Painting Quotes

I'll stick to painting as long as I can.

All painting - the painting of the past as well as of the present - shows us that its essential plastic means were only line and color.

Learn to trust yourself. That's very vital. ... Just stand with yourself. Remember, in his lifetime, Van Gogh sold only two paintings. I personally sold even fewer.

But not only medicine, engineering, and painting are arts; living itself is an art in fact, the most important and at the same time the most difficult and complex art to be practiced by man.

When something is finished, that means it's dead, doesn't it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting - I just stop working on it for a while.

Western artists stand as humans looking at nature; Asian artists try to be in nature. You become one with nature rather than painting a portrait of it. That's a big shift.

I've explored a variety of directions and themes over the years. But I think in my painting you can see the signature of one artist, the work of one wrist.

I have always been concerned with painting that simultaneously insists on a flat surface and then denies it.

With monochrome painting... the idiosyncrasy of the work, its difference, its expression, lies in shape.

If I hadn't started painting, I would have raised chickens.

I don't mind being miserable as long as I'm painting well.

For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh.

Most of my painting is done sitting in a chair with a book. I'd say it's 80 per cent sitting and reading, 10 per cent eating and ten per cent painting.

My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impression of nature.

Stop looking at the walls, look out the window.

A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.

I believe that painting should come through the avenues of meditation rather than the canals of action.

The reason for my painting large canvases is that I want to be intimate and human.

Music is like creating an emotional painting. The sounds are the colors.

My paintings are not meant to be tasted.

Nothing in the whole world is of interest to me but my painting and my flowers.

Painting is more important than art.

That's what all painting is about, it”s space and light occupied by human presences.

Painting took on a fabulous strength and splendor; the object was discredited as an indispensable element of the picture.

I've reached a point in my life where my Truman Show boat has hit the painting.

The Prelude to Tristan and Isolde reminds me of the old Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel.

There is a better chance of getting an exciting painting from a laboured study with texture than from a fine drawing without it.

He best can paint them who shall feel them most.

I knew that I must paint not what I saw, but only what was in me, in my soul.

Knowing what paint a painter uses or having an understanding of where he was in the history of where he came from doesn't hurt your appreciation of the painting.

The substance of painting is light.

I realized that most people waste their lives earning a living, and I wanted to live. I love painting, so I keep painting. That's how I became an artist.

I work on all parts of my painting at once, improving it very gently until I find that the effect is complete.

We cannot overlook the importance of wild country as source of inspiration, to which we give expression in writing, in poetry, drawing and painting, in mountaineering, or in just being there.

When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing.

I do believe it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply molding one’s inner life. And that too is a deed.

It often takes two to do a good painting - one to paint it, and another to rap the painter smartly with a hammer before he or she can ruin it.

The interest and the feelings are not due to colors; the lines of a painting that move us move us even more in a print.

I almost never start with an image. I start with a painting idea, an impulse, usually derived from my own world.

Painting is so much more than the materials.

Limited means often constitute the charm and force of primitive painting. Extension, on the contrary, leads the arts to decadence.

I honestly believe students of painting in the next century will laugh at the abstract art movement. They will marvel at such a drawn-out regression in the plastic arts.

Painting a picture is like trying to fight a battle.

Holding together a kind of tension. When you see a painting that's really good that's what it's doing.

A painting, you know, it's all dirty material. But it's about transformation. Taking that earth, that heavy earthen kind of thing, turning it into air and light.

There is more fine abstract design in Navajo rugs than in all these modern paintings.

Painting is like making love. You cannot ask, 'How do you do it?' But, hopefully, it is beautiful.

Painting or poetry is made as one makes love - a total embrace, prudence thrown to the winds, nothing held back.

I never want to stop painting. I'm 94 now. What's my secret? I just keep thinking about the painting I'm going to do tomorrow.

Something sacred, that's it. We ought to be able to say that such and such a painting is as it is, with its capacity for power, because it is "touched by God."