Painting Quotes

The essence of painting has actually always been to make it [the universal] plastically perceptible through colour and line.

Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.

The freer the soul, the more abstract painting becomes.

A Test match is like a painting. A one day match is like a Rolf Harris painting.

Psychoanalysis comes down to the process itself - the self, and life. I think I can say that I'm friends with the unconscious life, but I've never tried to make a painting directly from a dream.

I've always loved painting, although I never show anyone what I've done. Mainly because I don't do it well. But it's like a form of visual diary for me. A way of fixing things in my mind.

I can't just have one painting - I need to cover the wall in paintings. It's the same with my music. I want to mix everything together to create more.

Painting is still to a great extent dominated by a central image; corners in most cases are like uninvited guests at a party, uneasy and unattended.

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.

I believe the reason I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective.

I wish I felt energetic and could paint all the time, because there are so many paintings I'd like to do.

The goal is always to make a nice tableau painting with the voice. The more color I can find, the more shadow I can find - the goal is always to make more nuance and colors.

I really love painting women. Their bodies, their clothes - it all interests me, whereas men really don't that much, in a way.

My painting occurs when I think of two disparate elements.

The greatest productions of art, whether painting, music, sculpture or poetry, have invariably this quality-something approaching the work of God.

I think about women and their thoughts and ideas, and I suppose when I'm painting them I'm getting to be them, in a sense. That is why I plainly paint women.

The Best of the artist's art, which will one day be in a Museum wall, the Painting that sets the artist apart of all other artist artists.

I think of painting without subject matter as music without words.

In mathematics the complicated things are reduced to simple things. So it is in painting.

I keep plastering it until it comes around to what I want, in terms of all I know and think about painting now, as well as in terms of the initial observation.

Do not let it look as if you reasoned too much. Painting must be impulsive to be worth while.

If light is the spiritual quality of painting, color is surely its heart and passion.

The arts teach and moralise by their beauty alone, not by translating a philosophical or social formula. For the truly artistic person, painting has itself as it's purpose, which is quite enough.

Seeing Cubism paintings at the Beaubourg makes me very happy and also old films.

If I don't have anything better to do that day, I'll copy paintings, generally by people who have some relationship to the work of the moment.

Butte was once a grand city. To me, that city is like one big stage for Edward Hopper. You could put your camera anywhere, and you felt you were looking at his paintings.

Somehow, in painting I try to make some logic out of the world that has been given to me in chaos.

Once you start painting, you could of course get lost. I mean you get out of yourself, you don't know whether you're thinking, you just act actually sometimes.

My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation.

If an artist has no experience before he makes a painting or a sculpture, he is not an artist.

You can't have a $2 million painting unless it's on the wall somewhere and somebody saw it.

Painting is something that cannot be destroyed, it must destroy itself to reinvent itself.

When I am finished painting, I paint again for relaxation.

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

I don't have much of a problem with interruptions. I keep a detailed record of paint and materials as a work on each painting. I can restart exactly where I left off.

I must study war and politics so that my children shall be free to study commerce, agriculture and other practicalities, so that their children can study painting, poetry and other fine things.

The most difficult object in painting is yourself because you're always at issue

Good native Taste, tho' rude, is seldom wrong, Be it in music, painting, or in song: But this, as well as other faculties, Improves with age and ripens by degrees.

When I get intimate with my paintings, it's a real good spiritual thing to get off my chest. Same as playing the instruments is a great release.

It is the mysterious that I love in painting. It is the stillness and the silence. I want my pictures to take effect very slowly, to obsess and to haunt.

The most remarkable discovery ever made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing.

My paintings are wiser than I am.

Sculpture will last a lot longer than painting.

To do a drawing for a painting most often means doing something very sketchy and schematic and then later making it polished.

Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.

Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.

You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.

The key to understanding any people is in its art: its writing, painting, sculpture.

When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don't. I have a knack for disturbing.