Painter Quotes - Page 16

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

  William Blake

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

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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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• 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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• 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 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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• 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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• 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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