Painter Quotes - Page 12

• All inspired painters are impressionists, even though it be true that some impressionists are not inspired.

  Joaquin Sorolla

  Inspired, Being True, Impressionism

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• I hate darkness. Claude Monet once said that painting in general did not have light enough in it. I agree with him. We painters, however, can never reproduce sunlight as it really is. I can only approach the truth of it.

  Joaquin Sorolla

  Hate, Light, Darkness

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• When an artist begins to count strokes instead of regarding nature he is lost. This preoccupation with technique, at the expense of truth and sincerity, is the principal fault I find in much of the work of modern painters.

  Joaquin Sorolla

  Artist, Technique, Faults

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• I am interested in study, reflection, philosophy - but always as a dilettante. I also consider myself a dilettante as a painter.

  Antoni Tapies

  Philosophy, Reflection, Study

  "Antoni Tapies". UNESCO Courier, June 1994.

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• It has always been difficult for historians to fully grasp the intelligence of painters.

  Dore Ashton

  Difficult, Intellect, Historian

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• One thing about being a painter is that if you have a dog you are naturally going to spend a lot of time with him or her. It has always amazed me the closeness of that relationship even though a word was never spoken, intellect not any part of it.

  Ken Gillespie

  Dog, Intellect, Amazed

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• The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerises some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Canvas, Idiot, Staring

  Vincent van Gogh (2014). “Delphi Complete Works of Vincent van Gogh (Illustrated)”, p.2333, Delphi Classics

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• Art itself cannot be taught, but craftsmanship can. Architects, painters, sculptors are all craftsmen in the original sense of the word. Thus it is a fundamental requirement of all artistic creativity that every student undergo a thorough training in the workshops of all branches of the crafts.

  Walter Gropius

  Art, Creativity, Training

  "Paul Klee, 1879-1940: Poet of Colours, Masters of Lines". Book by Paul Klee and Susanna Partsch, p. 47, 2000.

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• Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit.

  Norman Mailer

  Summer, Winter, Artist

  Norman Mailer (2013). “Tough Guys Don't Dance: A Novel”, p.11, Random House

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• Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.

  Susan Sontag

  Perfection, Looks, Magazines

  Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

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• It is impossible to repeat in one period what was done in another.The pointof view isnotthesame, anymorethan are the tools, the ideals, the needs, or the painters' techniques.

  Pierre-Auguste Renoir

  Views, Technique, Needs

  FromRenoir's notebook, quoted in L Nochlin Impressionism and Post-Impressionism1874-1904 (1966).

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• Painters tend to ignore the challenges and thrills that sculptors enjoy daily - volume... like the perfect, imperfect voluminous oval of the egg.

  Sara Genn

  Eggs, Perfect, Challenges

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• Most artists, or at least most of the ones I know, deny having a philosophical outlook that they try to translate into their works. Some had thought of the work of Cezanne and others as being a 'painted epistemology.' But Cezanne himself denied this and Daniel-Henri Kahnwiler, the art critic and art dealer, insisted that none of the many painters he had known had a philosophical culture.

  Semir Zeki

  Art, Philosophy, Philosophical

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• As a painter, I realized that what we see is just manifestation of unseen power. Since then [1958 Coup in Iraq], reality started to take another form in my mind. Hence, I was aware of deception of our senses.

  Ala Bashir

  Reality, Iraq, Mind

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• Most important... develop your technical ability. You are handicapped if you do not develop well enough to hold the subconscious process so as not to have problems of inexperienced painters.

  Sergei Bongart

  Important, Problem, Enough

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• Sets of lines can say something about the direction and nature of the light. They are used by great fresco painters as a sign for shade.

  John French Sloan

  Light, Lines, Shade

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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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