Quotes About Painting

I think a good painting or a good work of art does many things it wants, I mean, maybe 15 or 20 or 100. One of the things a painting does is to make the room look better. It improves the wall that it's on. Which is much harder than it looks. And that's a good thing. And if one engages with a painting on that level, that's fine, that's great. After some time, familiarity, the other things that a painting does, the other layers, they just start to make themselves felt.

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.

A great painting is a great painting.

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

Being in the studio, it's more of a controlled environment, where you can be Salvador Dali and sit back and look at the painting. And you can go, 'Ah, you know what? Maybe a little bit more red over here...maybe add some blue over here.' You can sit back and look at the painting.

Like commercial stuff is sort of cheap and disposable and fun and can be sort of interesting in many ways. I love being in popular culture and existing in the evolution of popular culture. But it's so different from painting, and it's so different from that sort of slow, contemplative, gradual process that painting is.

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."

A painting is merely the image of a tree, a man, or any other object reflected in a fountain. The difference between a painting and sculpture is the difference between a shadow and the thing which casts it.

I do have great respect for painting, but I am definitely not a painter. I make drawings of paintings, and I'm jealous of painting for sure, but, for me, the paper gives my work a limit.

All my life I have painted pictures so that certain people would drop dead when they looked at them, but I have not succeeded yet. The worst painting cant hurt you, but a bad driver can kill you, a bad judge can send you to the chair, a bad politician can ruin an entire country, That is why even a bad painting is sacred.

Imagine a master painting that's never finished...when you can only build on previous work, you become limited by what you can paint...If you are in the midst of painting a forest full of tall tress and hanging vines, it is rather difficult to wake up the next day and suddenly turn that paining into the beach and ocean...We have to treat each day like a black canvas on which we can paint. Yesterday might have been paining flowers, but today you can paint cars or horses. A new day represents a chance for renewal.

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.

It's not about perfection. What's a perfect painting? What's interesting about a perfect painting?

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 realized that most people waste their lives earning a living, and I wanted to live. I love painting, so I keep painting. That's how I became an artist.

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.

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.

The first hope of a painter who feels hopeful about painting is the hope that the painting will move, that it will live outside its frame.

When I began as an artist, I already did not like expressionism, or abstract expressionism, because abstract painting had already been done. I did not want to belong to any one group or the other, and I'm not one or the other.

The flat sound of my wooden clogs on the cobblestones, deep, hollow and powerful, is the note I seek in my painting.

The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions.. the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.

Painting completed my life.

We live in a time when people are afraid of beauty, because beauty passes; you can't hang on to it. And even if you see something or someone beautiful, the next time you hear it, it sounds different. So you can't cling to beauty; beauty passes and when that passes, you realize you pass too, and you will die. And that's why people cry at a beautiful view, a beautiful lecture, a beautiful painting, a new baby.

I was very dramatic as a kid. I loved to entertain. I was taking my bathing suits and painting them black and putting sparkles on them because I thought I was going to be on stage.

Sculpture will last a lot longer than painting.

I respect journalism. I was always very aware of journalism from a very broad point of view, but I'd say my baptism by fire was doing the Donald Margulies play Time Stands Still. That for me was a real education because I spent a lot of time with some incredible journalists, war reporters particularly - Bob Woodruff, Dexter Filkins - people who were very helpful in painting the picture for me and reading the accounts of people and what they experienced, a lot of PTSD.

The worlds I paint leave a lot to engage the imagination by hinting at what lies beyond the four edges of the painting.

I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.

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

We could say that Romanian Onirisme was born from painting and not from surrealist literature. The visual is primordial. Dimov said, 'Dreams are not a source, but a canon, a legislative model.'

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.

Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.

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.

The invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as in poetry, where automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is a true photography of thought. Since a blind instrument now assured artists of achieving the aim they had set themselves up to that time, they now aspired, not without recklessness, to break with the imitation of appearances.

I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush and it is the same river who before I can bring my friends to view his work erases it forever from human view. After that it exists only in my mind's eye.

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

A great painting or symphony or play, doesn't diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of Creation behind the Universe.

I'm glad . . . that Edison didn't give up on the light bulb. That Luther refused to back down. That Michelangelo kept painting. That Lindbergh kept flying.

When all lies, deceit, pretense is stripped away, what remains? The truth of a painting, or a book or a man.

I have a Damien Hirst spot painting which I love. It has pride of place over my dining-room table.

Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon - it is the very heart of painting.

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.

Painting keeps me occupied in those moments when travel can be aimless and even disorienting. Mainly it is a way to register at least some of the new impressions of a foreign place, when its thrilling barrage can sometimes overwhelm you.

The media ... is like an oil painting. Close up, it looks like nothing on Earth. Stand back and you get the drift.

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

Jeanne, I fell asleep among the paintings, where I could sit for many days worshipping your portrait. I fell in love with your portrait, Jeanne, because it will never change. I have such a fear of seeing you grow old, Jeanne, I fell in love with an unchanging you that will never be taken away from me. I was wishing you would die, so that no one could take you away from me, and I would love the painting of you as you would look eternally.

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.