Quotes About Painting

One 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.

Your poems are rather hard to understand, whereas your paintings are so easy. Easy? Of course - you paint flowers and girls and sunsets; things that everybody understands. I never met him. Who? Everybody. Did you ever hear of nonrepresentational painting? I am. Pardon me? I am a painter, and painting is nonrepresentational. Not all painting. No: housepainting is representational. And what does a housepainter represent? Ten dollars an hour. In other words, you don't want to be serious - It takes two to be serious.

When HSBC took the painting out of their building, they had to block the road and use a crane to bring the painting out from the window. They spent about 20,000 dollars just to get the painting out of the building! They said not to bring it back, and told Sotheby's to sell it immediately!

The 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.

Comedy is the one absolutely self-aware art form. Actually, hip-hop's another one, I suppose. Because in your songs you're talking about how good a hip-hop artist you are. It's like a painter painting a panting of himself painting a painting.

life's kind of like a painting. A really bizarre, abstract painting. You could look at it and think that all it is, is a blur. And you could continue living your life thinking that all it is, is just a blur. But if you really look at it, really see it, focus on it, and use your imagination, life can become so much more. The painting could be of the sea, the sky, people,buildings, a butterfly on a flower, or anything except the blur you were once convinced it was.

The artist has the power to signoff the work by deconstructing the work itself: I've finished this work now and I'll sign it and relegate the painting to simply something that services my signature. The painting becomes the colorful backdrop of the signature.

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

Like commercial stuff is sort of cheap and disposable and fun and can be sort of interesting in many ways. I love being in popular culture and existing in the evolution of popular culture. But it's so different from painting, and it's so different from that sort of slow, contemplative, gradual process that painting is.

The vast amount of time it takes to make my paintings is very challenging. I have so many exciting ideas I would love to bring to a final painting, but my time-consuming technique limits the number of ideas that get to become a painting.

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 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."

A painting is merely the image of a tree, a man, or any other object reflected in a fountain. The difference between a painting and sculpture is the difference between a shadow and the thing which casts it.

The merit of painting lies in the exactness of reproduction. Painting is a science and all sciences are based on mathematics. No human inquiry can be a science unless it pursues its path through mathematical exposition and demonstration.

People are always trying to find the next groovy thing, and it hasn't gone back to painting... I'd like it to go back to painting. I'm sick of all this photography and video. There's so much of it, it's almost annoying.

I don't mean to give performance art a bad name or anything; I think there are people that are legit. I think I just got frustrated painting - I love painting; I actually tried to be an artist, but it's sensitive, and then you have an object. And what do you do with that object? And then repeat and repeat, blah blah blah.

Robert von Neumann taught painting, and when I finally got into a painting class of his, he reacted in much the same way.

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'm painting an idea not an ideal. Basically I'm trying to paint a structured painting full of controlled, and therefore potent, emotion.

Remember crime against property is not real crime. People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access.

When you come up in the art world, whatevers in the air, the issues of the moment, end up becoming part of the working method or modus operandi of how you think about doing a painting. And I came up at a time when-actually painting was dead when I came up. Sculpture sort of ruled.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

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.

Painting, 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.

At the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar.

My painting technique has not changed that much over time, although perhaps I am painting tighter and with more detail, in spite of a desire to loosen up and paint more expressively. One thing that has changed is my daily routine. I used to paint quite late into the night. It was a time I felt the creative spirits most active. As I have aged, my circadian rhythm has changed. I like to paint early in the day when I can avoid falling into the soul-sucking email world. Early dawn feels very similar to late night.

I get so tired of painting. I've been trying to give it up all the time, if we could just make a living out of movies or the newspaper business or something. It's so boring, painting the same picture over and over.

I 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.

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.

I started getting really curious about art. I read about the Dadaists and the Futurists and the Constructivists - those kind of movements which were reflecting the angst of the people of their times. Their work was trying to lead a movement. I began thinking about what was happening, with painting on the streets and painting on the trains as being similar but also coming from a real, pure space. It wasn't being created by academies. It was a spontaneous combustion of ideas that just happened.

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.

This is the essential distinction--even opposition--between the painting and the film: the painting is composed subjectively, thefilm objectively. However highly we rate the function of the scenario writer--in actual practice it is rated very low--we must recognize that the film is not transposed directly and freely from the mind by means of a docile medium like paint, but must be cut piece-meal out of the lumbering material of the actual visible world.

If you create something, whether it's a painting or a company, I think if you care about it, you have some obligation to go out and tell people about 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, 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.

We often hear the terms 'positional' and 'tactical' used as opposites. But this is as wrong as to consider a painting's composition unrelated to its subject. Just as there is no such thing as 'artistic' art, so there is no such thing as 'positional' chess.

Students want to know, "Are you painting by the numbers, or are you really present as a human being to what you are doing; and is it coming from inside of you?" So I would ask teachers this question: "Do you have a wellgrounded personal experience and conviction concerning whatever it is you are trying to teach?"

Originally, one of the reasons I was drawn to photography, as opposed to painting or sculpture or installation, is that of all the arts it is the most democratic, in so far as it's instantly readable and accessible to our culture. Photography is how we move information back and forth.

I build a painting by putting little marks together-some look like hot dogs, some like doughnuts.

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.

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

Think of the centre of interest in a painting as you would read it in a novel or see it in a movie. The crisis or climax is that point when you simply can't put the book down or wouldn't dare leave the movie, for whatever reason.

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."

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

This is what the Democrats are fighting for. They're fighting for you not to have a job and still have health care so you can pursue your entrepreneurial risk of writing, painting, taking pictures. It's just such a pain in the rear end to have to have a job. It's so damn mean of this country to require people to have a job. It stifles people. It stifles creativity and economic growth to require people to have a job, to have health care. What a country. Man, are we horribly rotten mean to people.

I can see forms and shapes in my mind when I solo, just as a painter can see forms and shapes when he starts painting. And I can see different colors.

Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon - it is the very heart of painting.

I don't understand it. Jack will spend any amount of money to buy votes but he balks at investing a thousand dollars in a beautiful painting.