Painter Quotes - Page 13

• I'm an ambitious self-publicist out of necessity. I've never been one to miss an opportunity because I've never had any illusions about how hard it is to survive as a painter... It's been an extra driving force to be able to prove the sceptics wrong.

  Stuart Pearson Wright

  Opportunity, Self, Missing

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Painters are noted for being dissipated and wild.

  William Blake

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

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Who would be an artist that was perfectly happy? Maybe nowadays, but when I grew up in the '60s, you had nobody in the art club who was popular. No cheerleaders in the art club. I was told that I couldn't be a painter by my first painting teacher. I said I wanted to go to Cooper and be an art student, and he said, "You'll be a waitress." It was really the strangely indifferent parenting.

  Amy Sillman

  Teacher, Art, Cheerleader

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• Take away a painter's vanity, said a famous landscape painter, and he will never touch a pencil again.

  Walter J. Phillips

  Vanity, Landscape, Said

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• I have no wish to be remembered as a painter, for I never was a painter; my idea of that profession was perhaps too exalted; I may say, is too exalted. I leave it to others more worthy to fill the niches of art.

  Samuel Morse

  Art, Ideas, Wish

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