Quotes About Painting

Realist painting has to do with leaving out a lot of detail. I think my painting can be a little shocking in all that it leaves out. But what happens is that the mind fills in what's missing . . . Painting is a way of making you see what I saw.

I just realized that I never look at a painting and ask, 'Is this painting fictional or non-fictional?' It’s just a painting.

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.

There are absences, but there are also presences. It's about how painting can evolve its own abstractions. I didn't know the painting was going to be about that, but it has to have that journey; I have to learn something, I have to end up somewhere I didn't expect to be, otherwise, I don't think it's painting.

life's kind of like a painting. A really bizarre, abstract painting. You could look at it and think that all it is, is a blur. And you could continue living your life thinking that all it is, is just a blur. But if you really look at it, really see it, focus on it, and use your imagination, life can become so much more. The painting could be of the sea, the sky, people,buildings, a butterfly on a flower, or anything except the blur you were once convinced it was.

If I go to the National Gallery and I look at one of the great paintings that excite me there, it's not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me which return me to life more violently.

What do you think of this" he asked, indicating the painting nearby. She gave him an odd look. "I think it's an enormous painting of a dog." He made a show of considering the picture and nodded seriously. "An astute observation.

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.

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

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?

Usually people start with painting and then go on to make installations; my painting came from installation.

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.

You can't make a perfect painting. We can see perfection in our minds. But we can't make a perfect painting.

Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought. Thus painting, like music, tends to become its own content.

I have a fairly unwieldy set of concerns that go into determining what I do in the paintings, such as the history of the decorative, patterns of cultural migration, Islamic art and design, Byzantine architecture, the annals of natural history, as well as contemporary painting. All of these things are filtered through my own sense of cultural urgency. How I proceed with the work has to do with how I respond to this instinctively chosen mass of materials. I'm weighing many things and making many decisions before I even get started on a painting.

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.

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.

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.

When we talk about Orientalist painting, we're talking about painting generally from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, and some would say even into the twentieth, that allows Europe to look at Africa, Asia Minor, or East Asia in a way that's revelatory but also as a place in which you can empty yourself out. A place in which there is no place. It's an emptiness and a location at once.

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

When an actor is in the moment, he or she is engaged in listening for the next right thing creatively. When a painter is painting, he or she may begin with a plan, but that plan is soon surrendered to the painting's own plan. This is often expressed as 'The brush takes the next stroke.' In dance, in composition, in sculpture, the experience is the same: we are more the conduit than the creator of what we express

If a certain activity, such as painting, becomes the habitual mode of expression, it may follow that taking up the painting materials and beginning work with them will act suggestively and so presently evoke a flight into the higher state.

The transition from painter to artist comes when you cross the line of painting what you see to painting what you feel about what you see.

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.

Photography is nature seen from the eyes outward, painting from the eyes inward. Photography records inalterably the single image, while painting records a plurality of images willfully directed by the artist.

Painting has always been a means of self-expression for me. Therefore, I paint because I have to and need to, not necessarily because I want to. Subconsciously or not, the figures I paint are a reflection of myself and whatever mood I am in at the time, so every painting is in essence a self-portrait.

I don't think it's wise to manufacture a painting, just for the sake of working... if the impulse isn't truly there, the painting will lack power.

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.

When I was growing up, I wanted to be a house painter like my father, but I was always screwing up when I went to work with him. I had a talent for knocking over paint and painting myself into corners. I also realized fairly quickly that painting bored me.

The older I get, the more I feel that color is what painting is. Painting is primarily color.

When I was painting, I was painting stories I was telling myself. When I look back at it, moving to writing was a very natural progression for me.

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.

With abstract work, I never was quite sure what it was that felt right about the painting, but I did know that I responded to it and I liked whatever it was offering me.

The only thing in life that really gives me any peace is just being lost in the process of creating something, whether it's the film or painting and drawing. Whatever that is, it is what I want to do.

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.

Only thanks to Pop Art, my painting has become understandable.

Think of the centre of interest in a painting as you would read it in a novel or see it in a movie. The crisis or climax is that point when you simply can't put the book down or wouldn't dare leave the movie, for whatever reason.

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.

A writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, “I don’t look like that.” And Picasso replied, “You will.” And he was right.

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.

Painting, like poetry, selects in the universe whatever she deems most appropriate to her ends. She assembles in a single fantastic personage, circumstances and features which nature distributes among many individuals. From this combination, ingeniously composed, results that happy imitation by virtue of which the artist earns the title of inventor and not of servile copyist.

I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing.

Style in painting is the same as in writing; a power over materials, whether words or colors, by which conceptions or sentiments are conveyed.

I'm always trying to get to a danger point in color, where color either becomes too sweet or it becomes too harsh, it becomes too noisy or too quiet, and at that point I still want the picture to be strong, forceful, and the carrier of everything that a painting has to have: contrast, drama, austerity.

No one blames themselves if they don't understand a cartoon, as they might with a painting or "real" art; they simply think it's a bad cartoon.

Poetry and painting continue to be companions: they cast their shadow and light, their silences and tones, at the edges of each other.

It took me a long time to stop thinking that someone else knew what a great painting was. I was never sure.