Painting Quotes

I love the trick of painting. You can have the movement within the still thing, but it is completely fixed. And that illusion is constantly exciting.

The process of painting offers an infinite array of possibilities. The closer in unification to just one of those, the better the painting becomes.

If I had a musical identity that was definable then it would be time to get into painting or something else. Race car driving.

I've done what I could as a painter and that seems to me to be sufficient. I don't want to be compared to the great masters of the past, and my painting is open to criticism; that's enough.

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.

I hope with all my heart there will be painting in heaven.

Painting is by nature a luminous language.

I don't like painting flowers in my music. I like painting guts and pain.

Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.

Should it not be remembered that in setting a garden we are painting a picture?

When you are painting a landscape, assume the painting is real and the landscape is an illusion.

Paintings are painted with paint, not with ideas.

Color is crucial in painting, but it is very hard to talk about.

What is to be done about these literary people, who will never understand that painting is a craft and that the material side comes first? The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished.

I always liked paintings to be walls rather than windows. When we see a painting on a wall, it's a window, so I often put my paintings in the middle of the space to make a wall.

I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing.

No, painting is not interior decoration. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.

I understand my own pictures best six months after I have done them.

When I encounter a sunrise, a painting, a woman, or an idea that makes my heart bound like a young calf, then I know I am standing in front of happiness.

I've tried to decentralize and interpenetrate so that all parts of a painting are of related value.

The painting of tomorrow will use the photographic eye as it has used the human eye.

People were very affected by the war. But it didn't mean you stopped painting unless you were called into the Army; then you just couldn't paint. But otherwise one continued.

And that Aha! that you get when you see an artwork that really hits you is, 'I am that.' I am the very radiance of energy that is talking to me through this painting.

I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness.

I have a painting where somebody's holding a chicken, and underneath the chicken is somebody's head.

Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from different directions.

If my husband ever met a woman on the street who looked like one of his paintings he would faint.

He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.

The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that make one's life.

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

A part of all art is to make silence speak. The things left out in painting, the note withheld in music, the void in architecture - all are as necessary and as active as the utterance itself.

There's a lot of difference between being well known and being notorious and the black paintings didn't make me well known - they made me notorious.

It is better to have a good painting with ten holes than ten bad paintings without any holes.

To me, photography is like a quest, or a pilgrimage, or a hunt. I love painting, I love music, but photography is what has allowed me to get outside of myself.

You usually want to get something out of a painting other than the ideas that you had in your head.

The fact that in the last 10 years only five of the 40 Turner Prize nominees have been painters tells you more about curators than about the state of painting today.

Painting is self-discovery. You arrive at the image through the act of painting.

I grew up painting and playing piano so when I was a little kid I thought I was going to be an artist or a painter but my mom had me taking piano lessons for about 10-12 years as a young kid.

I've never made a movie to make money. I've never made a painting to make money.

Landscape painting is the obvious resource of misanthropy.

People say, Why dont you just paint with paintbrushes? I say that I feel more connected to my painting using my skin. Its very tribal in a way - savage!

There is tragic evidence to show that the paintings at the French prehistoric art sites are deteriorating.

I've just kept on ceaselessly painting in order to learn painting.

People know that I always do my hair and makeup, but I also love doing crafts. I love getting a blank canvas and painting something.

I consider painting as a means of expression, not as a goal.

No, the thing to do is try to make a painting that will be alive in your own lifetime.

It is important that the painting can be inhabited, so that the mind's eye, or the eye's mind, can move about it credibly.

Only talent interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual contribution.

A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.

When all lies, deceit, pretense is stripped away, what remains? The truth of a painting, or a book or a man.