Popular quotes about Painting! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 59
The painting is always done very much with [the model's] co-operation. The problem with painting a nude, of course, is that it deepens the transaction. You can scrap a painting of someone's face and it imperils the sitter's self-esteem less than scrapping a painting of the whole naked body.
Lucian FreudComedy is the one absolutely self-aware art form. Actually, hip-hop's another one, I suppose. Because in your songs you're talking about how good a hip-hop artist you are. It's like a painter painting a panting of himself painting a painting.
Bo BurnhamI was always interested in drawing and painting. I enrolled in college to study painting. But I didn't have any livelihood when I graduated. My mother died very young, and I didn't have any home, so I had to find a way to earn a living. It seemed to me that photography - to the great disappointment, I have to say, of my painting teacher - could offer that. So I went and did a degree in photography, and then after that I could go out and get paid for work. For portraits, things like that.
Stuart FranklinI 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.
George ClooneyI would have conversations with European artists. Meaning, people look at my painting and one person would say, "Oh, your painting is just like so-and-so!" Another person would say, "It's just like so-and-so." But at the end, it's a chain of relay like a marathon. There are so many so-and-so's that eventually it becomes mine. My dialogue was completely European, with the '40s, '50s, '60s artists, but on the exterior side I do big painting. It's post-Pollock. It's current. It's a meeting of the time. The Chinese side just comes out.
Michael ChowI donโt trust painting. At least not in New York. Most painting here relies on formula and repetition, whoring itself to the market. There seems to be no risk and once a painter gets a strategy, very little exploration. As a result, I stopped thinking about painting a long time ago. I prefer forms of art that are more market-resistant, more idea-based, more - for lack of a better word - risky.
Kenneth GoldsmithI made work specifically for them not to like. If you made paintings of flowers and someone says they hate it, it's like, "What do you mean? It's a flower!" But if you make a painting of your name and somebody says they hate it, it's like, "Well, why would you like a painting of my name anyway?"
Josh SmithI liked painting, very early on, even more than drawing. I used poster paint on posterboard. I would copy images that I liked from magazines and books and combine them to make a "collage" kind of painting. In some ways, this is similar to how I work today.
Mark RydenI don't know but a book in a man's brain is better off than a book bound in calf--at any rate it is safer from criticism. And taking a book off the brain, is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel--you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety--& even then, the painting may not be worth the trouble.
Herman MelvilleCould you imagine people eating a painting - if they could introduce a painting into their bodies? It's probably the artist's dream, and we have the opportunity to do so.
Ferran AdriaThe 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.
Mark RydenI'm now painting with all the elan of a Marseillais eating soup, which won't surprise you when I tell you I'm painting large sunflowers. The idea? To decorate the studio, now there's hope of Gauguin living here. I aim at a dozen panels of sunflowers in the room I've set aside for Gauguin.
Vincent Van GoghMost of my painting is done sitting in a chair with a book. I'd say it's 80 per cent sitting and reading, 10 per cent eating and ten per cent painting.
Susan RothenbergPainting 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.
Robert MotherwellThe frame is the pimp of painting; it enhances it, but it must never shine at the painting's expense.
Edgar DegasI am painting with the same enthusiasm as a Marseillaise eats bouillabaisse ... I am painting big sunflowers.
Vincent Van GoghAll painting, no matter what you are painting, is abstract in that it's got to be organized.
David HockneyWhat most paintings do is give you a path for your eye to move around. The painting actually tells your eye, go here, now go here, now go here, go here. So all you have to do is look at it, give it a few seconds, and your eye will start to move through the painting.
David SalleImagine 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.
Ian K. SmithSomething in me knows where Iโm going, and - well, painting is a state of being. ... Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.
Jackson PollockI went to art school, and every Tuesday and Friday we drew the nude. If you look at Western painting, male and female nudes are in the center of every painting. It's difficult and exciting to draw the nude. Why get so upset about this? It's our duty to break taboos.
Peter GreenawayThere are different kinds of painting, some with lights and some without, but still if you look at any painting here (in the light) and then over here (out of the light) it's an entirely different thing. The consciousness of this came to the Impressionists and I'm very interested in that.
Jean-Luc GodardPainting seems to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs. When that has educated the frame to self-possession, to nimbleness,to grace, the steps of the dancing-master are better forgotten; so painting teaches me the splendor of color and the expression of form, and as I see many pictures and higher genius in the art, I see the boundless opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist stands free to choose out of the possible forms.
Ralph Waldo EmersonAt the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar.
Joni MitchellThere'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.
Kevin PowersI am only interested in painting the actual person, in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong.
Lucian FreudThe 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.
Yves KleinPainting is the only universal language. All nature is creation's picture book. Painting alone can describe every thing which can be seen, and suggest every emotion which can be felt. Art reaches back into the babyhood of time, and is man's only lasting monument.
William Morris HuntA society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.
Mary McCarthyI'm a tireless worker; I don't consider painting a work, it is not an obligation, I do it for pleasure; I haven't found anything that amuses me more than painting.
Fernando BoteroWhat's great about it is that painting doesn't move. And so in the 21st century, when we're used to clicking and browsing and having constant choice, painting simply sits there silently and begs you to notice the smallest of detail.
Kehinde WileyLook at the paintings of Picasso. He is a great painter, but just a subjective artist. Looking at his paintings, you will start feeling sick, dizzy, something going berserk in your mind. You cannot go on looking at Picasso's painting long enough. You would like to get away, because the painting has not come from a silent being. It has come from a chaos. It is a by product of a nightmare. But ninety-nine percent art belongs to that category.
RajneeshAnd no book, and possibly no painting, when it is finished, is ever exactly like the first dream of it.
Patricia HighsmithBut what's your ultimate goal, you'll say. That goal will become clearer, will take shape slowly and surely, as the croquis becomes a sketch and the sketch a painting, as one works more seriously, as one digs deeper into the originally vague idea, the first fugitive, passing thought, unless it becomes firm.
Vincent Van GoghIโm just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it recreates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, itโs far closer to the miraculous creation of life than, say, a painting or music or even literature. Itโs not just an art form; itโs actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. Itโs my way of telling a story.
Federico FelliniSometimes 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.
Emily CarrI 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.
David BowieSo 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.
Allison MackieHave not Manet and Monet, Cรฉzanne and Matisse, rendered to painting something of the same service which Keats and Shelley gave to poetry after the solemn and ceremonious literary perfections of the eighteenth century? They have brought back to the pictorial art a new draught of joie de vivre; and the beauty of their work is instinct with gaiety, and floats in sparkling air. I do not expect these masters would particularly appreciate my defence, but I must avow an increasing attraction to their work.
Winston ChurchillI so love the animation process. Interesting, everything that I do in animation, the kind of crafting and skills of storytelling, totally work within the structure of the Disney nature films. In a weird way, I like to think that animation is like painting, and Disney nature is like sculpting. Animation you start with a blank canvas and you paint. With Disney nature, you start with a big block of imagery and you hone it down into your final story. Somewhere you end up with something kind of pretty to watch.
Roy Conli