Quotes About Painting

All that stuff about flatness - it's this idea that painting is a specialized discipline and that modernist painting increasingly refers to painting and is refining the laws of painting. But who cares about painting? What we care about is that the planet is heating up, species are disappearing, there's war, and there are beautiful girls here in Brooklyn on the avenue and there's food and flowers.

It was a figure painting class, where you had a model, and [Robert von Neumann ] would wander around and he'd come up behind someone and say, "Well, what are you trying to do?" And if you told him what you were trying to do, he would then proceed to discuss this with you and suggest things that you might look at and ways in which you could improve what you were attempting to do, etc - never worked on your painting, never touched your painting but talked extensively about what you were trying to do.

My paintings are well-painted, not nimbly but patiently. My painting contains in it the message of pain. I think that at least a few people are interested in it. It's not revolutionary. Why keep wishing for it to be belligerent? I can't. Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all of this. I think work is the best.

There are absences, but there are also presences. It's about how painting can evolve its own abstractions. I didn't know the painting was going to be about that, but it has to have that journey; I have to learn something, I have to end up somewhere I didn't expect to be, otherwise, I don't think it's painting.

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.

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.

Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?

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.

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.

Robert von Neumann taught painting, and when I finally got into a painting class of his, he reacted in much the same way.

Each painting has its own way of evolving. When the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.

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.

I'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.

Music is an amazing thing. I don't know if we really think about it the same way we consider a painting an amazing thing. I mean, a painting is, in quotes, imaginary. There is nothing on the canvas when you start; and writing a song, there is nothing there when you start.

If you call painting dumb poetry, the painter may call poetry blind painting.

Self-painting is a further development of painting. The pictorial surface has lost its function as sole expressive support. It was led back to its origins, the wall, the object, the living being, the human body. By incorporating my body as expressive support, occurrences arise as a result, the course of which the camera records and the viewer can experience

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.

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.

Painting is by nature a luminous language.

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 painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.

But I owe something to Vincent, and that is, in the consciousness of having been useful to him, the confirmation of my own original ideas about painting. And also, at difficult moments, the remembrance that one finds others unhappier than oneself.

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.

Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.

I grew up painting and playing piano so when I was a little kid I thought I was going to be an artist or a painter but my mom had me taking piano lessons for about 10-12 years as a young kid.

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

One of the reasons that I went to Mexico aside from the Maya and the pre-Columbian aspect of it was that I wanted to work with [Diego] Rivera, which I did, on a mural that he was painting at the time. But at some point I realized that I wasn't going to be a political artist, it just wasn't in my repertoire.

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

Fiction is not photography, it's oil painting.

Only when you are moved by a painting should you buy it. Being moved is what collecting is all about.

To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

This is what the Democrats are fighting for. They're fighting for you not to have a job and still have health care so you can pursue your entrepreneurial risk of writing, painting, taking pictures. It's just such a pain in the rear end to have to have a job. It's so damn mean of this country to require people to have a job. It stifles people. It stifles creativity and economic growth to require people to have a job, to have health care. What a country. Man, are we horribly rotten mean to people.

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

Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.

What is more natural in a democratic age than that we should begin to measure the stature of a work of art-especially of a painting-by how widely and how well it is reproduced?

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

Impressionism; it is the birth of Light in painting.

I know for sure that I have an instinct for color, and that it will come to me more and more, that painting is in the very marrow of my bones.

There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning.

Painting is a play of opacities and transparencies.

Style in painting is the same as in writing; a power over materials, whether words or colors, by which conceptions or sentiments are conveyed.

It's often about the simple things, isn't it? Painting and photography are first about seeing, they say. Writing is about observing. Technique is secondary. Sometimes the simple is the most difficult.

A cinematographer is a visual psychiatrist, moving an audience... making them think the way you want them to think, painting pictures in the dark.

You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.

Painting is situational. And my particular situation exists within gender, race, class, sexuality, nation.

Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.

Painting... in which the inner and the outer man are inseparable, transcends technique, transcends subject and moves into the realm of the inevitable.