Quotes About Painting

Painting from life was incredibly important for me because it allowed me to train my eyes to see everything that is there. But I realized early on that painting from life wasn't something that I was all that invested in. I was always more interested in the painting than I was the people. For me, removing that as a compulsion offered me a lot more freedom to actually paint and think about color, form, movement, and light.

We struggle against easel painting not because it is an aesthetic form of painting, but because it is not modern, for it does not succeed in bringing out the technical side, it is a redundant, exclusive art, and cannot be of any use to the masses. Hence we are struggling not against painting but against photography carried out as if it were an etching, a drawing, a picture in sepia or watercolor.

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.

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.

Art has become more than painting, sculpture or music: art is more than Van Gogh painting a landscape or Wagner composing an opera. The whole of reality itself has become the object of art.

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

I fell in love with painting. Painting allows me to see things as I want to and not necessarily as they are, it's an escape, a way to preserve thoughts and memories, a way to create hopes and dreams. - Marina

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.

It's helpful for me to get ideas - the physical action of painting. Sometimes it frees up your writer brain. It's nice for me now that the writing has become a serious career that painting can become more like a hobby.

When you talk about painters and you talk about painters painting masterpieces, there is no painter who painted only one painting and that was a masterpiece. You have to do a whole bunch of paintings to get to the place of mastering your craft.

I don't know any artists or painters, like, "Oh that painting group." I want to write down this idea of a group of artists who treat it like a band. Like, "Who made the painting?" "All four of us did."

Photography is painting with light! The blurs, the spots, those are errors! But the errors are part of it, they give it poetry and turn it into painting. And for that you need as bad a camera as possible! If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you're doing worse than anyone else in the whole world.

My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I've taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, 'The Hornet's Nest,' I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.

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

In old times men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith, in later times they use the objects of faith to show their powers of painting.

For me, architecture is an art the same as painting is an art or sculpture is an art. Yet, architecture moves a step beyond painting and sculpture because it is more than using materials. Architecture responds to functional outputs and environmental factors. Yet, fundamentally, it is important for me to stress the art in architecture to bring harmony.

I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious.

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.

The essential of painting is that 'something', that 'ethereal glue,' that 'intermediary product' which the artist exudes with all his creative being and which he has the power to place, to encrust, to impregnate into the pictorial matter of the painting.

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.

In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.

If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.

Picasso didn't stop painting when he was 41 years old because he felt he wasn't relevant, but he kept going and the painting he made before he died are now worth 40 million dollars.

There is a kinship between music and painting - with the same words used to describe both, as when a musical composition is said to have color and a painting to have rhythm.

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.

Burn shavings and splinters of pitch pine, and when they turn to charcoal, put them out, and pound them into mortar with size. This will make a pretty black for fresco painting.

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

Painting, I think it's like jazz.

Painting is like being a lawyer and attacking a corporation.

Sculpture will last a lot longer than painting.

I think of a piece, and then people who are competent fabricate it. But lately I've started finger painting, which probably should be a joke but isn't!

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

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.

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.

My worlds are completely different. Painting is a peaceful world, and it's a different vibe than having a great match. You are able to look back at what you created when you finish. Recording music is an entirely different monster. When you finally write something, you do a demo and then you go into the studio. Doing the master version, that's the best feeling ever - especially when you're so proud of what you've written, and you can't wait for people to hear it. That's actually very similar to trying to tell a story in a wrestling match.

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.

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.

Painting is an object, but it's also a voice. I don't see them as objects; I see them as voices.

When I adjust materials of different kinds to one another, I have taken a step in advance of mere oil painting, for in addition to playing off color against color, line against line, form against form, etc., I play off material against material, for example, wood against sackcloth.

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.

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.

Think of anybody - Dostoevsky or Jane Austen - [their work] was always something that now we would call political. So I don't see those separations too much, between what is artistic and what is political. Maybe in painting... no, I don't even believe that.

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

I don't have a lot of pressure on myself to be successful. I'm more of an artist. I just try to make myself more a part of the most beautiful painting as possible. And enjoy it.

Impressionism; it is the birth of Light in painting.

As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color.