Quotes About Painting

Good painting is nothing else but a copy of the perfections of God and a reminder of His painting. Finally, good painting is a music and a melody which intellect only can appreciate, and with great difficulty.

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.

I have never heard a dancer asking for advice about how to stay focused on her footwork, or a painter complaining about the dull day-to-day task of painting. What task worth doing isn't worth daily effort? Do you think Michelangelo was having fun the whole time he was on his back painting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling?

For me, preparing the canvas takes longer than painting. The actual painting takes about half an hour.

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.

Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?

One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting. But if one lacks this passionate commitment, there is nothing left to do. Then it is best to leave it alone.

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.

Could 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.

Most 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.

It is not about painting life, it is about making painting alive.

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 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.

It's Frank's painting on the cover. We were originally going to use a Salvador Dali painting that we got permission from Salvador Dali to use, and Frank found this one, and it really did fit the music much more.

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.

There 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.

There is no light painting or dark painting, but simply relations of tones.

Creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. (Describing his poetic ideal, 1817)

Painting is something that takes place among the colors, and one has to leave them alone completely, so that they can settle the matter among themselves. Their intercourse: this is the whole of painting. Whoever meddles, arranges, injects his human deliberation, his wit, his advocacy, his intellectual agility in any way, is already disturbing and clouding their activity.

Each part of a great painting should in itself be a great painting.

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.

I think we seem to remember things in still pictures. I never gave up on painting. When they said painting was dead, I just thought, Well, that's all about photography, and photography's not that interesting, and it's changing anyway.

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

In printmaking, I essentially use the same process as in painting with one important exception ... to try, with sensitivity to the medium to emphasize what printing can do best ... better than say, painting or collaging or watercolour or drawing or whatever ... Otherwise, the artist expresses the same vision in graphics that he does in his other work.

You're going to react to a painting in a way that the painting demands you react.

Photoshop came out of painting, and now it's going back to painting.

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.

Painting is the subject of painting.

An effective lighting design is like a beautiful painting. Your medium is bringing someone to an emotional state he or she would not achieve at that moment without your art. This does not and can not happen by accident.

But 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.

A painting, you know, it's all dirty material. But it's about transformation. Taking that earth, that heavy earthen kind of thing, turning it into air and light.

I'm not interested in 'abstracting' or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it - drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea.

There is no condition that you cannot modify into something more, any more than there is any painting that you can paint and not like and just paint over it again. There are many limiting thoughts in the human environment that make it feel like it is not so, as you have these incurable illnesses, or these unchangeable conditions. But we say, they are only "unchangeable" because you believe that they are.

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.

There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet's bombast!

A lot of ideas don't translate very well into art. To say, "Oh my god, the grass is green ..." You're going to end up with a big green painting.

Life matters more than any painting, novel, film, or great big diamond.

Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.

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.

Around 1980, I went back to painting with a vengeance.

I am biased towards the belief that every painter must be grounded in strong and faultless drawing skills, and until one has not experimented with all styles of painting and has not comprehended their potentialities one's work is not complete. Even an abstract painter must know how to draw as well as a figurative artist. As for me, drawing has never created any problem, since I know how to draw anatomy correctly if I had to, I understand the function of muscle groups and sculpture.

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

I use those expectations as a color on my palette, a certain temperature in the room. You can use those expectations for the great punchline, but also for a great painting, in society.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

For me painting is a dramatic action in the course of which reality finds itself split apart

And I like the idea of change. Because I don't see why we should hang a painting on the wall and then just not think of it anymore because it's there like a piece of furniture.