Painter Quotes - Page 13

• A painter knows what to do by the tug of the brush as it pulls through a mixture of oils, and by the look of coloured slurries on the palette.

  James Elkins

  Oil, Mixtures, Looks

  James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.8, Routledge

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• At concerts, for me, the orchestra was like a painter. It flooded me with all the colours of the rainbow. If the violin came in by itself, I was suddenly filled with gold and fire, and with red so bright I could not remember having seen it on any object.

  James Elkins

  Music, Fire, Rainbow

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• As the decades go by, a painter's life becomes a life lived with oil paint, a story told in the thicknesses of oil. Any history of painting that does not take that obsession seriously is incomplete.

  James Elkins

  Oil, Doe, Stories

  James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.5, Routledge

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• To a nonpainter, oil paint is uninteresting and faintly unpleasant. To a painter, it is the life's blood: a substance so utterly entrancing, infuriating, and ravishingly beautiful that it makes it worthwhile to go back into the studio every morning, year after year, for an entire lifetime.

  James Elkins

  Beautiful, Morning, Blood

  James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.4, Routledge

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• The muddy moods of oil paints are the painter's muddy humors, and its brilliant transformations are the painter's unexpected discoveries.

  James Elkins

  Oil, Discovery, Brilliant

  James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.5, Routledge

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• Painting is a fine art: not merely because it gives us trees and faces and lovely things to see, but because paint is a finely tuned antenna, reacting to very unnoticed movement of the painter's hand, fixing the faintest shadow of a thought in color and texture.

  James Elkins

  Art, Hands, Color

  James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.193, Routledge

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• Paint records the most delicate gesture and the most tense. It tells whether the painter sat or stood or crouched in front of the canvas. Paint is a cast made of the painter's movements, a portrait of the painter's body and thoughts.

  James Elkins

  Portraits, Records, Movement

  James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.5, Routledge

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• Michelangelo's contemporaries thought him the greatest artist who ever lived and called him 'divine.' His reputation as sculptor, architect, painter and draughtsman has not subsequently been surpassed, and who is to say his contemporaries were wrong?

  Michael Ayrton

  Artist, Reputation, Architect

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• A good painter needs only three colours: black, white and red.

  Titian

  White, Black, Three

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• The painter must always seek the essence of things, always represent the essential characteristics and emotions of the person he is painting.

  Titian

  Essence, Essentials, Portraiture

  "The Quotable Artist". Book by Peggy Hadden, p. 71, 2002.

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• Maybe I was a little jealous or envious of the abstract painters - but the truth was I thought what they were doing was boring.

  Larry Rivers

  Jealousy, Littles, Boring

  Larry Rivers, Marlborough Gallery (2005). “Larry Rivers: paintings and drawings: 1951-2001 ; May 3-June 4, 2005”, Marlborough Gallery

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• To be original one needs to learn the ideas of other painters in order to be different from them.

  Edgar Alwin Payne

  Order, Ideas, Different

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• The average artist, if he chooses, could render an exact drawing of what he sees. Artistic work not only allows but demands some deviation from form and line. Just how far this may go depends on the viewpoint of each painter.

  Edgar Alwin Payne

  Artist, Average, Drawing

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• A photo is like a map, a way of giving me a foot into a kind of reality I want... I'm not trying to make paintings look like photos. I want to make paintings using photos as a reference, the way painters did when photography was first invented.

  Peter Doig

  Photography, Reality, Feet

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• The danger, I find, is that you can become too formulaic, like some commissioned portrait painters who develop a methodology.

  Jamie Wyeth

  Portraits, Danger, Methodology

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• I'm an odd portrait painter in that I'm not just interested in human faces. I consider almost all of my paintings to be portraits.

  Jamie Wyeth

  Portraits, Portraiture, Faces

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• In some ways painters have been more important in my life than writers. Painters teach you how to see—a faculty that usually isn’t highly developed in poets. Whether you take a walk in the woods with a painter, or go to a museum with one, through them you notice shapes, colors, harmonies, relationships that enhance your own seeing.

  Carolyn Kizer

  Museums, Color, Important

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• My purpose is to create music not for snobs, but for all people, music which is beautiful and healing. To attempt what old Chinese painters called 'spirit resonance' in melody and sound.

  Alan Hovhaness

  Beautiful, Healing, People

  "Alan Hovhaness Biographical Summary" by Marco Shirodkar, www.hovhaness.com.

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• In recent times, Surrealist painters have used descriptive illusionistic academic methods.

  Hans Arp

  Academic, Used, Method

  "Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essais, souvenirs 1920-1965". Book by Jean/Hans Arp, p. 63, 1966.

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• The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.

  Willa Cather

  Writing, Accomplishment, Novelists

  Willa Cather (1988). “Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art”, p.40, U of Nebraska Press

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• Painters are noted for being dissipated and wild.

  William Blake

  William Blake (1988). “William Blake”, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky . The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrant nude differs from a nude by Manet.

  Arthur Koestler

  Reality, Space, Discovery

  Arthur Koestler (1969). “The Act of Creation”

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• It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.

  Pablo Picasso

  Would Be, Looks, Symbols

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• Literature is the noblest of all the arts. Music dies on the air, or at best exists only as a memory; oratory ceases with the effort; the painter's colors fade and the canvas rots; the marble is dragged from its pedestal and is broken into fragments.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Art, Memories, Air

  Elbert Hubbard (1911). “A Thousand & One Epigrams: Selected from the Writings of Elbert Hubbard”

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• Seeing the world anew, as if it were new, is as old as writing. It's what all painters are trying to do, to see what's there, to see it in a way that renews it. It becomes more and more urgent as the planet gets worn flat and forest after forest is slain to print the paper for people's impressions to be scrawled down on. It becomes harder and harder to be original, to see things with an innocent eye. Innocence is much tied up with it. As the planet gets progressively less innocent, you need a more innocent eye to see it.

  Martin Amis

  Writing, Eye, People

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