Quotes About Painting

I thought I was going to be able to use my painting ideas as decoration on pottery, but my painting did not translate into decoration on pottery. I thought it was going to, and in fact I made, while still in school, a plate with one of my paintings on it, and that's exactly what it was, it was a plate with a painting on it. It was not a decorated plate; it was just a painting superimposed over a three-dimensional ceramic form.

Sometimes you look at a painting and certain parts are so beautiful. You say, "Wow, this is fantastic," but 10 minutes later you most likely have to kill it. Every painting wants to live. You want to build and bring this type of painting to the climax. When it's at the highest point, you want more. And then if you want more, you might destroy it. So you take a chance.

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.

I think, at the L.A. County Museum of Art, I saw my first example of Kerry James Marshall, who had a very sort of heroic, oversized painting of black men in a barbershop. But it was painted on the same level and with the same urgency that you would see in a grand-scale [Anthony] van Dyck or [Diego] Velazquez. The composition was classically informed; the painting technique was masterful. And it was something that really inspired me because, you know, these were images of young, black men in painting on the museum walls of one of the more sanctified and sacred institutions in Los Angeles.

Stealing, of course, is a crime, and a very impolite thing to do. But like most impolite things, it is excusable under certain circumstances. Stealing is not excusable if, for instance, you are in a museum and you decide that a certain painting would look better in your house, and you simply grab the painting and take it there. But if you were very, very hungry, and you had no way of obtaining money, it would be excusable to grab the painting, take it to your house, and eat it.

Having a background in doing printmaking and letterpress, I think that I became very interested in images that were flat and graphic. And my painting still today is very flat...American craft is like that too - the painting is very flat. And also the painting that you see on the storefronts, handmade signs, tend to be very flat. That's probably my biggest influence.

Good 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.

I bought a painting in Madrid on my first trip there too and a lot of people say, 'Well it's not the greatest painting' and I say, 'It is to me.' OK, you can look at a beautiful painting and say, 'That's beautiful' but to me, it feels warmer to fill my home with pictures of friends and family and paintings of places I've gone. That's what I want to come home to.

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere.

I fell in love with painting. Painting allows me to see things as I want to and not necessarily as they are, it's an escape, a way to preserve thoughts and memories, a way to create hopes and dreams. - Marina

One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting. But if one lacks this passionate commitment, there is nothing left to do. Then it is best to leave it alone.

The world will not give you an endowment for your finger-painting. Your finger-painting may be marvelous, but our government and society do not value art adequately. We should fulminate against that and seek to change it, but in the meantime you have to make choices. If you're an artist who likes to have a steady income for yourself, for your children, for your partner, to help you engage in elder care as you take care of your parents or grandparents, that's a good thing.

The painting was framed in a misty view of sky, sea, and valley. Newt's painting was small, black, and warty. It consisted of scratches made in a black, gummy impasto. The scratches formed a sort of spider's web, and I wondered if they might not be the sticky nets of human futility hung up on a moonless night to dry.

A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.

When 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.

Painting is a duality and abstract painting is an entirely aesthetic thing. It always remains on one level. It is only really interesting in the beauty of its patterns or its shapes.

I do have great respect for painting, but I am definitely not a painter. I make drawings of paintings, and I'm jealous of painting for sure, but, for me, the paper gives my work a limit.

When you start a painting, it is somewhat outside you. At the conclusion, you seem to move inside the painting.

When I get my hands on painting materials I don't give a damn about other people's painting... every generation must start again afresh.

For me, architecture is an art the same as painting is an art or sculpture is an art. Yet, architecture moves a step beyond painting and sculpture because it is more than using materials. Architecture responds to functional outputs and environmental factors. Yet, fundamentally, it is important for me to stress the art in architecture to bring harmony.

It'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.

I visited the Museum of Modern Art last spring and spent time with David Alfaro Siqueiros's painting, 'Echo of a Scream (1937).' I got spun out by the way he creates tension and movement through the interlocking details in the painting. This poem began as an emulation of Siqueiros's compositional style and, in the process, became an ekphrastic aubade about my old neighborhood.

One has to seek Beauty and Truth, Sir! As I always say to my pupils, you have to work to the finish. There's only one kind of painting. It is the painting that presents the eye with perfection, the kind of beautiful and impeccable enamel you find in Veronese and Titian.

We sat there, not talking, for a few minutes. He ate the Moon Pie; only skinny people can scarf down junk food like that. Finally, I said, "Norman?" "Yeah?" "Are you ever going to show me the painting?" "Man," he said. "You are, like, so impatient." "I am not," I said. "I've been waiting forever." "Okay, okay." He stood up and went over to the corner, picking up the painting and bringing it over to rest against the bright pink belly of one of the mannequins. Then, he handed me a bandana. "Tie that on.

I think everyone on the planet is a fan of a painting because everyone is a fan of visual stimulation, but I've had freedom in the world [of painting] because I've kept it to myself.

Usually when I'm painting something it takes a lot of focus. I have the room I go into called the white room. In my imagination when I'm really focused I go into that white room and all that's there is me, my painting, and my tools. There's no distraction. When I'm really concentrated I like to have it silent but when I'm doing something that doesn't have to be necessarily perfect, I can just go for it.

The older I get, the more I feel that color is what painting is. Painting is primarily color.

Ever since I started painting, I have tried to get the fluidity and surprise of image connection, the simultaneity of film montage, into painting.

Look at the paintings of Picasso. He is a great painter, but just a subjective artist. Looking at his paintings, you will start feeling sick, dizzy, something going berserk in your mind. You cannot go on looking at Picasso's painting long enough. You would like to get away, because the painting has not come from a silent being. It has come from a chaos. It is a by product of a nightmare. But ninety-nine percent art belongs to that category.

But what's your ultimate goal, you'll say. That goal will become clearer, will take shape slowly and surely, as the croquis becomes a sketch and the sketch a painting, as one works more seriously, as one digs deeper into the originally vague idea, the first fugitive, passing thought, unless it becomes firm.

Burn 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.

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. There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.

what a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that's what writing is, I think that's what painting is. It's seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life. What all artists are trying to do is to make sense of life.

The problem of a painting is physical and metaphysical, the same as I think life is physical and metaphysical.

Sculpture will last a lot longer than painting.

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.

Getting plastic surgery in your late 70's, it's kind of like painting your house as the fire approaches. Just die, there's no shame in it.

It is true that the Drive-By Media is not spending a lot of time covering the Donald Trump Middle East trip. The reason is, they don't want to write or televise any of this because it's in such stark contrast to the pictures they've been painting of Trump. It's so incongruent. It's so inconsistent. In addition to all else, it is the protection of the Barack Obama legacy.

There are teachers and students with square minds who are by nature meant to undergo the fascination of catagories. For them, 'schools' and 'movements' are everything; by painting a group symbol on the brow of mediocrity, they condone their own incomprehension of true genius.

All great questions must be raised by great voices, and the greatest voice is the voice of the people - speaking out - in prose, or painting or poetry or music; speaking out - in homes and halls, streets and farms, courts and cafes - let that voice speak and the stillness you hear will be the gratitude of mankind.

Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.

In some exquisite critical hints on "Eurythmy," Goethe remarks, "that the best composition in pictures is that which, observing the most delicate laws of harmony, so arranges the objects that they by their position tell their own story." And the rule thus applied to composition in painting applies no less to composition in literature.

A great painting or symphony or play, doesn't diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of Creation behind the Universe.

Painting is at once a form of meditation and an utter, complete personal engagement with life.

Painting keeps me occupied in those moments when travel can be aimless and even disorienting. Mainly it is a way to register at least some of the new impressions of a foreign place, when its thrilling barrage can sometimes overwhelm you.

In painting, you can suddenly come upon something so huge that no-one can deal with it.

I believe the reason I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective.

Twisting and wiring and stringing starching and curling, delicately painting spots and shadings on scraps of silk until what had been nothing more than a pile of brightly colored fragments had been transformed into the silk irises, forget-me-not, violets and roses that would adorn the hats of women and girls more fortunate than themselves.