Painting Quotes

Painting is the art of hollowing a surface.

Almost everything, if one keeps one's eyes open, is potential material for painting.

A painting is life and a painting is death . . . the picture is our own legacy left by tomorrow's dead for tomorrow's living.

We look at a painting to know the painter; it's his company we are after, not his skill.

The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.

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."

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.

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

Painting isn't a question of sensibility; it's a matter of seizing the power, taking over from nature, not expecting her to supply you with information and good advice.

I find I can't get rid of my trashiness as an artist. A lot of my themes in painting, to the extent that there are intentional themes, are meant to bring that conundrum into high relief.

One must act in painting as in life, directly.

Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon - it is the very heart of painting.

I want the paintings to take me or the viewer out somewhere else.

Only when the habit of one's consciousness to see in paintings bits of nature, madonnas and shameless nudes... has disappeared, shall we see a pure painting composition.

Almost as though the painting itself becomes the embodiment of a type of struggle for visibility, and this might be considered the main subject of the painting.

Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.

Painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement.

I don't see a big difference between painting and photography. Moreover, such distinctions mean nothing to me.

Painting can feign reality without having seen it.

I don't buy art. I'd rather buy a beautiful location or a beautiful site than buy art. A beautiful home is like owning a beautiful painting, except you can live in it.

There is in art the notion of less is more, which is to say, you don't torture a painting that has already confessed.

Keep painting your demons.

My skin is an art gallery right, with paintings and crucifixes hoping to save me from all the dangers in the music business

My painting is visible images that conceal nothing... they evoke mystery. Mystery means nothing. It is unknowable.

A painting is more than the sum of its parts

Nothing is so improving to the temper as the study of the beauties either of poetry, eloquence, music, or painting.

As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color.

At 18 I began painting steadily fulltime and at age 20 had my first New York show at the Macbeth Gallery.

Success is not fame or money or the power to bewitch. it is to have created something valuable from your own individuality and skill a garden, an embroidery, a painting, a cake, a life.

You have to like everything that you're painting. Maybe on a narrative level it seems harsh... but I like everything in all my paintings. It's as if you need to be less intelligent at that level.

Painting doesn't mean just describing; it's a state of spirit.

Look at any inspired painting. It's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation.

He that would be a painter must have a natural turn thereto. Love and delight therein are better of the Art of Painting than compulsion.

And since geometry is the right foundation of all painting, I have decided to teach its rudiments and principles to all youngsters eager for art. . .

Nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday.

Drawing is the artist's most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality.

Painting is the aesthetic side of the object but it has never been original, has never been its own goal.

The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the works of others as his standard.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

My portraits are half what I see and the other half is invented or dictated by the person and the painting.

We look at the mountain to see the painting, then we look at the painting to see the mountain.

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.

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

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

Painting contains a divine force which not only makes absent men present, as friendship is said to do, but moreover makes the dead seem almost alive.

Rhythm is as necessary in a picture as pigment; it is as much a part of painting as of music.

Music is like painting in sound. You take it into your inner heart and never lose it. It's eternally mysterious.

Doing the show was like painting the George Washington Bridge. As soon as you finished one end, you started right in on the other.

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.