marvelous to be able to get out of it.
Willem De Kooning
#63. Retirement with its open canvas, is an especially opportune time to cultivate expanded experiences.
Timothy McIntyre
#65. Use your time to bathe yourself in the gift. Move your hand across the canvas. Go to museums. Make this into an obsession.
Anna Deavere Smith
#66. I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
John Updike
#67. One of the main reasons I paint is because I think nature is so wonderful. I want to try to get my feelings of that down on canvas, if possible.
E. J. Hughes
#68. The urge is always with me to retouch yesterday's canvas with today's paintbrush and cover the things that fill me with regret..
Andrew Davidson
#69. I usually start by doing one or more color studies of the subject on a piece of canvas taped to cardboard.
Mary Beth McKenzie
#70. No, I never had any dreams. The process of art is a dream in itself. The artist just doesn't ... you work out something. It's yours. You don't have to go to sleep to do that. You do that on the canvas.
LeRoy Neiman
#71. Whether it's a canvas tote or Givenchy, a day bag you love is essential. It doesn't have to be a fashion It bag of the season, either.
Brad Goreski
#72. In the other room Rateau was looking at the canvas, completely blank, in the center of which Jonas had merely written in very small letters a word that could be made out, but without any certainty as to whether it should be read solitary or solidary.
Albert Camus
#73. What the painter adds to the canvas are the days of his life. The adventure of living, hurtling toward death.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#74. Whether I'm at home and researching online or whether I'm in the studio just drawing, I think I'm more interested in practical research - discussing with other people, trying to find the exact formula of putting things on the canvas, what is the consistency of paint that works best.
Camille Henrot
#75. No; for instead of delivering myself up to the full enjoyment of them as others do, I am always troubling my head about how I could produce the same effect upon canvas; and as that can never be done, it is more vanity and vexation of spirit.
Anne Bronte
#76. Words are your paintbrush, and your life is the canvas. You can paint whatever you want to paint; you can even copy another artist's work - but what you express with your paintbrush is the way you see yourself, the way you see the entire reality.
Miguel Ruiz
#77. I see for others ... in order to put on canvas the sudden apparitions which come to me.
Pablo Picasso
#78. I sometimes use music as way of getting back to a certain time, dredging up stuff from the past and putting it down on canvas.
Danny Fox
#79. Writing is one means to investigate the mystique of life. Each fresh page is an unsullied canvas that an inquisitive writer employs to explore the poetic transience behind their existence.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#80. A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist's own needs; a 'finished' statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work - related far more directly to the demands of communication.
John Berger
#81. For sheer excitement you can keep movie premieres and roller-coasters . An empty white canvas waiting to be filled. That's the thing.
Pam Brown
#82. Anyone can put paint on a canvas, but only a true master can bring the painting to life. Anyone can kill, but only a genius can make murder an art.
Shaun Jeffrey
#83. What I did for my last act as a painter, if you call me a painter, was to photograph the weave of the canvas, and enlarge it and enlarge it until it became like a landscape.
Agnes Denes
#84. Because eventually, no matter what the circumstances, he would see the real me. Josh is a beautiful, messy, passionate work of art, and I'm ... a blank canvas. There's nothing here to love.
Stephanie Perkins
#85. As a creative person, you want to start with a blank canvas.
Bibhu Mohapatra
#86. I was confused by this sudden glare of attention; it was as if the characters in a favorite painting, absorbed in their own concerns, had looked up out of the canvas and spoken to me.
Donna Tartt
#87. 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
#88. I'm a painter. I'm still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas.
Carolee Schneemann
#89. I love the idea of renaissance. If my career is like painting a canvas, I want to have as many different colors in there as I can.
Nolan Gerard Funk
#90. I like a canvas to breathe and be alive. Be alive is the point. And, as the limitations are something called pigment and canvas, let's see if I can do it.
Lee Krasner
#91. The canvas of your life can reflect infinite beauty depending on the colors you opt to splash on it.
Pooja Ruprell
#92. In abstract painting, I worried about the limited range of possibilities that, as time went on, became increasingly important to me. I wanted to express or deal with differences that an all-over paint and canvas 'presence' neutralized.
Richard Diebenkorn
#93. Wanna move out the hood and defeat that cancer
I ask how she stay on her feet like dancers
How she keep on adding paint to a life-size canvas.
Lil B
#94. If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat ... you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.
Diane Frolov
#95. You're an enormous sponge and everything goes in there and you squeeze it out in songs, I guess. And if you're a painter, you squeeze them out on to a canvas.
Feist
#96. I get up at 7:30. I grab a canvas bag and go out. I say hello to the people in the supermarket and liquor store. I buy the 'New York Times.' I go to the beach and think about characters and plot.
Lawrence Sanders
#97. Fantasy is the only canvas large enough for me to paint on.
Terry Brooks
#98. 'Game Of Thrones' was too big a canvas for a movie, but 'Dirty White Boys' is like a great old Western: there's so much compression, and it's so pressurized, it demands to be told in one sitting.
David Benioff
#99. And so my militant philosophy is this: to make with a brush on canvas is a simple direct delight-to make with the movie is the same.
Norman McLaren
#100. Painters must want to paint above all else. If the artist in front of the canvas begins to wonder how much he will sell it for, or what the critics will think of it, he won't be able to pursue original avenues. Creative achievements depend on single-minded immersion.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
