Quotes About Painting

I feel like what's most important for painting - which has been hierarchically on the top for a really long time in terms of what is considered fine art, by comparison with something like a comic book or what's considered low art - is that painting should open up laterally to include other cultures and things that don't immediately resonate as a painting but are obviously of equal contribution to the genre.

When I was painting in art school - and I think many painters in the 1980s worked similarly - a finished painting would often be constructed from lots of other paintings underneath. Some of these individual layers of painting were better than others, but that was something that you would often only realise retrospectively.

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.

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.

People want to know those details. They think it gives them greater insight into a piece of art, but when they approach a painting in such a manner, they are belittling both the artist’s work and their own ability to experience it. Each painting I do says everything I want to say on its subject and in terms of that painting, and not all the trivia in the world concerning my private life will give the viewer more insight into it than what hangs there before their eyes. Frankly, as far as I’m concerned, even titling a work is an unnecessary concession.

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere.

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.

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?

[Comics is] one of the last havens for honesty when it comes to a reader's genuine response to art. Most of us, if we don't find any sympathy or pleasure, for example, in a modern painting, are likely to blame our own ignorance of the history and theory of painting. But nobody pretends to like a bad comic strip. Such harshness is necessary for any real truth to surface, I think, and for art to really contribute anything to life. Though I don't know. I could be wrong.

It'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.

Initially I explored the tension between illustration and fine art when I first encountered miniature painting in my late teens. Championing the formal aspects of the Indo-Persian miniature-painting genre has often been at the core of my practice.

Photography is painting with light! The blurs, the spots, those are errors! But the errors are part of it, they give it poetry and turn it into painting. And for that you need as bad a camera as possible! If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you're doing worse than anyone else in the whole world.

The most difficult thing about painting is the self-discipline. When I finish a job, I give myself a few days, but then I have to discipline myself quite fiercely if I want to do some painting that's worthwhile. Otherwise, you're just doodling. It's much easier when you're just told what you have to do.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.

I am the thing that I am painting at the time of painting.

I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious.

I 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.

There'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.

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.

I visited the Museum of Modern Art last spring and spent time with David Alfaro Siqueiros's painting, 'Echo of a Scream (1937).' I got spun out by the way he creates tension and movement through the interlocking details in the painting. This poem began as an emulation of Siqueiros's compositional style and, in the process, became an ekphrastic aubade about my old neighborhood.

I believe I am looking for rightness. My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation. In nature everything is always right: the structure is right, the proportions are good, the colours fit the forms. If you imitate that in painting, it becomes false.

Painting 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.

If, 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.

The first hope of a painter who feels hopeful about painting is the hope that the painting will move, that it will live outside its frame.

Painting is literature in colors. Literature is painting in language.

I barely knew I wanted to be an artist. I liked my art classes and painting was fun, I guess, but I didn't realize that seeing the country was going to inspire me to further explore that... but that's what it did.

Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

I like to feel like you can bite my paintings. Not to eat them, to hurt them. I like to feel like I'm painting with my teeth.

I don't believe in art like I used to. I believe in something beyond it, something that contains art and everything else. But I just don't quite have the nerve to chuck drawing and painting. Part of it is that I enjoy it too much, and part is that I don't have the courage to renounce the world. I don't want to move out of this nice neighborhood so that I can live in a shed and devote myself to meditating and touching something I can't feel. I'm addicted to the fun of playing in the world.

It is true that the Drive-By Media is not spending a lot of time covering the Donald Trump Middle East trip. The reason is, they don't want to write or televise any of this because it's in such stark contrast to the pictures they've been painting of Trump. It's so incongruent. It's so inconsistent. In addition to all else, it is the protection of the Barack Obama legacy.

No painting is more replete than Mondrian's.

My life is a creative act--like a painting, or a concerto.

Sometimes I go to sleep thinking, "I don't like this painting." But then I wake up in the morning, look at it again and think, "Actually, that's not so bad."

Western artists stand as humans looking at nature; Asian artists try to be in nature. You become one with nature rather than painting a portrait of it. That's a big shift.

When I adjust materials of different kinds to one another, I have taken a step in advance of mere oil painting, for in addition to playing off color against color, line against line, form against form, etc., I play off material against material, for example, wood against sackcloth.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

Sometimes I miss out the morning's painting session and instead study my Japanese books in the open.

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.

Cinema informed my painting by the sheer geography - on locations, there is so much downtime. And when you're spending all this time creating art by committee, the concept of the singular voice is a pleasant antidote.

Painting 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.

[King René of Anjou (1409-80)] would not listen to the news of his son having lost the Kingdom of Naples, because he would not bedisturbed when painting a picture of a partridge.

"Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will," she says. The sky is like a monochromatic contemporary painting, drawing me in with its illusion of depth, pulling me up. "Yeah, that's true," I say. But then after I think about it for a second, I add, "But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all."

Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise, / Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? / That we by tracing magic lines are taught, / How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?

An object painted upside down is suitable for painting because it is unsuitable as an object.

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