Quotes About Painting

You know, the way art history is taught, often there's nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.

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.

For example, in one of my last exhibitions I had a 50-foot massive painting with I think perhaps a hundred thousand hand-painted small flowers. This was the Christ painting [The Dead Christ in the Tomb, 2008] in my Down exhibition [2008]. Now, I simply can't spend eight hours a day painting small, identical flowers. And so I've got a team that allows me to have these grand, sweeping statements.

Just the way you might look at a painting and see the painting, and the painting is outside you, so this immaterial intellect would see the forms and behold them, as if they were standing before it. And Plotinus said that that can't be right because it falls prey to sceptical objections.

There'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.

...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.

I have never heard a dancer asking for advice about how to stay focused on her footwork, or a painter complaining about the dull day-to-day task of painting. What task worth doing isn't worth daily effort? Do you think Michelangelo was having fun the whole time he was on his back painting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling?

It's true, I do sometimes suspend myself over the canvas, but mostly I work at a table when I'm making a painting. When I use 'The Rig,' my feet are firmly anchored. I lower myself horizontally just long enough to make a brush stroke - a matter of seconds - and then I'm upright again. My assistant then erases the painting quickly with a squeegee and I go for it again... until I get it right. It's like trying to hit a home run.

I don't like getting out when I could be painting. And when I'm painting, I don't want anybody else around.

As 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.

I sit for two or three hours and then in 15 minutes I can do a painting, but that's part of it. You have to get ready and decide to jump up and do it; you build yourself up psychologically, and so painting has no time for brush. Brush is boring, you give it and all of a sudden it's dry, you have to go. Before you cut the thought, you know?

Painting is so close, so personal, so immediate, and so ordinary... It is the ordinary resurrections that define your painting.

The muscularity in my paintings is only an expression of the spirit within. When I paint Nephi, I'm painting the interior, the greatness, the largeness of spirit. Who knows what he looked like? I'm painting a man who looks like he could actually do what Nephi did.

Make 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.

The 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.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

It is not about painting life, it is about making painting alive.

An artist makes a painting, and nobody bugs him or her about it. It's just you and your painting. To me, that's the way it should be with film as well.

Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it.

I 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.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

I never want to stop painting. I'm 94 now. What's my secret? I just keep thinking about the painting I'm going to do tomorrow.

Painting is a kind of call and response. During the act of painting one is listening, paying attention to a self, a voice simultaneously recognizable and foreign.

Painters should shut up and paint and when we stop painting we should dance or have sex or get a massage or take a shower and we shouldn't be talking about painting.

Creation 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)

The 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.

I 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.

Who speaks of art speaks of poetry. There is not art without a poetic aim. There is a species of emotion particular to painting. There is an effect that results from a certain arrangement of colors, of lights, of shadows. It is this that one calls the music of painting

In printmaking, I essentially use the same process as in painting with one important exception ... to try, with sensitivity to the medium to emphasize what printing can do best ... better than say, painting or collaging or watercolour or drawing or whatever ... Otherwise, the artist expresses the same vision in graphics that he does in his other work.

Photoshop came out of painting, and now it's going back to painting.

Experience has proved that there is no difference between a so-called realist painting - of a landscape, for example - and an abstract painting. They both have more or less the same effect on the observer.

Picasso didn't stop painting when he was 41 years old because he felt he wasn't relevant, but he kept going and the painting he made before he died are now worth 40 million dollars.

What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.

I did photography, painting, and drawing, but I prefer sculpture. I like it because it's very physical.

Every business, like a painting, operates according to its own rules. There are many ways to run a successful company. What works once may never work again. What everyone tells you never to do may just work, once.

Contradictions 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.

After my divorce, painting took me out of panic mode and into a serene, calm place. I could absolutely lose myself.

Painting is something that takes place among the colors.

Painting is like being a lawyer and attacking a corporation.

In the end I'm in love with it [Western European easel painting]. And that's where a lot of the influence from the work comes from.

Everything that I saw became something to be made, and it had to be exactly as it was, with nothing added. It was a new freedom: there was no longer the need to compose. The subject was there already made, and I could take from everything. It all belonged to me: a glass roof of a factory, with its broken and patched panels, lines on a road map, a corner of a Braque painting, paper fragments in the street. It was all the same: anything goes.

Though painting borrows help indeed from colours... it has nothing more wide of its real aim or more remote from its intention than to make a show of colours... to raise a separate and flattering pleasure to the sense.

I 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.

Sunlight is painting.

What is to be done about these literary people, who will never understand that painting is a craft and that the material side comes first? The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.

Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.

Around 1980, I went back to painting with a vengeance.

When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't