Popular quotes about Painting! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 61
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 MartinOne learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters. I can't stress enough how important it is, if you are interested at all in painting, to look and to look a great deal at painting. There is no other way to find out about painting.
Frank StellaIt 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.
Warren MacKenzieThe true essence of Chinese culture is sophistication, refinement, the spirit of poetry. The spirit of ink painting and calligraphy lives on forever. Calligraphy is more important than painting. Chinese always consider nature. Man is a very small part of nature. That's why in Chinese painting you see huge mountains and man very small, very humble before nature. You must be harmonious and one with nature. You don't fight it. And then there's a bit of a poetry. Of course, it's very complicated, but also very simple.
Michael ChowIn every painting, as in any other work of art, there is always an IDEA, never a STORY. The idea is the point of departure, the first cause of the plastic construction, and it is always present all the time as energy creating matter. The stories and other literary associations exist only in the mind of the spectator, the painting acting as the stimulus.
Jose Clemente OrozcoI'm not particularly interested in painting, per se. I'm interested in a painting that has that mysterious life to it. Anything that doesn't partake of that magic is halfway dead - it returns to its physical elements, it's just paint and canvas.
Caio FonsecaA painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.
Howard HodgkinI come from a painting background, and although my painting is completely different from my performances, there is something about the fundamentals of that training that transfers over to this idea of an exercise and being diligent about mapping something out in advance - even if it is just being aesthetically diligent.
Tehching HsiehIt's helpful for me to get ideas - the physical action of painting. Sometimes it frees up your writer brain. It's nice for me now that the writing has become a serious career that painting can become more like a hobby.
Erin MorgensternAlmost as though the painting itself becomes the embodiment of a type of struggle for visibility, and this might be considered the main subject of the painting.
Kehinde WileyI'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 GoghThe muscularity in my paintings is only an expression of the spirit within. When I paint Nephi, I'm painting the interior, the greatness, the largeness of spirit. Who knows what he looked like? I'm painting a man who looks like he could actually do what Nephi did.
Arnold FribergI 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."
Fred ArmisenYou can't make a perfect painting. We can see perfection in our minds. But we can't make a perfect painting.
Agnes MartinI 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 BradleyI 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.
Neil FarberIn 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 SterneLet's talk about the artist's desire to go beyond the pictorial or the representational and the desire to create the abstract - the idea that painting can go beyond what is seen. What we found is that, increasingly, painting became about paint, its own material truth. When I'm talking about the way that we look at others and the way that we see ourselves increasingly, looking at others becomes its own material truth.
Kehinde WileyPainting, like music, has nothing to do with the reproduction of nature, nor interpretation of intellectual meanings. Whoever is able to feel the beauty of colors and forms has understood nonobjective painting.
Hilla von RebayThe 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 poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.
Leonardo da VinciMy studio practice is a - I suppose a bit more like [Thomas] Gainsborough or [Peter Paul] Rubens in the sense that any artist who wants to create a grand narrative on a grand scale has to sort of parse out some of the smaller aspects of painting or the more mundane aspects of painting to others.
Kehinde WileyIf, while I'm painting, I distort or destroy a motif, it is not a planned or conscious act, but rather it has a different justification: I see the motif, the way I painted it, is somehow ugly or unbearable. Then I try to follow my feelings and make it attractive. And that means a process of painting, changing or destroying - for however long it takes - until I think it has improved. And I don't demand an explanation from myself as to why this is so.
Gerhard RichterThere 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 TobeyUsually when I'm painting something it takes a lot of focus. I have the room I go into called the white room. In my imagination when I'm really focused I go into that white room and all that's there is me, my painting, and my tools. There's no distraction. When I'm really concentrated I like to have it silent but when I'm doing something that doesn't have to be necessarily perfect, I can just go for it.
Autumn de ForestPeople want Art. And they are given it. But the less Art there is in painting the more painting there is.
Pablo PicassoThere 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 RiceThe most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively - because without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins.
Frank ZappaSometimes 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 CarrIn the end I'm in love with it [Western European easel painting]. And that's where a lot of the influence from the work comes from.
Kehinde WileyWell painting is certainly my main thing. I will keep doing that for the rest of my life, but if I become famous I would maybe like to experiment with acting, or I have a good voice so maybe a little bit of singing. I'm going to take singing lessons, so who knows.
Autumn de ForestI'd love to be considered a post-pop artist, but I love to have five or six different styles in every painting, just for the pleasure of the eye.
ErroWell, I'm a painter, I was trained as a painter. I seem to have spent a little less time painting than I might've done. But it didn't transcend the feeling of playing at UFO and those sort of places with the lights and that, the fact that the group was getting bigger and bigger.
Syd BarrettColors in painting are as allurements for persuading the eyes, as the sweetness of meter is in poetry.
Nicolas PoussinPainting 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.
Susan MinotIn my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.
Theodore BikelGrowing up in Northern Ontario provided me with a strong affinity for the natural environment that was so eloquently responded to by Tom Thomson and his colleagues. The concept of this painting grew out of a number of forays into Algonquin over the years. From its conception I intended Algonquin to be a subtle tribute to Tom Thomson. But I also wanted it to be a response to the natural beauty that so typifies the grandeur of Ontarioโs first provincial park.
Ken DanbyUsually when painters use photographs, they enlarge and copy them and simply make a large, boring painting of a large, boring photograph.
Duane MichalsStyle in painting is the same as in writing,-a power over materials, whether words or colors.
James EllisOnce you start painting, you could of course get lost. I mean you get out of yourself, you don't know whether you're thinking, you just act actually sometimes.
David HockneyIn the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
John BergerIt's fascinating to think that as soon as man came into existence, he started painting.
Pierre SoulagesBasically, the prosecutor who led case against me and that administration were trying to say that an actor can be held responsible for his acting, thousands of miles away from where he did the acting. The analogy would be if an artist painted a nude painting in New York City, and it was met with accolades and great reviews. And suddenly, somebody from Texas bought it and put it in their shoe store and it was found to be obscene in Texas, the artist in New York is responsible, and goes to jail because it's obscene in Texas.
Harry Reems