Painting Quotes

With abstract work, I never was quite sure what it was that felt right about the painting, but I did know that I responded to it and I liked whatever it was offering me.

I was studying sculpture and painting and was working on a degree so I could become a teacher. I really liked teaching, and it was something I was pursuing when I got out of school.

I had stopped painting around 2000, which I guess was when the music thing started getting pretty busy. I just didn't have enough time to pursue it properly.

It's sort of like my past is an unfinished painting, and as the artist of that painting, I must fill in all the ugly holes and make it beautiful again.

A great painting is a great painting.

The thing that a lot of people may or may not know is every artist is a cinephile, whether they watch movies whether they're painting, or have films that influence them.

I was in love. With a two-dimensional object. A mute in love with a painting. Lovely. Just lovely.

I was good friends with Frank Sinatra, I heard Steve Kaufman painting his portrait, so I asked Steve to paint my portrait.

Thirst will parch your tongue and your body will waste through lack of sleep ere you can describe in words that which painting instantly sets before the eye.

He who despises painting has no love for the philosophy in nature.

Perspective is the rein and rudder of painting.

We may call painting the grandchild of nature.

How painting surpasses all human works by reason of the subtle possibilities which it contains.

Painting embraces and contains within itself all the things which nature produces or which results from the fortuitous actions of men... he is but a poor master who makes only a single figure well.

The people who love my paintings, that respond to them the most, they're spectators, they're not viewers.

Haven, don't ask me to define the boundaries of normal. You know how I was raised. My father once struck strands of his own pubic hair onto a painting and sold it for a million dollars.

I stopped painting because I was so shocked at what I was doing and how much I wasn't in the work. The work was alien to me. I didn't know how to paint in a way that would get me out of this funk.

I was envious of [Vincent] Van Gogh because I could never make a painting that beautiful! (Ridiculous, I know.) That was when the character of Ivy [Wilkes] began to take shape for me.

Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.

Every painting has a weakness and a breaking point, where the essence of a painting lies. In my case it is never in the centre.

When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't

A color which would be 'dirty' if it were the color of a wall, needn't be so in a painting.

A great painting or symphony or play, doesn't diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of Creation behind the Universe.

Girls seemed to like artists! I felt very drawn to the idea of power, really, and doing painting as a power trip, in a sense. This idea of power has always driven me.

If you stand too close to a painting - all you see are patches of color, if you stand too far back, you can't see any of the detail.

I wouldn't consider myself an outsider artist because I have a university degree in painting.

But painting can be too lonely... I like being with people too much to have ever made that my life's work.

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

Around 1980, I went back to painting with a vengeance.

I try to not get to the point where one is making wallpaper, or simply painting money. I want to make sure that I am at least trying to weigh myself down, that there's a challenge each time.

Sometimes working on one painting will help solve a problem in another painting.

Everything in painting is about relationship, so I judge each area by its relationship to the surrounding areas.

When I'm not working on a children's book, I'm painting abstract paintings. That's probably the most joyous thing for me as an artist. But I do love children's books.

When I'm painting them, the whole legend and mythology of apples occurs to me, and so Adam and Eve and the snake and all the rest of it somehow gets into the picture.

A seventeenth-century painting can be "modern" because the living eye finds it fresh and new. A "modern" painting can be outdated because it was a product of the moment and not of time.

Dutch painting: daily life is enough.

The horizon is more than a convention of landscape painting, less than truth.

In the landscape, colors are more neutral than you may think. Pay close attention to this. Small areas of rich color can make the whole painting look colorful.

"Good" people are those who don't hold in the thoughts, but find proper outlets like writing, painting, music, etc.

When spiritual, metaphysical, material, or immaterial events come into my life, I can only fix them by way of painting.

I hope to actually get back to painting someday... soon. I sort of transitioned into cartooning from painting.

I would never put a sculpture in front of a painting, so that it is difficult to see the painting. I always place each thing so you can see it isolated. You can focus on every individual work.

If I revise a children's book, if I'm spending three hours on the first draft, I'm probably spending 30 minutes revising it. I mean, come on! But to redo a painting? That's hard work.

If I'm feeling something, I know if it's a song, or if it's a little story that I'm going to write, or if it's a painting or play. I might sit down and write a play.

When you set aside the mantle of control in the painting process, images arise from ancient layers of the psyche.

When we begin to lift the veils of censorship and repression in painting, a great deal of energy is unleashed.

I do portraits. I usually do live models in a class environment, but I've been painting at home more. I really love the human form, and I love faces. I've tried to do landscapes a few times.

I decided I needed something that I could feel as passionate about as acting, and something in which I could completely lose myself. I started painting, and I'm still doing it.

By merely increasing or decreasing the amount of contrast in any area we can move the observer through the painting.

All paintings are abstract ideas, not representations of a true reality.