Painter Quotes

Writers who can't invent stories often substitute style for narrative. They remind me of the painter who couldn't paint people, so he painted chairs.

Instead of being a well-known painter, I became everybody's favorite dirty joke. Come to think of it, teaching masturbation skills is pretty weird.

A record ... is a statement, it's its own statement, its own entity, rather than being about something else. If I was a painter ... I don't paint the chair, I would paint feelings about the chair.

You can't be both a painter and a musician and master anything. You can't. And live a life.

You can't say I'm going to become a painter in the same way you say I'm going to become a dentist. Or maybe you can nowadays. But it's an endeavor.

The effect of sincerity is to give one's work the character of a protest. The painter, being concerned only with conveying his impression, simply seeks to be himself and no one else.

Gardening was something I learned in my youth when I was unhappy. I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

I apologize if there's a Parkinson's painter in the audience. I assume you do your best work in the morning. Probably gets abstract by noon.

I didn't know anything about conceptual art when I left Kansas. I went to Cal Arts to be a painter, but the exciting stuff was happening elsewhere, so I took a holiday from painting for a few years.

It has always been difficult for historians to fully grasp the intelligence of painters.

Prince or commoner, tenor or bass, Painter or plumber or never-do-well, Do me a favor and shut your face - Poets alone should kiss and tell.

If I didn't have a conviction that a serious painter can portray Nature more profoundly than the best colour photography, I'd probably give it all up or go abstract or take up photography.

I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot.

The eye is complicated. It mixes the colors [it sees] for you ... The painter must unmix them and lay them on again shade by shade, and then the eye of the beholder takes over and mixes them again.

I am not a painter. I am a poet. / Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not.

The painter is, as to the execution of his work, a mechanic; but as to his conception and spirit and design he is hardly below even the poet.

Beethoven was so hard of hearing, he thought he was a painter.

Writer or painter god-parents are notoriously unreliable. That is, there is certain before long to be a cooling of friendship.

I'd come into filmmaking as a painter so, for me, making 'Good Will Hunting' was experimental because I didn't know how to do it.

My grandfather was not a musician but he was an artist - a painter, a decorative painter.

A painter with prestige among painters is bound to be discovered sooner or later.

The beauty of the picture is an abiding concrete of the painter's vision.

Many have genius, but, wanting art, are forever dumb. The two must go together to form the great poet, painter, or sculptor.

In literary art, as in the art of the architect, the painter, the musician, signs that the artist is thinking of his own achievement more than of his subject always offend me.

To be a painter now is to be part of a very small, endangered species.

I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc.

As the decades go by, a painter's life becomes a life lived with oil paint, a story told in the thicknesses of oil. Any history of painting that does not take that obsession seriously is incomplete.

I'm an odd portrait painter in that I'm not just interested in human faces. I consider almost all of my paintings to be portraits.

A photographer's art is more in his perceptions than his execution. In a painter, I think the perception is only the first step, and then you have a kind of hard road of execution.

If ever a painter wrought a miracle of illusion with brush and pigment that painter was Velazquez in his Las Meninas, at the Prado in Madrid.

The great paintings are the ones with the most subtle value relationships. The closer you could bring your values and still distinguish between them, the stronger you were as a painter.

Oh, I am a lonely painter / I live in a box of paints.

I have always thought of myself as a painter derailed by circumstance.

There are different paths that one can pursue as a painter. I work with the thesis that I have not as yet reached my goal. This engagement is the necessary basis from which I plan new paintings.

When the painter wishes to represent an event, he cannot place before us too great a number of personages; but he cannot employ too few when he wishes to portray an emotion.

He who cannot see the beautiful side is a bad painter, a bad friend, a bad lover; he cannot lift his mind and his heart so high as goodness.

If deceiving the eye were the only business of the art... the minute painter would be more apt to succeed. But it is not the eye, it is the mind which the painter of genius desires to address.

I'm glad movies aren't going to please everybody, they can't. But what they have to be is recognisable. I don't equate myself with a master painter, but I think you can recognise my films.

The photographer can arrange his picture just as the painter does, only sometimes he must go about it in a different way.

The mind of a painter should be like a mirror which is filled with as many images as there are things placed before him.

The first object of the painter is to make a flat plane appear as a body in relief and projecting from that plane

It reflects no great honour on a painter to be able to execute one thing well.

If you call painting dumb poetry, the painter may call poetry blind painting.

I draw all the time. Drawing is my backbone. I don't think a painter has to be able to draw, I just think that if you draw, you better draw well.

I was never the kind of painter or sculptor who kept a shop.

Whenever a great painter... does a work which appears to be false and lying, that falsity is very true.

One day, in the San Francisco walk, he came upon some badly painted figures and observed that good painters imitate nature but bad ones vomit it forth.

The connoisseur of painting gives only bad advice to the painter. For that reason I have given up trying to judge myself.

With a painter's temperament, all that's needed are the means of expression sufficient to be intelligible to the wide public.

A thousand painters ought to be killed yearly. Say what you like: I'm every inch a painter.