Painting Quotes

When I'm painting outdoors, I only have time to think about what I'm saying, not how I'm saying it.

What is painting today? It's a discontinued thing, discontinued from anything serious that happened in the past.

Whenever I see a Frans Hals I feel like painting, but when I see a Rembrandt I feel like giving up!

Each part of a great painting should in itself be a great painting.

The activity of painting: A thrilling tussle between the artist's materials and his inspiration.

Usually people start with painting and then go on to make installations; my painting came from installation.

When I was in art college, I would be painting, and I would create something on a canvas that was actually quite attractive. But if I got frightened and tried to protect that, that canvas would die.

The most joyous painting is not done for the art world, it is done for the inner world.

In my opinion painting should be considered excellent in proportion as it approaches the effect of relief, while relief should be considered bad in proportion as it approaches the effect of painting.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Photography is painting with light

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

I had the desire to paint the figure without actually painting the figure.

Doubt is a central factor all the time. There's always the doubt: What the hell am I doing out here in the middle of the woods, all alone, painting?

I paint very directly. I go from top to bottom. When I get to the floor, the painting is finished.

My career doesn't depend on painting Bill Clinton.

For me, painting means the continuation of dreaming by other means.

Children's finger-painting came under the arts, but movies didn't.

Photography started as a means of getting reference material for my paintings of nature subjects.

I love the idea of renaissance. If my career is like painting a canvas, I want to have as many different colors in there as I can.

There must be an open space in the paintings - an entry space for the viewer, or even for me. Just white space where you can get into it.

I didn't know what to expect from a famous movie star; maybe that he'd be sort of stuck-up, you know. But not Gary Cooper. He horsed around so much... that I had a hard time painting him.

It wouldn't be right for me to clown around when I'm painting a president.

A painting only lives in the eye of the beholder

People want Art. And they are given it. But the less Art there is in painting the more painting there is.

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

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.

My nervous system is very much weakened - nothing but painting in oil can keep me going.

We must always apologize for talking painting.

It's still an escape for me, painting, so it also takes me elsewhere. I don't think I would do it otherwise.

What is bad painting? Picabia made some deliberately bad paintings, but they were by him, so great in a way.

How do you complete a painting, really? There are paintings by so many different artists that are interesting precisely because they haven't really been completed.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Progress in painting, there's no such thing! ...One day I went and changed the yellow on my palette. Well, the result was, I floundered for ten years!

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

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.

My life is a creative act--like a painting, or a concerto.

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