Popular quotes about Painting! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 60
All that stuff about flatness - it's this idea that painting is a specialized discipline and that modernist painting increasingly refers to painting and is refining the laws of painting. But who cares about painting? What we care about is that the planet is heating up, species are disappearing, there's war, and there are beautiful girls here in Brooklyn on the avenue and there's food and flowers.
Chris MartinWhen I am in a painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc, because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.
Jackson PollockWhen I look at a painting it isn't only the painting I see but the thing that I am. If there is more in the painting that I am, then I won't see it.
Ivan EyreI attended the High School of Industrial Arts and studied with many great artists as painting is something that you never stop learning about. Actually, in high school there was a time that I was thinking about just concentrating on painting and I asked my music teacher, Mr. Sondberg, for advice and he encouraged me to stick with the music as well. So all my life I have been singing and painting.
Tony BennettThere'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.
Michael ChowWhen I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.
Jackson PollockIt's true, I do sometimes suspend myself over the canvas, but mostly I work at a table when I'm making a painting. When I use 'The Rig,' my feet are firmly anchored. I lower myself horizontally just long enough to make a brush stroke - a matter of seconds - and then I'm upright again. My assistant then erases the painting quickly with a squeegee and I go for it again... until I get it right. It's like trying to hit a home run.
James NaresA painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.
Howard HodgkinMost painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.
Robert MotherwellAt a lecture, a guy said to me, "You know, when I look at your work, I don't know what I'm looking at, but when I look at a Willem de Kooning painting, I know what that is." I said, "Well, the paintings I'm doing have a very legible sentence at the top of the canvas." At a lecture, a guy said to me, "You know, when I look at your work, I don't know what I'm looking at, but when I look at a de Kooning painting, I know what that is." I said, "Well, the paintings I'm doing have a very legible sentence at the top of the canvas."
Glenn LigonIn 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.
Vik MunizWhy was the painting made? What ideas of the artist can we sense? Can the personality and sensitivity of the artist be felt when studying the work? What is the artist telling us about his or her feelings about the subject? What response do I get from the message of the artist? Do I know the artist better because of the painting?
Gerald BrommerI am painting with the same enthusiasm as a Marseillaise eats bouillabaisse ... I am painting big sunflowers.
Vincent Van GoghI think that time moves slower in painting. And maybe that accounts for a lot of the anxiety around painting in the last 40 or 50 years.
Joe BradleyIn part of Lord Kames' Elements of Criticism, he says that "music improves the relish of a banquet." That I deny,--any more than painting might do. They may both be additional pleasures, as well as conversation is, but are perfectly distinct notices; and cannot, with the least propriety, be said to mix or blend with the repast, as none of them serve to raise the flavor of the wine, the sauce, the meat, or help to quicken appetite. But music and painting both add a spirit to devotion, and elevate the ardor.
Laurence SterneEach painting has its own way of evolving. When the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself.
William BaziotesI reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue, and yellow. I affirmed: this is the end of painting.
Alexander RodchenkoPhotography 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.
Charles SheelerPainting 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 EmersonA 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.
Julian SchnabelI 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.
Scott KahnWhat counts is art. painting, a kind of painting that is quite different from what everyone makes it out to be. But what kind? Will God or someone else give me the strength to breathe the breath of prayer and mourning into my paintings, the breath of prayer for redemption and resurrection?
Marc ChagallThere 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.
Alton TobeyWhen it comes to partnership, some humans can make their lives alone - it's possible. But creatively, it's more like painting: you can't just use the same colours in every painting. It's just not an option. You can't take the same photograph every time and live with art forms with no differences.
Ben HarperWhat any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.
John BergerLook 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.
RajneeshThere are three forms of visual art: Painting is art to look at, sculpture is art you can walk around, and architecture is art you can walk through
Dan RiceI don't believe in making pencil sketches and then painting landscape in your studio. You must be right under the sky.
William Merritt ChaseI'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.
Willem de KooningIโm 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 FelliniI believe, even when I'm doing my standup or my acting or whatever I'm doing, I believe in painting pictures.
J. B. SmooveThere 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!
Jean de la BruyereYou say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
Gilbert K. ChestertonThere was a school in Chicago called the School of Design. This was started by [Laszlรณ] Moholy-Nagy, and it was a wonderful school, but we [with Alix MacKenzie] didn't go to that school. We did have friends who went to that school and we would visit there often, and I'm sure it pushed me in my painting direction very strongly just by association.
Warren MacKenzieA painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.
Elaine de KooningI 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.
Selena GomezI love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, 'the ability to conceive failure as progress.'
Jerry SaltzI 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.
Cecily BrownPoetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.
William BlakeYou never realize how much your mother loves you till you explore the attic - and find every letter you ever sent her, every finger painting, clay pot, bead necklace, Easter chicken, cardboard Santa Claus, paperlace Mother's Day card and school report since day one.
Pam BrownWhen I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't
Lucian FreudThatโs the huge problem with an abstract painting. When are you done? Youโre done when you donโt want to do it anymore.
Amy Sillman