Quotes About 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 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.

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.

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.

...if photos can reproduce the world more perfectly than any painter, can capture an instant, a look, a gesture, then what makes a painting good anymore? Painting subverts this subversion of its traditional nature by redefining itself - art is idea, not simply skillful execution. So, a work can be crudely made, or even machine made - but it has to be practically and functionally useless.

Painting is self-discovery. You arrive at the image through the act of painting.

I will do a lot of research and create a lot of material for use in one painting. And then I go on discovering and working with a whole other range of material in another painting. I'm interested in a fairly comprehensive and orchestrated synthesis that might bring about a new situation consisting of this hidden material. I'm interested in hidden source material.

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.

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

In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?

While painting I noticed a piece of madras cloth on the floor. As usual, my mind started working overtime and a pair of scissors and a small amount of glue later...I created THE COMEDIAN. Everybody loved the uniqueness of the painting. It was indeed a hit.

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

An artist makes a painting, and nobody bugs him or her about it. It's just you and your painting. To me, that's the way it should be with film as well.

Let's talk about the artist's desire to go beyond the pictorial or the representational and the desire to create the abstract - the idea that painting can go beyond what is seen. What we found is that, increasingly, painting became about paint, its own material truth. When I'm talking about the way that we look at others and the way that we see ourselves increasingly, looking at others becomes its own material truth.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Painting is a kind of call and response. During the act of painting one is listening, paying attention to a self, a voice simultaneously recognizable and foreign.

Painters should shut up and paint and when we stop painting we should dance or have sex or get a massage or take a shower and we shouldn't be talking about painting.

There's something immediate about the experience of reading a poem. It makes sense in my own mind, but I'm trying to figure out a way to articulate it... It's like looking at a painting: you're able to take in the totality of the work all at once, and so processing whatever information that painting is giving you is almost secondary to simply apprehending what's in front of you.

My sister-in-law is a painter, and I'll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She'll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting.

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 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.

What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.

People want Art. And they are given it. But the less Art there is in painting the more painting there is.

Every business, like a painting, operates according to its own rules. There are many ways to run a successful company. What works once may never work again. What everyone tells you never to do may just work, once.

Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

I believe, even when I'm doing my standup or my acting or whatever I'm doing, I believe in painting pictures.

There was a school in Chicago called the School of Design. This was started by [Laszló] Moholy-Nagy, and it was a wonderful school, but we [with Alix MacKenzie] didn't go to that school. We did have friends who went to that school and we would visit there often, and I'm sure it pushed me in my painting direction very strongly just by association.

I don't have much of a problem with interruptions. I keep a detailed record of paint and materials as a work on each painting. I can restart exactly where I left off.

I understand - and often make fun of - the desire to run to the wall text before running to the painting.

Sunlight is painting.

Both sex and death are eternal themes. You could make thousands of movies on this theme, and whether you have a human being who is painting, singing, making a film, writing, these are the themes that you will come back to and return to. If you don't have any of these artistic expressions, sex is one of the only gifts that nature gave you for free, so it is very important to celebrate it. And then, with death, we are condemned to that. This is absolutely present in our lives.

Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.

When you drive, you are doing several things at once. You are using your eyes, ears, hands, your mind. If you have meditated for many years and have reached a lofty height in your meditation, as I have, you can meditate while running and cycling and painting.

I begin painting and as I paint the picture begins to assert itself, or suggest itself, under my brush. The form becomes a sign for a woman or a bird as I work... The first stage is free, unconscious... the second stage is carefully calculated.

Western artists stand as humans looking at nature; Asian artists try to be in nature. You become one with nature rather than painting a portrait of it. That's a big shift.

Whenever I see a Frans Hals I feel like painting, but when I see a Rembrandt I feel like giving up!

Well, I'm a painter, I was trained as a painter. I seem to have spent a little less time painting than I might've done. But it didn't transcend the feeling of playing at UFO and those sort of places with the lights and that, the fact that the group was getting bigger and bigger.

One teacher told me that my work belonged in the trash. That day I ran out of the classroom and ended up in the library, where there happened to be a black and white photography exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg's photographs of the streets of New York. The subject of his photos were exactly what I was painting about.

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.

In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.

That's why I ended up going to Lancaster University, because they had a visual arts course, and in the first year it was like a broad visual arts course in sculpture, painting, graphics - all of that.

"Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will," she says. The sky is like a monochromatic contemporary painting, drawing me in with its illusion of depth, pulling me up. "Yeah, that's true," I say. But then after I think about it for a second, I add, "But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all."

All gardening is landscape painting,' said Alexander Pope.

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

Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, / Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? / That we by tracing magic lines are taught, / How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?

Sometimes people think drawing and painting is mucking about when actually it is a highly skilled activity.