Popular quotes about Painting! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
You have bits of canvas that are unpainted and you have these thick stretcher bars. So you see that a painting is an object; that it's not a window into something - you're not looking at a landscape, you're not looking at a portrait, but you're looking at a painting. It's basically: A painting is a painting is a painting. And it's what Frank Stella said famously: What you see is what you see.
Frank StellaWhen I am in a painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc, because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.
Jackson PollockI'm not anti conceptual art. I don't think painting must be revived, exactly. Art reflects life, and our lives are full of algorithms, so a lot of people are going to want to make art that's like an algorithm. But my language is painting, and painting is the opposite of that. There's something primal about it. It's innate, the need to make marks. That's why, when you're a child, you scribble.
Jenny SavilleI feel like what's most important for painting - which has been hierarchically on the top for a really long time in terms of what is considered fine art, by comparison with something like a comic book or what's considered low art - is that painting should open up laterally to include other cultures and things that don't immediately resonate as a painting but are obviously of equal contribution to the genre.
Laura OwensI tried different techniques during my career, but I especially fell in love with painting with oil and pallette-knife. Every artwork is the result of long painting process; every canvas is born during the creative search; every painting is full of my inner world.
Leonid AfremovGood painting is nothing else but a copy of the perfections of God and a reminder of His painting. Finally, good painting is a music and a melody which intellect only can appreciate, and with great difficulty.
MichelangeloIf I go to the National Gallery and I look at one of the great paintings that excite me there, it's not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me which return me to life more violently.
Francis BaconIn every painting, as in any other work of art, there is always an IDEA, never a STORY. The idea is the point of departure, the first cause of the plastic construction, and it is always present all the time as energy creating matter. The stories and other literary associations exist only in the mind of the spectator, the painting acting as the stimulus.
Jose Clemente OrozcoWhile a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) โ a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.
Susan SontagFor me, Corsica is a place that I visited with my friends, maybe five or six times over the years, and I'm so happy there that I wanted to make a painting about it almost just to share with my friends, but it's so difficult when all your feelings are one way, and they're very sort of happy and pleasant. It's impossible to make a painting about it.
Nate LowmanBeing in the studio, it's more of a controlled environment, where you can be Salvador Dali and sit back and look at the painting. And you can go, 'Ah, you know what? Maybe a little bit more red over here...maybe add some blue over here.' You can sit back and look at the painting.
Zakk WyldeIn my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?
Philip GustonAlmost as though the painting itself becomes the embodiment of a type of struggle for visibility, and this might be considered the main subject of the painting.
Kehinde WileyMake a small painting of what you want to do... and project it up on a white wall... The enlarged version is so changed that there is no way of just visualizing it in the brain... It's a whole new dimension in painting.
Jim RoweThe merit of painting lies in the exactness of reproduction. Painting is a science and all sciences are based on mathematics. No human inquiry can be a science unless it pursues its path through mathematical exposition and demonstration.
Leonardo da VinciPainting to me is addictive. These are moments when it is inspiring, but they are few and far between. I keep my tools sharpened for the moment when things do start clicking, but that doesn't happen a lot. I really have to push myself sometimes. Painting is a profession in which it is very easy to be lazy, particularly if you have any degree of success.
Jamie WyethI'm painting an idea not an ideal. Basically I'm trying to paint a structured painting full of controlled, and therefore potent, emotion.
Euan UglowModern abstract art starts in Russia in about 1915 with Malevich, and then the Russian Revolution happens, and eventually all that experimental art gets squashed and social realism comes back into play. All of a sudden, Malevich is no longer painting black squares; he's painting peasants in colorful schmattas.
Robert LongoAfter painting comes Sculpture, a very noble art, but one that does not in the execution require the same supreme ingenuity as the art of painting, since in two most important and difficult particulars, in foreshortening and in light and shade, for which the painter has to invent a process, sculpture is helped by nature. Moreover, Sculpture does not imitate color which the painter takes pains to attune so that the shadows accompany the lights.
Leonardo da VinciWhat most paintings do is give you a path for your eye to move around. The painting actually tells your eye, go here, now go here, now go here, go here. So all you have to do is look at it, give it a few seconds, and your eye will start to move through the painting.
David SalleIt's Frank's painting on the cover. We were originally going to use a Salvador Dali painting that we got permission from Salvador Dali to use, and Frank found this one, and it really did fit the music much more.
Alice CooperI went to art school, and every Tuesday and Friday we drew the nude. If you look at Western painting, male and female nudes are in the center of every painting. It's difficult and exciting to draw the nude. Why get so upset about this? It's our duty to break taboos.
Peter GreenawayThere are different kinds of painting, some with lights and some without, but still if you look at any painting here (in the light) and then over here (out of the light) it's an entirely different thing. The consciousness of this came to the Impressionists and I'm very interested in that.
Jean-Luc GodardCreation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. (Describing his poetic ideal, 1817)
Samuel Taylor ColeridgeThe essential of painting is that 'something', that 'ethereal glue,' that 'intermediary product' which the artist exudes with all his creative being and which he has the power to place, to encrust, to impregnate into the pictorial matter of the painting.
Yves KleinMy paint is like a rocket, which describes its own space. I try to make the impossible possible. What is happening I cannot foresee, it is a surprise. Painting, like passion, is an emotion full of truth and rings a living sound, like the roar coming from the lion's breast. To paint is to destroy what preceded. I never try to make a painting, but a chunk of life. It is a scream; it is a night; it is like a child; it is a tiger behind bars.
Karel AppelSelf-painting is a further development of painting. The pictorial surface has lost its function as sole expressive support. It was led back to its origins, the wall, the object, the living being, the human body. By incorporating my body as expressive support, occurrences arise as a result, the course of which the camera records and the viewer can experience
Gunter BrusI believe I am looking for rightness. My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation. In nature everything is always right: the structure is right, the proportions are good, the colours fit the forms. If you imitate that in painting, it becomes false.
Gerhard RichterPainting is the only universal language. All nature is creation's picture book. Painting alone can describe every thing which can be seen, and suggest every emotion which can be felt. Art reaches back into the babyhood of time, and is man's only lasting monument.
William Morris HuntIn my work, I want to create an understanding, not about what a painting looks like but about what a painting says.
Kehinde WileyWhen it comes to partnership, some humans can make their lives alone - it's possible. But creatively, it's more like painting: you can't just use the same colours in every painting. It's just not an option. You can't take the same photograph every time and live with art forms with no differences.
Ben HarperEver since I started painting, I have tried to get the fluidity and surprise of image connection, the simultaneity of film montage, into painting.
David SalleI used to split my time between writing, music and painting. I would work on a book and then abandon it, start a band, do an album, quit music, then do a gallery show. Eventually I decided to give writing a serious shot.
Isaac MarionThere are three forms of visual art: Painting is art to look at, sculpture is art you can walk around, and architecture is art you can walk through
Dan RiceI barely knew I wanted to be an artist. I liked my art classes and painting was fun, I guess, but I didn't realize that seeing the country was going to inspire me to further explore that... but that's what it did.
Edward RuschaOver and over again did the Attorney-General cry out aloud, in the agony of his cause, 'What is to become of painting if the critics withhold their lash?
James WhistlerI'm not interested in 'abstracting' or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it - drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea.
Willem de KooningThere is no condition that you cannot modify into something more, any more than there is any painting that you can paint and not like and just paint over it again. There are many limiting thoughts in the human environment that make it feel like it is not so, as you have these incurable illnesses, or these unchangeable conditions. But we say, they are only "unchangeable" because you believe that they are.
Esther HicksOne does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite - that particular peach is but a detail.
Pablo PicassoYou say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
Gilbert K. ChestertonI wish I could be more serious about painting. I think there may be something going on there and I should pursue it. I'm very old-fashioned - even with the music. I realize, while I have so much respect for the kookiness of people who go for it, who paint with their eyes closed, I am superclassical.
Lou DoillonPainting allows me to use other portions of my brain pleasurably. Irony plays no part in what or how I paint. I paint the particular subject matter not to make polemical points but because I am interested in the human imprint on the landscape. I paint the landscape of my time and place with the stuff in it.
James Howard KunstlerI love the trick of painting. You can have the movement within the still thing, but it is completely fixed. And that illusion is constantly exciting.
Cecily BrownSelf-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
Ray BradburyHave not Manet and Monet, Cรฉzanne and Matisse, rendered to painting something of the same service which Keats and Shelley gave to poetry after the solemn and ceremonious literary perfections of the eighteenth century? They have brought back to the pictorial art a new draught of joie de vivre; and the beauty of their work is instinct with gaiety, and floats in sparkling air. I do not expect these masters would particularly appreciate my defence, but I must avow an increasing attraction to their work.
Winston ChurchillThe invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as in poetry, where automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is a true photography of thought. Since a blind instrument now assured artists of achieving the aim they had set themselves up to that time, they now aspired, not without recklessness, to break with the imitation of appearances.
Andre Breton