Quotes About Painting

It 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.

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.

I tried different techniques during my career, but I especially fell in love with painting with oil and pallette-knife. Every artwork is the result of long painting process; every canvas is born during the creative search; every painting is full of my inner world.

That sculpture is more admirable than painting for the reason that it contains relief and painting does not is completely false. ... Rather, how much more admirable the painting must be considered, if having no relief at all, it appears to have as much as sculpture!

At some point I realized that the text was the painting and that everything else was extraneous. The painting became the act of writing a text on a canvas, but in all my work, text turns into abstraction.

I liked drawing and painting, because the only failure would be to listen to the doubters who wanted me to stop drawing and painting because 'you aren't going to make a living doing that.' I liked looking in art books at the work of painters.

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

When I was doing just the underwater, I don't think people could relate to it at first. Then I added the land, which was a painting called, Two Worlds. For some reason that particular painting gave people something to hold onto.

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.

Imagine 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.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Something in me knows where I’m going, and - well, painting is a state of being. ... Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

Painting 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.

Painting has always been a means of self-expression for me. Therefore, I paint because I have to and need to, not necessarily because I want to. Subconsciously or not, the figures I paint are a reflection of myself and whatever mood I am in at the time, so every painting is in essence a self-portrait.

In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.

It's good when someone comes to a book or a movie and interacts with it. It's the difference between an illustration and a painting. An illustration serves a specific purpose, and a painting is something you can immerse yourself in.

While it may seem a little mundane, the material realities of realizing the painting actually have a lot to do with how you should read the painting. For example, we assume that what the model is wearing is what we found him in in the streets. No; in fact, a lot of what happens is that in Photoshop certain aspects are being heightened or diminished. There is no actual material truth in these paintings.

Picasso didn't stop painting when he was 41 years old because he felt he wasn't relevant, but he kept going and the painting he made before he died are now worth 40 million dollars.

Painting is the subject of painting.

Every business, like a painting, operates according to its own rules. There are many ways to run a successful company. What works once may never work again. What everyone tells you never to do may just work, once.

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.

And no book, and possibly no painting, when it is finished, is ever exactly like the first dream of it.

Over and over again did the Attorney-General cry out aloud, in the agony of his cause, 'What is to become of painting if the critics withhold their lash?

A painting is a collection of a series of corrections.

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.

The problem of a painting is physical and metaphysical, the same as I think life is physical and metaphysical.

The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.

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

Basic research is like shooting an arrow in the air and, where it lands, painting a target.

Creating things. I love the idea of creation and creativity. Whether it's a character, a short film, a piece of music, a painting, or a bookcase - to watch something go from an idea to a creation is pretty much where it's at for me.

My movement from painting to film was a very conscious one.

The invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as in poetry, where automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is a true photography of thought. Since a blind instrument now assured artists of achieving the aim they had set themselves up to that time, they now aspired, not without recklessness, to break with the imitation of appearances.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

Painting must be fertile. It must give birth to a world.. ..it must fertilize the imagination.

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.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

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.

Colors in painting are as allurements for persuading the eyes, as the sweetness of meter is in poetry.

Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.

Cinema doesn't connect with the body as artists have in two thousand years of painting, using the nude as the central figure which the ideas seem to circulate around. I think it is important to somehow push or stretch or emphasize, in as many ways as I can, the sheer bulk, shape, heaviness, the juices, the actual structure of the body. Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.

As a child growing up among artists I learned to think of a picture not as a finished product exposed for the admiration of the virtuosi, but as the visible record, lying about the house, of an attempt to solve a definite problem in painting.

All my album artwork is body painting.

Leisure, itself the creation of wealth, is incessantly engaged in transmuting wealth into beauty by secreting the surplus energy which flowers in great architecture, great painting and great literature. Only in the atmosphere thus engendered floats that impalpable dust of ideas which is the real culture. A colony of ants or bees will never create a Parthenon.

As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color.

I know the world that I am painting is not a reality. It is a whim, an entertainment to provoke something in people, whether as escapism or relief. I think that is very valid.

The sense of motion in painting and sculpture has long been considered as one of the primary elements of the composition.

I always feel attacked when I'm asked about my painting.