Quotes About Painting

I think every painting should be the same size and the same color so they're all interchangeable and nobody thinks they have a better painting or a worse painting.... Besides even when the subject is different, people want the same painting.

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.

When HSBC took the painting out of their building, they had to block the road and use a crane to bring the painting out from the window. They spent about 20,000 dollars just to get the painting out of the building! They said not to bring it back, and told Sotheby's to sell it immediately!

You know, the way art history is taught, often there's nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.

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.

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 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.

At some point I realized that the text was the painting and that everything else was extraneous. The painting became the act of writing a text on a canvas, but in all my work, text turns into abstraction.

The painting was framed in a misty view of sky, sea, and valley. Newt's painting was small, black, and warty. It consisted of scratches made in a black, gummy impasto. The scratches formed a sort of spider's web, and I wondered if they might not be the sticky nets of human futility hung up on a moonless night to dry.

A seventeenth-century painting can be "modern" because the living eye finds it fresh and new. A "modern" painting can be outdated because it was a product of the moment and not of time.

The vast amount of time it takes to make my paintings is very challenging. I have so many exciting ideas I would love to bring to a final painting, but my time-consuming technique limits the number of ideas that get to become a painting.

Painting to me is addictive. These are moments when it is inspiring, but they are few and far between. I keep my tools sharpened for the moment when things do start clicking, but that doesn't happen a lot. I really have to push myself sometimes. Painting is a profession in which it is very easy to be lazy, particularly if you have any degree of success.

Painting something that defies the law of the land is good. Painting something that defies the law of the land and the law of gravity at the same time is ideal.

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

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

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.

It's not a matter of painting life, it's a matter of giving life to painting.

Use your blood to paint. Keep painting until you faint. Keep painting until you die.

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.

All painting - the painting of the past as well as of the present - shows us that its essential plastic means were only line and color.

There aren't really rules for painting, but there’s certain facts and fictions about painting. Part of what I do is document another surface and sort of translate it. They’re like translations, and then part of it is fiction, which is invention.

For me, going back to itinerant landscape painting, it's not about returning to an older method, but about building on what happened in the 20th century in photography. And also highlighting what the differences are between a painting and a photograph in picturing space.

A lot of what I do is about being in the moment and I think that's hard for people to get. I like it when things suddenly affect the painting. I mix up this red and it affects the whole painting or this little bit of white falls down there, and something changes the whole nature of the thing. The residue on what happens, that's what's in the paintings.

Who speaks of art speaks of poetry. There is not art without a poetic aim. There is a species of emotion particular to painting. There is an effect that results from a certain arrangement of colors, of lights, of shadows. It is this that one calls the music of painting

In my work, I want to create an understanding, not about what a painting looks like but about what a painting says.

I stopped painting, not because I didn't like painting; the sensuality of it was fun. But I wasn't able to get to the point I wanted to.

We sat there, not talking, for a few minutes. He ate the Moon Pie; only skinny people can scarf down junk food like that. Finally, I said, "Norman?" "Yeah?" "Are you ever going to show me the painting?" "Man," he said. "You are, like, so impatient." "I am not," I said. "I've been waiting forever." "Okay, okay." He stood up and went over to the corner, picking up the painting and bringing it over to rest against the bright pink belly of one of the mannequins. Then, he handed me a bandana. "Tie that on.

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.

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.

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.

There are three forms of visual art: Painting is art to look at, sculpture is art you can walk around, and architecture is art you can walk through

I think that the sheer fact that music can raise certain questions or put topics on the agenda has in itself already an effect. Just like any other art of cultural expression can do that - books, films, photos, painting - it can bring people together who share certain ideals, who don't find their ideas expressed properly, or even expressed at all, in the mainstream media.

Sometimes I could quit paint and take to charring. It must be fine to clean perfectly, to shine and polish and know that it could not be done better. In painting that never occurs.

I wish I could be more serious about painting. I think there may be something going on there and I should pursue it. I'm very old-fashioned - even with the music. I realize, while I have so much respect for the kookiness of people who go for it, who paint with their eyes closed, I am superclassical.

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.

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 allows me to use other portions of my brain pleasurably. Irony plays no part in what or how I paint. I paint the particular subject matter not to make polemical points but because I am interested in the human imprint on the landscape. I paint the landscape of my time and place with the stuff in it.

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.

I love the trick of painting. You can have the movement within the still thing, but it is completely fixed. And that illusion is constantly exciting.

Well painting is certainly my main thing. I will keep doing that for the rest of my life, but if I become famous I would maybe like to experiment with acting, or I have a good voice so maybe a little bit of singing. I'm going to take singing lessons, so who knows.

I build a painting by putting little marks together-some look like hot dogs, some like doughnuts.

Sunlight is painting.

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.

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

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.

Painting is my vehicle of transit. I don't always know where I am going or what it means.

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

I can see forms and shapes in my mind when I solo, just as a painter can see forms and shapes when he starts painting. And I can see different colors.