Painting Quotes

I am able to make a contribution... Let me repeat my convictions, I can make a contribution to American painting.

We must always apologize for talking painting.

Photography is painting with light

Keep painting - day in - day out. Be absorbed by it.

I am anxious that the world should be inclined to look to painters for information about painting.

Painting dissolves the forms at its command ... it melts them into color.

The bathroom door swings open. Emma sees the blood painting my skin and the red rivers carved on my body. Emma sees the wet knife, silver and bone. The screams of my little sister shatter mirrors.

I'm not interested in painting; I'm not interested in making a picture. Then what the hell am I interested in? I must be interested in this process.

Painting is like being a lawyer and attacking a corporation.

There is something mysterious in this work that I do not ever what to discover.

I trust the symbol that is arrived at in the making of the painting. Meaningful symbols aren't invented as such, they are made or discovered as symbol later.

In Zen brush-painting, the circle is a master's problem. It represents everything and nothing, and in so doing, the universe.

The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.

It is what is painted between the outlines that makes the difference between merely competent painting and really meaningful art.

You have to live in a state of thinking your painting is good, or you couldn't do it.

Values create dimension, but color usually receives all of the attention. When painting with oils, placing dark and light pigments next to each other can be an accident waiting to happen.

I suggest that it is the honesty of the attempt to recreate the forms and spaces visually without artistic editing that is one of the hallmarks of realist painting.

What is painting but the act of embracing, by means of art, the surface of the pool?

Put a symbol, or language of some sort, in a painting and it will be noticed by the viewer whether or not they can read that particular language.

The theme, or harmony, of a painting can be created by any one of its visual elements. A single colour... repetition of shapes... Light can be a theme.

A painting with a message does not happen by accident. It happens when you place elements in their order of importance.

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.

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.

I'm not sure that Van Gogh got up in the morning and looked at the crows and the bizarre clouds and went damn that's a good painting, you know? No, he considered shooting himself, and one day he did.

Painting is drawing, with the additional means of color.

I think people have to choose between living with contradictions or painting themselves into a corner. I have a lot of contradictions.

I'm not so interested in the effort that it takes to have a self-promotional outlook. I believe in being quiet and making my work and just trying to make discoveries and let the painting evolve.

Painting is just a tool; it is nothing in itself. What counts is how you do it.

Atmosphere in a painting is nine-tenths fear.

Don't listen to the fools who say that pictures of people can be of no consequence, or that painting is dead. There is much to be done.

The art of painting is entering a new golden age. It is in no danger of becoming obsolete.

Perspective is to painting what the bridle is to the horse, the rudder to a ship.

With all its variety and liveliness, color acts in the work of art as blood does as it circulates through our bodies. Color is what keeps the painting alive and moving.

Color is a language. It is the language of painting. How painting expresses itself is in large part with color.

Surface is a modernist concept. What surface does is to encourage one to see the painting as object rather than as a window on the world.

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

A little amateur painting in water colors shows the innocent and the quiet mind.

Painting is so close, so personal, so immediate, and so ordinary... It is the ordinary resurrections that define your painting.

Allow the brush to 'wander' above the realm of conventional judgement and practice.

Representational painters: loosen the grip of inflexibility! Abstract painters: tighten your hold on crafting your images! In both types of painting students need to unlearn what one has acquired.

Reconcile the loss of the painting - no matter how many times it may happen - with the joy of beginning again.

I do have great respect for painting, but I am definitely not a painter. I make drawings of paintings, and I'm jealous of painting for sure, but, for me, the paper gives my work a limit.

There are forms that can only be seen when you are near a painting, others only appear when you are far away.

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

Every milieu has something ridiculous about it - film-making, the music world, painting - because people who take themselves seriously become funny pretty quickly.

Burn shavings and splinters of pitch pine, and when they turn to charcoal, put them out, and pound them into mortar with size. This will make a pretty black for fresco painting.

My app is the same juicy paint used by Vincent Van Gogh; my screen is the woven canvas of Titian. Painting by hand, I've come to figure, is a certain kind of love.

With every experience, you alone are painting your own canvas, thought by thought, choice by choice.

Art, if it is successful in the task of questioning reality, if it is good painting and not merely a performance of dexterity, will be an affirmation of God.

I suppose what you're doing as a painter is making a record of your trip through life. I can't think of any job that is quite as satisfactory as doing a painting.