Painter Quotes - Page 25

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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 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 connoisseur of painting gives only bad advice to the painter. For that reason I have given up trying to judge myself.

  Pablo Picasso

  Giving, Judging, Advice

  Pablo Picasso (1972*). “Picasso: 90 Drawings and Works in Colour”

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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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• 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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