Painter Quotes - Page 14

• A record ... is a statement, it's its own statement, its own entity, rather than being about something else. If I was a painter ... I don't paint the chair, I would paint feelings about the chair.

  Bob Dylan

  Feelings, Records, Paint

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• Selection is the invention of the landscape painter.

  Henry Fuseli

  Landscape, Invention, Selection

  1789 Aphorisms on Art, no.237, (published 1831).

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• Colour, as the strange and magnificent expression of the inscrutable spectrum of Eternity, is beautiful and important to me as a painter; I use it to enrich the canvas and to probe more deeply into the object. Colour also decided, to a certain extent, my spiritual outlook, but it is subordinated to life, and above all, to the treatment of form. Too much emphasis on colour at the expense of form and space would make a double manifestation of itself on the canvas, and this would verge on craft work.

  Max Beckmann

  Beautiful, Spiritual, Expression

  "On my Painting". Max Beckmann's Speech during the exhibition 'Twentieth-Century German Art', London, July 21, 1938.

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• As a painter, cursed or blessed with a terrible and vital sensuousness, I must look for wisdom with my eyes. I repeat, with my eyes, for nothing could be more ridiculous or irrelevant than a 'philosophical conception painted purely intellectually without the terrible fury of the senses grasping each visible form of beauty and ugliness.

  Max Beckmann

  Blessed, Philosophical, Eye

  Max Beckmann, Guggenheim Museum Soho (1996). “Max Beckmann in exile”, Solomon R Guggenheim Museum

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• I define Inner Space as an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind meet and merge. Now, in the landscapes of the surrealist painters, for example, one sees the regions of Inner Space; and increasingly I believe that we will encounter in film and literature scenes which are neither solely realistic nor fantastic. In a sense, it will be a movement in the interzone between both spheres.

  J. G. Ballard

  Believe, Reality, Hands

  Munich Round Up Interview, 1968.

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• Le style, pour l'e  crivain aussi bien que pour le peintre, est une question non de technique mais de vision. For the writer as well as for the painter, style is not a question of technique, but of vision.

  Marcel Proust

  Style, Vision, Technique

  1927 A' la recherche du temps perdu,'LeTemps retrouve '.

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• The men liked to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I'm one of the best painters.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Funny, Women, Thinking

  Quoted in WChadwick Women, Art and Society (1990).

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• School and things that painters have taught me even keep me from painting as I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to be at least paint as I wanted to and say what I wanted to when I painted as that seemed to be the only thing I could do that didn't concern anybody but myself. I found that I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn't say in any other way things that I had no words for.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Stupid, School, Shapes

  Foreword to the catalogue for the show at the Anderson Galleries in New York, 1926.

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• If modern painters feel qualms about applying the term "masterpiece" to describe a work of capital importance, this is because it has come to convey a notion of perfection: a notion that leads to much confusion when applied to artists other than those who made perfection their ideal.

  Andre Malraux

  Artist, Qualms About, Confusion

  "The Voices of Silence". Book by Andre Malraux, Doubleday, Part III, Chapter VI, 1953.

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• My father, a ruined dandy from the South, had been reduced to keeping a small harness-repair shop and, when that failed, he became ostensibly a house-and-barn painter. However, he did not call himself a house-painter. The idea was not flashy enough for him. He called himself a "sign-writer.

  Sherwood Anderson

  Father, Ideas, House

  Sherwood Anderson (1968). “A story teller's story: a critical text”

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• I am not as these are, the poet saithIn youth's pride, and the painter, among menAt bay, where never pencil comes nor pem

  Dante Gabriel Rossetti

  Pride, Youth, Poet

  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Sonnets LXXIV: LXXV:LXXVI: Old And New Art”

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• The painter's portrait and the physicist's explanation are both rooted in reality, but they have been changed by the painter or the physicist into something more subtly imagined than the photographic appearance of things.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Reality, Portraits, Appearance

  Jacob Bronowski (1965). “Science and Human Values”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• In literary art, as in the art of the architect, the painter, the musician, signs that the artist is thinking of his own achievement more than of his subject always offend me.

  Herbert Spencer

  Art, Thinking, Achievement

  Herbert Spencer (1902). “Facts and comments”

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• The painter paints his brushes black, Through the canvas runs a crack, Portrait of the pain never answers back...

  Phil Ochs

  Running, Pain, Answers

  "Song: Flower Lady (Pleasures of the Harbor)". October 31, 1967.

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• The work of the painter, the poet or the musician, like the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental and the only one really common to us all; scientific thought is merely the sharp point more penetrating because it has been whetted on the stone of fact, but at the cost of some loss of substance and its effectiveness is to be explained by its power to pierce sufficiently deeply for the main body of the tool to follow the head.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Loss, Effectiveness, Musician

  Claude Levi-Strauss (2012). “Tristes Tropiques”, p.121, Penguin

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• As a teacher I approach my students purely with the human desire to free them from all scholarly inhibitions, and I tell them, "Painters must speak through paint not through words."

  Hans Hofmann

  Teacher, Desire, Students

  It ls magazine, Winter-Spring 1959.

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• No more painters, no more scribblers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more royalists, no more radicals, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more communists, no more proletariat, no more democrats, no more republicans, no more bourgeois, no more aristocrats, no more arms, no more police, no more nations, an end at last to all this stupidity, nothing left, nothing at all, nothing, nothing.

  Louis Aragon

  Stupidity, Police, Musician

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• Still I should paint my own places best; painting is with me but another word for feeling, and I associate "my careless boyhood" with all that lies on the banks of the Stour; those scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful; that is, I had often thought of pictures of them before ever I touched a pencil, and your picture ['The White Horse'] is one of the strongest instance I can recollect of it.

  John Constable

  Horse, Lying, Grateful

  Letter to Rev. John Fisher, October 23, 1821.

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• It is always my endeavour however in making a picture that it should be without a companion in the world. At least such should be a painters ambition.

  John Constable

  Ambition, World, Endeavour

  John Constable (1966). “John Constable's Correspondence”

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• I ought to respect myself for my friends' sake, and my children's. It is time, at fifty-six, to begin, at least, to know oneself, - and I do know what I am not, and your regard for me has at least awakened me to believe in the possibility that I may yet make some impression with my "light" - my "dews" - my "breezes" - my bloom and freshness, - no one of which qualities has yet been perfected on the canvas of any painter in the world.

  John Constable

  Children, Believe, Light

  Letter to C.R. Leslie (March 1833), from "The Letters of John Constable, R.A. to C. R. Leslie, R.A. 1826-1837", p. 104, 1931.

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• I am anxious that the world should be inclined to look to painters for information about painting. I hope to show that ours is a regularly taught profession; that it is scientific as well as poetic; that imagination alone never did, and never can, produce works that are to stand by a comparison with realities.

  John Constable

  Reality, Imagination, Looks

  John Constable (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of John Constable (Illustrated)”, p.584, Delphi Classics

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• Poetry operates by raising our curiosity, engaging the mind by degrees to take an interest in the event, keeping that event suspended, and surprising at last with an unexpected catastrophe. The painter's art is more confined, and has nothing that corresponds with, or perhaps is equivalent to, this power and advantage of leading the mind on, till attention is totally engaged. What is done by Painting, must be done at one blow; curiosity has received at once all the satisfaction it can ever have.

  Joshua Reynolds

  Art, Blow, Curiosity

  Sir Joshua Reynolds (1842). “The Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds”, p.142

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• The Painter who seeks popularity in Art closes the door upon his own genius.

  Washington Allston

  Art, Doors, Genius

  Washington Allston, Richard Henry Dana (1850). “Lectures on Art, and Poems”, p.171, Scholarly Pub Office Univ of

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• I have always been haunted by the feeling that the painter has much to gain from making use of the forces that tend to work against his action.

  Jean Dubuffet

  Feelings, Use, Gains

  "Jean Dubuffet, Works, writings Interviews". Book edited by Valerie da Costa and Fabrice Hergott; Ediciones Polígrafa, Barcelona, p. 9, 2006.

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• What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist: "Paint me just as I am." Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it.

  Aubrey Beardsley

  Photography, Artist, Perfect

  "Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography". Book by Matthew Sturgis, p. 189, 1999.

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