Painting quotes
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Collage-making, for me, is basically an act of painting, allowing me to indulge in an appetite for immediacy.
-- Abe Ajay -
It is not right for painters to think that painting is like prostitution, that 'first you do it for love, then you do it for others, and finally you do it for money.
-- Ad Reinhardt -
My paintings are the last paintings one can make.
-- Ad Reinhardt -
Painting cannot be the only activity of a mature artist.
-- Ad Reinhardt -
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Painting is self-discovery. You arrive at the image through the act of painting.
-- Adolph Gottlieb -
I feel like there's too many paintings left unpainted that I just don't want to take the time away.
-- Alan Bean -
I found I have to stay painting.
-- Alan Bean -
When I'm traveling the world, I don't ever look anymore at the geography - just enough to catch galleries and paintings.
-- Alber Elbaz -
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It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.
-- Albert Camus -
In Holland, everyone is an expert in painting and in tulips.
-- Albert Camus -
Geometry is the foundation of all painting.
-- Albrecht Durer -
Painting seems an old man's business. After a certain time you're out of it, and you just paint masterpieces.
-- Alex Katz -
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Painting dissolves the forms at its command ... it melts them into color.
-- Alexander Eliot -
He best can paint them who shall feel them most.
-- Alexander Pope -
I knew that I must paint not what I saw, but only what was in me, in my soul.
-- Alexej von Jawlensky -
The animation of the canvas is one of the hardest problems of painting.
-- Alfred Sisley -
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I always start a painting with the sky.
-- Alfred Sisley -
Painting is a way of thinking visually, so whatever is happening with me at the time gets reflected in the work.
-- Ali Banisadr -
It's Frank's painting on the cover. We were originally going to use a Salvador Dali painting that we got permission from Salvador Dali to use, and Frank found this one, and it really did fit the music much more.
-- Alice Cooper -
It's a privilege, you know, to paint and it takes up a lot of time and it means there's a lot of things you don't do. But still, with me, painting was more than a profession, it was also an obsession. I had to paint.
-- Alice Neel -
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There is a kinship between music and painting - with the same words used to describe both, as when a musical composition is said to have color and a painting to have rhythm.
-- Alton Tobey -
Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.
-- Ambrose Bierce -
Art is nothing tangible. We cannot call a painting 'art' as the words 'artifact' and 'artificial' imply. The thing made is a work of art made by art, but not itself art. The art remains in the artist and is the knowledge by which things are made.
-- Ananda Coomaraswamy -
Under his (Marc Chagall, ed.) sole impulse metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting.
-- Andre Breton -
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The substance of painting is light.
-- Andre Derain -
To love a painting is to feel that this presence is ... not an object but a voice.
-- Andre Malraux -
Here, reality is not subordinated to painting, indeed painting seems the handmaid of reality, though we feel it tending towards a procedure which, while not at the mercy of appearances, is not yet in conflict with them.
-- Andre Malraux -
The edge in modern painting is charged with neurosis; it meets a world that no longer confirms it but which is hostile or at best indifferent.
-- Andrew Graham-Dixon -
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At its edges, a painting makes its surrender to reality. The ways in which it can do so are endlessly revealing, as infinite as the potential forms of painting itself.
-- Andrew Graham-Dixon -
Painting is like romance, since it is all about seeing, feeling, and interpreting.
-- Andrew McDermott -
I like eating out. I like buying beautiful paintings and being surrounded by beautiful things. I have to finance that life. I can barely afford a pension scheme because I don't make enough money.
-- Andrew Motion -
I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious.
-- Andrew Wyeth -
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I'm not at all interested in painting the object just as it is in nature. Certainly I'm much more interested in the mood of a thing than the truth of a thing.
-- Andrew Wyeth -
God, I've frozen my ***** off painting snow scenes!
-- Andrew Wyeth -
Writing must certainly be one of the hardest professions - writing and painting.
-- Anjelica Huston -
Each painting is fresh and new, a surprise even to myself.
-- Anne Jackson -
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Though painting borrows help indeed from colours... it has nothing more wide of its real aim or more remote from its intention than to make a show of colours... to raise a separate and flattering pleasure to the sense.
-- Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 10th Earl of Shaftesbury -
I liked sculpting better than painting. You have more freedom in sculpting.
-- Anthony Quinn -
Painting quickly is a calculated act to block out rational thought.
-- Antoni Tapies -
They were wrestling with canvases, using violent colors and huge brush strokes. I arrived with gray, silent, sober, oppressed paintings. One critic said they were paintings that thought.
-- Antoni Tapies -
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I love art. I used to have a painting of Gorbachev that was given to my family by Gorbachev.
-- Armie Hammer -
You know how fussy and particular I am in painting. I am ever removing the paint and repainting the spot until I am completely exhausted.
-- Arshile Gorky -
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.
-- Arshile Gorky -
I communicate my innermost perceptions through art.
-- Arshile Gorky -
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I look at nature, I see myself. Paintings are mirrors, so is nature.
-- Arthur Dove -
The real change that paintings undergo is in the perceptions of the viewer.
-- Arthur Smith -
If you add something to a painting, never let it be for aesthetic reasons. Only let it be for reasons of expression.
-- Asger Jorn -
Only my current situation has enabled me to accomplish the expensive task of demonstrating that the preferred sustenance of painting is painting.
-- Asger Jorn -
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Form and substance are one and the same. Form is the life expression and substance the living painting.
-- Asger Jorn -
A painter leaves his emotions behind him for posterity to share.
-- Augustus John -
The back is like a frame, the front body, the painting that it throws into relief.
-- B.K.S. Iyengar -
Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about what I paint, really.
-- Balthus -
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Painting is a source of endless pleasure, but also of great anguish.
-- Balthus -
The craft of painting has virtually disappeared. There is hardly anyone left who really possesses it. For evidence one has only to look at the painters of this century.
-- Balthus -
I will always find even the worst paintings that attempt some kind of representation better than the best invented paintings.
-- Balthus -
The best way to begin is to say: Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. And now let us have a look at his paintings.
-- Balthus -
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I’ve learnt from experience that a painting isn’t finished when you put down your brush - that’s when it starts. The public reaction is what supplies meaning and value. Art comes alive in the arguments you have about it.
-- Banksy -
I give away thousands of paintings for free.
-- Banksy -
I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.
-- Barnett Newman -
Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting.
-- Barnett Newman -
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Painting, like passion, is a living voice.
-- Barnett Newman -
Painting, like passion, is a living voice, which, when I hear it, I must let it speak, unfettered.
-- Barnett Newman -
The problem of a painting is physical and metaphysical, the same as I think life is physical and metaphysical.
-- Barnett Newman -
Should it not be remembered that in setting a garden we are painting a picture?
-- Beatrix Farrand -
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Painting' and 'religious experience' are the same thing. It is a question of the perpetual motion of a right idea.
-- Ben Nicholson -
The kind of painting which I find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational, but it is musical and architectural... Whether this visual relationship is slightly more or slightly less abstract is, for me, beside the point.
-- Ben Nicholson -
It is an intimately communicative affair between the painter and his painting, a conversation back and forth, the painting telling the painter even as it receives its shape and form.
-- Ben Shahn -
If one has set for himself the position that his painting shall not misconstrue his personal mode of thinking, then he must be rather alert to just what he does think.
-- Ben Shahn -
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I figure I'm still good for painting until 95 or thereabouts.
-- Bern Will Brown -
If I had money, I would like to get an old building, have music performances, do lithographs, have shows of paintings, and do those things that I'm interested in doing.
-- Bill Dixon -
In the middle 1940s... I heard everyone live. Painting, the theater; everything was happening. It was an exciting time when New York was the place to be.
-- Bill Dixon -
In every form of art, you really want the experience of the images to transcend the medium, for the medium to disappear into the greater experience of viewing the work. So that you forget you are looking at a painting, or a photograph.
-- Bill Henson -
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I think that the mythology of Van Gogh's life, and the beauty of his paintings, is unstoppable.
-- Billy Childish -
Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.
-- Blaise Pascal -
Happy painting and God Bless, my friend.
-- Bob Ross -
Music is a lot more like solving an intricate puzzle with moments of pure, random creative bliss... whereas painting is much more purely random creative bliss with moments of problem solving.
-- Brandon Boyd -
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Painting is so much more than the materials.
-- Brian Johnson -
In general, my paintings are multifocal. You can't call it unfocused space, but not being fixed to a single focus is very much of our time.
-- Bridget Riley -
Painting is, I think, inevitably an archaic activity and one that depends on spiritual values.
-- Bridget Riley -
In my earlier paintings, I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active.
-- Bridget Riley -
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As a teenager I started painting and playing guitar.
-- Buffy Sainte-Marie -
The key is in remaining just aloof enough from a painting so that you know when to stop.
-- Buffy Sainte-Marie -
The artistic process in digital art is very much the same as for making other kinds of paintings.
-- Buffy Sainte-Marie -
I continue to make paintings of people and their moments in our time because I am of that time. Out of that I hope to make pictures that are timeless.
-- Burton Silverman -
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I've been playing piano my whole life, but I'd never tried to understand how compositions are made, really. Try to imagine if you'd loved paintings your whole life but had never painted one. My aspiration now is just to understand.
-- Caio Fonseca -
The world of painting has nothing to do with the art world.
-- Caio Fonseca -
So many paintings have hidden meanings or need wall texts, but my work is not in that category.
-- Caio Fonseca -
I don't get my inspiration from books or a painting. I get it from the women I meet.
-- Carolina Herrera -
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Painting doesn't mean just describing; it's a state of spirit.
-- Caryl Churchill -
The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also refrain from painting that which he sees before him. Otherwise, his pictures will be like those folding screens behind which one expects to find only the sick or the dead.
-- Caspar David Friedrich -
The painter should paint not only what he has in front of him, but also what he sees inside himself. If he sees nothing within, then he should stop painting what is in front of him.
-- Caspar David Friedrich -
I would have liked maybe to be in architecture or painting, something connected to the fine arts.
-- Catherine Deneuve -
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I love Monet - I've nicknamed him King Blob. When you go up to the painting, it's a series of blobs - amazing.
-- Celia Imrie -
Photography is nature seen from the eyes outwards. Painting is nature seen from the eyes inwards.
-- Charles Sheeler -
There is an aesthetic excitement about painting which is one of the most beautiful experiences that can be. Put things down while you feel that joy.
-- Charles Webster Hawthorne -
The successful painter is continually painting still life.
-- Charles Webster Hawthorne -
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There's plenty of stuff that I don't feel dissident about: I really like tea, I don't have any problem with that. I like lots of paintings.
-- China Mieville -
Her sculptured face was as perfect as a painting.
-- Christopher Paolini -
Make a child a painting and he'll be happy for a day. Teach a child to paint and he'll be miserable for a lifetime.
-- Christopher Willard -
One of Cezanne's unfinished paintings... appears to be a completed work even though only a few strokes of paint have been put down. My methods are similar... I expect each of my paintings to appear whole in every stage.
-- Christopher Willard -
