Quotes About Painting

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.

I 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.

Painting is traditional but for me that doesn't mean the academy. I felt a need to paint; I love painting. It was something natural - as is listening to music or playing an instrument for some people. For this reason I searched for themes of my era and my generation. Photography offered this, so I chose it as a medium for painting.

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 was at an art museum with my parents, and was quite taken with a [Vincent] Van Gogh painting. I stood admiring the painting for some time, and then realized that in addition to feeling moved by the beauty of the painting, I felt a little jealous of the painter.

I would have conversations with European artists. Meaning, people look at my painting and one person would say, "Oh, your painting is just like so-and-so!" Another person would say, "It's just like so-and-so." But at the end, it's a chain of relay like a marathon. There are so many so-and-so's that eventually it becomes mine. My dialogue was completely European, with the '40s, '50s, '60s artists, but on the exterior side I do big painting. It's post-Pollock. It's current. It's a meeting of the time. The Chinese side just comes out.

Before a painter puts a brush to his canvas, he sees his picture mentally.... If you think of yourself in terms of a painting, what do you see?... Is the picture one you think worth painting?... You create yourself in the image you hold in your mind.

The artist has the power to signoff the work by deconstructing the work itself: I've finished this work now and I'll sign it and relegate the painting to simply something that services my signature. The painting becomes the colorful backdrop of the signature.

[Comics is] one of the last havens for honesty when it comes to a reader's genuine response to art. Most of us, if we don't find any sympathy or pleasure, for example, in a modern painting, are likely to blame our own ignorance of the history and theory of painting. But nobody pretends to like a bad comic strip. Such harshness is necessary for any real truth to surface, I think, and for art to really contribute anything to life. Though I don't know. I could be wrong.

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.

I am painting with the same enthusiasm as a Marseillaise eats bouillabaisse ... I am painting big sunflowers.

I loved surrealism and abstract painting, and anything related to those. I always thought painting was the highest form of art. What led me to drawing was seeing so much self-important, pretentious, conceptual-type art in university. I wanted to reject that by making quick, fun art.

I'm painting an idea not an ideal. Basically I'm trying to paint a structured painting full of controlled, and therefore potent, emotion.

Painting doesn't freeze time. It circulates and recycles time like a wheel that turns. Those who were first might well be last. Painting is a very slow art. It doesn't travel with the speed of light. That's why dead painters shine so bright.

I feel like it's almost a Renaissance thing, a painting, a modern version of a painting. I think it's important for Kim [Kardashian] to have her figure. To not show it would be like Adele not singing.

Something in me knows where I’m going, and - well, painting is a state of being. ... Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

My painting technique has not changed that much over time, although perhaps I am painting tighter and with more detail, in spite of a desire to loosen up and paint more expressively. One thing that has changed is my daily routine. I used to paint quite late into the night. It was a time I felt the creative spirits most active. As I have aged, my circadian rhythm has changed. I like to paint early in the day when I can avoid falling into the soul-sucking email world. Early dawn feels very similar to late night.

I trained as a painter, and I still love painting, but eventually I became aware that the physical aspect of painting didn't really suit me. I didn't enjoy working in the medium. It's very messy. I prefer to have it clean, with a nice computer.

Sometimes you need to live with a painting for a while. Starting a painting can be easy, but finishing it... that's the skill of the painter, how you finally know when it's done.

I am after painting reality impressed on the mind so hard that it returns as a dream, but I am not after painting dreams as such, or fantasy.

I don't think it's wise to manufacture a painting, just for the sake of working... if the impulse isn't truly there, the painting will lack power.

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

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

If, while I'm painting, I distort or destroy a motif, it is not a planned or conscious act, but rather it has a different justification: I see the motif, the way I painted it, is somehow ugly or unbearable. Then I try to follow my feelings and make it attractive. And that means a process of painting, changing or destroying - for however long it takes - until I think it has improved. And I don't demand an explanation from myself as to why this is so.

Painting is the supreme form of expression; you don't need to 'read' painting.

The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively - because without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins.

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

Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God.

With a stroke of love on the canvas of my soul I'm painting a perfect world with shades of Michelangelo With each promise made in every heart that knows we can live in a perfect world in shades of Michelangelo I hear songs of children echo in the sky I hear songs of children a tomorrow so bright!

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.

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.

A 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.

If all meanings could be adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not exist.

We could say that Romanian Onirisme was born from painting and not from surrealist literature. The visual is primordial. Dimov said, 'Dreams are not a source, but a canon, a legislative model.'

I'm not so interested in the effort that it takes to have a self-promotional outlook. I believe in being quiet and making my work and just trying to make discoveries and let the painting evolve.

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.

We need to understand that there is a process of learning and experience and success will stem from this. The painting represents life and the brushstroke represents the steps we take in life.

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.

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

I see painting as an evocative magic, and there must always be a random factor in magic, one which must be constantly changed and renewed.

That’s the huge problem with an abstract painting. When are you done? You’re done when you don’t want to do it anymore.

Painting must be fertile. It must give birth to a world.. ..it must fertilize the imagination.

People say, Why dont you just paint with paintbrushes? I say that I feel more connected to my painting using my skin. Its very tribal in a way - savage!

Every song has a composer, every book has an author, every car has a maker, every painting has a painter, and every building has a builder. So it isn't irrational to take this simple logic a little further and say that nature must have had a Maker. It would be irrational to believe that it made itself.

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.

The literature of the immediate future will inevitably turn away from painting, whether respectably realistic or modern, and from daily life, whether old or the very latest and revolutionary, and turn to artistically realized philosophy.