Popular quotes about Painting! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
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 FreudI 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 OwensThe true essence of Chinese culture is sophistication, refinement, the spirit of poetry. The spirit of ink painting and calligraphy lives on forever. Calligraphy is more important than painting. Chinese always consider nature. Man is a very small part of nature. That's why in Chinese painting you see huge mountains and man very small, very humble before nature. You must be harmonious and one with nature. You don't fight it. And then there's a bit of a poetry. Of course, it's very complicated, but also very simple.
Michael ChowThere's a difference between craft and painting. Craft, your job is to make it exactly the same every time. Painting is the opposite, but in painting there is some craftsmanship, which is called technique. But technique is spontaneous. That's the treasure, the most important part. You are in it.
Michael ChowI have never seen a beautiful painting of a beautiful woman. But you can take an ugly woman and make a beautiful painting of her. It is the painting itself that should be beautiful.
Max Ernst(Landscapes) are too close to painting. And TV has nothing to do with painting. It's just transmission. And you can't transmit a landscape, happily enough.
Jean-Luc Godard...if photos can reproduce the world more perfectly than any painter, can capture an instant, a look, a gesture, then what makes a painting good anymore? Painting subverts this subversion of its traditional nature by redefining itself - art is idea, not simply skillful execution. So, a work can be crudely made, or even machine made - but it has to be practically and functionally useless.
David ByrneWhen I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.
Jackson PollockColor is a language. It is the language of painting. How painting expresses itself is in large part with color.
Joseph RaffaelAs for the various kinds of montage photography, they are in reality not photography at all but a kind of painting in which photography is used - as pastiches of textiles are used in crazy-quilts - to form a mosaic. Whatever value the montage may have derives from painting rather than the camera.
Lewis MumfordIn 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 GustonAll art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.
Salman RushdieMost painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.
Robert MotherwellPainting is so close, so personal, so immediate, and so ordinary... It is the ordinary resurrections that define your painting.
Joshua L. GoldbergAt a lecture, a guy said to me, "You know, when I look at your work, I don't know what I'm looking at, but when I look at a Willem de Kooning painting, I know what that is." I said, "Well, the paintings I'm doing have a very legible sentence at the top of the canvas." At a lecture, a guy said to me, "You know, when I look at your work, I don't know what I'm looking at, but when I look at a de Kooning painting, I know what that is." I said, "Well, the paintings I'm doing have a very legible sentence at the top of the canvas."
Glenn LigonAlmost 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 WileyWhen you talk about painters and you talk about painters painting masterpieces, there is no painter who painted only one painting and that was a masterpiece. You have to do a whole bunch of paintings to get to the place of mastering your craft.
Walter MosleyAll I care about these days is painting โ photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.
Henri Cartier-BressonRobert von Neumann taught painting, and when I finally got into a painting class of his, he reacted in much the same way.
Warren MacKenzieWhen you come up in the art world, whatevers in the air, the issues of the moment, end up becoming part of the working method or modus operandi of how you think about doing a painting. And I came up at a time when-actually painting was dead when I came up. Sculpture sort of ruled.
Chuck CloseI believe that one should not think too much about nature when painting, at least not during the painting's conception. The colour sketch should be made exactly as one has perceived things in nature. But personal feeling is the main thing.
Paula Modersohn-BeckerThe transition from painter to artist comes when you cross the line of painting what you see to painting what you feel about what you see.
T. Allen LawsonPainting is like breathing to me. Itโs what I do all the time. Every day I make art, whether it is painting, writing or making a movie.
Julian SchnabelSomething in me knows where Iโm going, and - well, painting is a state of being. ... Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.
Jackson PollockI'm not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings.
Robert RauschenbergI get so tired of painting. I've been trying to give it up all the time, if we could just make a living out of movies or the newspaper business or something. It's so boring, painting the same picture over and over.
Andy WarholWhen we paint, whether it is on our bodies for ceremony or on bark or canvas for the market, we're not just painting for fun or profit, we're painting as we always have done to demonstrate our continuing link with our country and the rights and responsibilities we have to it.
Galarrwuy YunupinguI realized that most people waste their lives earning a living, and I wanted to live. I love painting, so I keep painting. That's how I became an artist.
Pierre SoulagesI would always be painting and drawing. If I was stuck at home, I was in the basement working on a painting.
Terry CrewsOne thing that really interests me is-and it comes out of Chinese and Japanese painting-where you have a number of different kinds of space in the same painting. You have a kind of deep space, and then you have something like right up on the surface.
Mary HeilmannIf you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.
Pablo PicassoWhile it may seem a little mundane, the material realities of realizing the painting actually have a lot to do with how you should read the painting. For example, we assume that what the model is wearing is what we found him in in the streets. No; in fact, a lot of what happens is that in Photoshop certain aspects are being heightened or diminished. There is no actual material truth in these paintings.
Kehinde WileyThis is the essential distinction--even opposition--between the painting and the film: the painting is composed subjectively, thefilm objectively. However highly we rate the function of the scenario writer--in actual practice it is rated very low--we must recognize that the film is not transposed directly and freely from the mind by means of a docile medium like paint, but must be cut piece-meal out of the lumbering material of the actual visible world.
Herbert ReadContradictions of perspective. Contrasts of light. Contrasts of form. Points of view impossible to achieve in drawing and painting. Foreshortenings with a strong distortion of the objects, with a crude handling of matter. Moments altogether new, never seen before compositions whose boldness outstrips the imagination of painters Then the creation of those instants which do not exist, contrived by means of photomontage. The negative transmits altogether new stimuli to the sentient mind and eye.
Alexander RodchenkoBurn shavings and splinters of pitch pine, and when they turn to charcoal, put them out, and pound them into mortar with size. This will make a pretty black for fresco painting.
Marcus Vitruvius PollioA lot of ideas don't translate very well into art. To say, "Oh my god, the grass is green ..." You're going to end up with a big green painting.
John BaldessariI felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.
David BowieI influenced the BG style by not being able to draw perspective. The BG artists developed cool graphic painting styles to make my bad backgrounds look like they were that way on purpose.
John KricfalusiI don't buy art. I'd rather buy a beautiful location or a beautiful site than buy art. A beautiful home is like owning a beautiful painting, except you can live in it.
Millard DrexlerWell painting is certainly my main thing. I will keep doing that for the rest of my life, but if I become famous I would maybe like to experiment with acting, or I have a good voice so maybe a little bit of singing. I'm going to take singing lessons, so who knows.
Autumn de ForestPainting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.
John BergerI so love the animation process. Interesting, everything that I do in animation, the kind of crafting and skills of storytelling, totally work within the structure of the Disney nature films. In a weird way, I like to think that animation is like painting, and Disney nature is like sculpting. Animation you start with a blank canvas and you paint. With Disney nature, you start with a big block of imagery and you hone it down into your final story. Somewhere you end up with something kind of pretty to watch.
Roy Conli