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.

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.

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.

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't.

I'm not particularly interested in painting, per se. I'm interested in a painting that has that mysterious life to it. Anything that doesn't partake of that magic is halfway dead - it returns to its physical elements, it's just paint and canvas.

Color is a language. It is the language of painting. How painting expresses itself is in large part with color.

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

I liked drawing and painting, because the only failure would be to listen to the doubters who wanted me to stop drawing and painting because 'you aren't going to make a living doing that.' I liked looking in art books at the work of painters.

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.

Now that photography is a digital medium, the ghost of painting is coming to haunt it: photography no longer retains a sense of truth. I think that's great, because it frees photography from factuality, the same way photography freed painting from factuality in the mid-nineteenth century.

I'm not just painting for painting's sake. I want to be truthful.

I wanted to be a visual artist, but I realized I was more affected by what I read than by what I saw. I would go to a show at a museum and look at a painting and say, 'Oh I wish I owned that,' and that would be the end of my relationship with a painting. With a short story I would read or with an author I would discover I could be haunted. It would affect my mood and affect the way that I saw the world. I thought, wow, it would be amazing to be able to do that.

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

All painting, no matter what you are painting, is abstract in that it's got to be organized.

I am the thing that I am painting at the time of painting.

I would never put a sculpture in front of a painting, so that it is difficult to see the painting. I always place each thing so you can see it isolated. You can focus on every individual work.

A painting is music you can see and music is a painting you can hear.

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.

It's sort of like my past is an unfinished painting, and as the artist of that painting, I must fill in all the ugly holes and make it beautiful again.

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.

I started getting really curious about art. I read about the Dadaists and the Futurists and the Constructivists - those kind of movements which were reflecting the angst of the people of their times. Their work was trying to lead a movement. I began thinking about what was happening, with painting on the streets and painting on the trains as being similar but also coming from a real, pure space. It wasn't being created by academies. It was a spontaneous combustion of ideas that just happened.

Painting and art cannot be taught. You can save time if someone tells you to put blue and yellow together to make green, but the essence of painting is a self-disciplined activity that you have to learn by yourself.

Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

There are things that music can do that language could never do, that painting could never do, or sculpture. Music is capable of going directly to the source of the mystery. It doesn't have to explain it. It can simply celebrate it.

Each moment of your life is a brush stroke in the painting of your growing career. There are the bold, sweeping strokes of one increasing, dynamic purpose. There are the lights and shadows that make your life deep and strong. There are the little touches that add the stamp of character and worth. The art of achievement is the art of making life-your life-a masterpiece.

Students want to know, "Are you painting by the numbers, or are you really present as a human being to what you are doing; and is it coming from inside of you?" So I would ask teachers this question: "Do you have a wellgrounded personal experience and conviction concerning whatever it is you are trying to teach?"

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.

Within one hour of touching the brush to canvas for the first time, my students have a total, complete painting.

So worried was I that people would see through the painting into my soul - and guess at secret Alison stuff - that I scraped the paint off the canvas. It was too risky to expose what everyone hides...And yet isn't that the job of the artist? Next step is to take the risk - to work more deeply. To expose that which cannot be expressed any other way. That is art. Scary and exciting.

Painting dissolves the forms at its command ... it melts them into color.

But in order to survive in this foreign world, I had to teach myself that love was very much like a painting. The negative space between people was just as important as the positive space we occupy. The air between our resting bodies, and the breath in our conversations, were all like the white of the canvas, and the rest our relationship- the laughter and the memories- were the brushstroke applied over time.

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.

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.

My life is a creative act--like a painting, or a concerto.

You never realize how much your mother loves you till you explore the attic - and find every letter you ever sent her, every finger painting, clay pot, bead necklace, Easter chicken, cardboard Santa Claus, paperlace Mother's Day card and school report since day one.

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.

Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting. Life is profound in its simplicity

In painting, as in the other arts, there's not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula. You come to nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat.

Everybody has had the experience of something they love - whether it's a pop song or a painting or a movie - feeling so perfect to them that it's almost like it came from another planet. It has nothing to do with ordinary life, which is very plain. And there's something depressing about that in a way, because you feel like you're this small little human, and you feel like it has nothing to do with you.

Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us.

Cinema doesn't connect with the body as artists have in two thousand years of painting, using the nude as the central figure which the ideas seem to circulate around. I think it is important to somehow push or stretch or emphasize, in as many ways as I can, the sheer bulk, shape, heaviness, the juices, the actual structure of the body. Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.

The greatest work of an artist is the history of a painting.

People who believe in painting... realize there is something greater than just coming up with an idea, and executing it.

All gardening is landscape painting,' said Alexander Pope.

Usually when painters use photographs, they enlarge and copy them and simply make a large, boring painting of a large, boring photograph.

I am very depressed and deeply disgusted with painting. It is really a continual torture.