Quotes About Painting

One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters. I can't stress enough how important it is, if you are interested at all in painting, to look and to look a great deal at painting. There is no other way to find out about painting.

You're like a witness. You're the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you're in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I'm a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you're in the room but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room.

When I look at a painting it isn't only the painting I see but the thing that I am. If there is more in the painting that I am, then I won't see it.

Very few people have a natural feeling for painting, and so, of course, they naturally think that painting is an expression of the artist's mood. But it rarely is. Very often he may be in greatest despair and be painting his happiest paintings.

When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art.

If you go to a concert, you will notice, is it loud? Is the music fast? Is it predominately strings or brass? There are things we can all register, whether we are musicians or not. Painting's no different. Taking pleasure in projecting oneself into the painting is the act of looking. That's what looking is.

In Holman Hunt's painting, "The Light of the World, "Christ is shown in a garden at midnight, holding a lantern in His left hand. With His right hand He is knocking on a heavily paneled door. When the painting was unveiled, a critic remarked to the painter, "Mr. Hunt, the work is unfinished. There is no handle on the door." "That," Hunt answered, "is the door to the human heart. It can be opened only from the inside."

In the back of every painting there's an entire universe that makes it possible for the painting to be there: an army of conservators, technicians, people who maintain these things, the market.

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.

In old times men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith, in later times they use the objects of faith to show their powers of painting.

I don't understand why a Mark Rothko painting - as much as I love Mark Rothko - has to cost $73 million. I mean, I think $14 million is a pretty reasonable sum of money for a good Rothko painting. What's disturbing about this present moment is that these prices have been so out of control.

I 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.

Painting, like music, has nothing to do with the reproduction of nature, nor interpretation of intellectual meanings. Whoever is able to feel the beauty of colors and forms has understood nonobjective painting.

Chemistry has the same quickening and suggestive influence upon the algebraist as a visit to the Royal Academy, or the old masters may be supposed to have on a Browning or a Tennyson. Indeed it seems to me that an exact homology exists between painting and poetry on the one hand and modem chemistry and modem algebra on the other. In poetry and algebra we have the pure idea elaborated and expressed through the vehicle of language, in painting and chemistry the idea enveloped in matter, depending in part on manual processes and the resources of art for its due manifestation.

I would always be painting and drawing. If I was stuck at home, I was in the basement working on a painting.

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.

Painting 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.

While 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.

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's great about it is that painting doesn't move. And so in the 21st century, when we're used to clicking and browsing and having constant choice, painting simply sits there silently and begs you to notice the smallest of detail.

A painting is a collection of a series of corrections.

One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite - that particular peach is but a detail.

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

The worlds I paint leave a lot to engage the imagination by hinting at what lies beyond the four edges of the painting.

I'm not painting myself as a down-home, modest guy.

I first came up with the idea for the colour-chart pictures back in 1966, and my preoccupation with the topic culminated in 1974 with a painting that consisted of 4,096 colour fields. Initially I was attracted by the typical Pop Art aestheticism of using standard colour-sample cards; I preferred the unartistic, tasteful and secular illustration of the different tones to the paintings of Albers, Bill, Calderara, Lohse, etc.

Have not Manet and Monet, Cézanne 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.

Fashion, at modern time, was actually a way for women to go out in the world. There was one painting of a woman sitting at a café, drinking a beer by herself and kind of pretending to read but really watching people, that sort of thing. It fascinated me.

I was attracted to a lot of different art forms - dancing, painting. But there's something about music that people hold so close. It's such a powerful art form, and that's why I live for it.

Painting 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.

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.

Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts. Only then will their work be imbued with the architectonic spirit which it has lost as salon art. Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.

There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.

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

My mother was the most creative, fantastic person and would come up with great things for us to do. She'd buy art supplies and all of us would sit around painting. I was lucky.

I am biased towards the belief that every painter must be grounded in strong and faultless drawing skills, and until one has not experimented with all styles of painting and has not comprehended their potentialities one's work is not complete. Even an abstract painter must know how to draw as well as a figurative artist. As for me, drawing has never created any problem, since I know how to draw anatomy correctly if I had to, I understand the function of muscle groups and sculpture.

Painting is an object, but it's also a voice. I don't see them as objects; I see them as voices.

Painting is about the beauty of space and the power of containment.

A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, “I don’t look like that.” And Picasso replied, “You will.” And he was right.

I still have agents in France, Los Angeles and Amsterdam who call and suggest parts. I'd love to keep on doing both painting and acting until the end of my days.

I liked sculpting better than painting. You have more freedom in sculpting.

Art isn't only a painting. Art is anything that's creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator.

[M]editation is not just being silent—that is only one part of it.... [I]t has to be creative. And when a poetry comes out of your inner silences, or a painting, it has a flavor which is not of this world.

I'd like to get all the colors in the world into one painting

What has reason to do with the art of painting?

One of the reasons I moved away from painting was because I eventually discovered that I wanted to deal more with motion, time, and performance - and that became a much bigger part of my life both as an actor and as a musician and someone who goes on stage and travels around the world and works on productions.

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

I feel that when I am painting, it is a form of worship. I see how wonderful nature is and how wonderful art is... and by trying to produce these works of art, I feel that I am just showing my appreciation of these creations.