Painter Quotes - Page 3

• Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity. I don't see a different purpose for it now.

  Dorothea Tanning

  Art, Different, Purpose

  75 Copy quote

• We speak of concrete and not abstract painting because nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a color, a surface.

  Theo van Doesburg

  Art, Real, Color

  62 Copy quote

• One curator said he didn't want my work in his gallery because it was so simple even children understood it. I thought, what a wonderful tribute!

  Ted Harrison

  Art, Children, Work

  27 Copy quote

• The evolution of the New Era rests on the cornerstone of Knowledge and Beauty.

  Nicholas Roerich

  Beauty, Knowledge, Knowing

  Nicholas Roerich (1990). “Heart of Asia: Memoirs from the Himalayas”, p.1, Inner Traditions / Bear & Co

  62 Copy quote

  Show source

• All works, no matter what or by whom painted, are nothing but bagatelles and childish trifles... unless they are made and painted from life, and there can be nothing... better than to follow nature.

  Caravaggio

  Life, Art, Nature

  78 Copy quote

• The purpose of my work was never to destroy but always to create, to construct bridges, because we must live in the hope that humankind will draw together and that the better we understand each other the easier this will become.

  Alphonse Mucha

  Hope, Bridges, Creating

  197 Copy quote

• Art is long. Life is short. A picture can become for us a highway between a particular thing and a universal feeling.

  Lawren Harris

  Life, Art, Long

  61 Copy quote

• Art is a spiritual, immaterial respite from the hardships of life.

  Fernando Botero

  Life, Spiritual, Art

  69 Copy quote

• Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not....All colours arouse specific associative ideas, psychologically material or tangible, while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.

  Yves Klein

  Art, Blue, Color

  109 Copy quote

• Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.

  Chuck Close

  Work, Inspiration, Ideas

  76 Copy quote

• Abstract is not a style. I simply want to make a surface work. This is just a use of space and form: it's an ambivalence of forms and space.

  Joan Mitchell

  Space, Style, Use

  102 Copy quote

• The artist must paint as he would speak. I don’t want people to speculate what I mean, I want them to understand.

  David Alfaro Siqueiros

  Mean, Artist, People

  87 Copy quote

• It was not that the jagged precipices were lofty, that the encircling woods were the dimmest shade, or that the waters were profoundly deep; but that over all, rocks, wood, and water, brooded the spirit of repose, and the silent energy of nature stirred the soul to its inmost depths.

  Thomas Cole

  Nature, Rocks, Water

  Thomas Cole (1980). “The collected essays and prose sketches”

  87 Copy quote

  Show source

• I don't go into the studio with the idea of 'saying' something. What I do is face the blank canvas and put a few arbitrary marks on it that start me on some sort of dialogue.

  Richard Diebenkorn

  Ideas, Faces, Arbitrary

  61 Copy quote

• Art is a line around your thoughts.

  Gustav Klimt

  Art, Thinking, Deep Thought

  Gustav Klimt, Ankriktip, Abelia Serotina (2016). “Gustav Klimt Artworks”, p.17, Book and Magazine

  72 Copy quote

  Show source

• Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Art, Hands, Doe

  36 Copy quote

• Color and I are one. I am a painter.

  Paul Klee

  Art, Color

  1914 The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898-1918, entry 926.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.

  Henry Moore

  Art, Jobs, Mistake

  Henry Moore, Alan G. Wilkinson (2002). “Henry Moore-- Writings and Conversations”, p.20, Univ of California Press

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

  Claude Monet

  Art, Nature, Flower

  18 Copy quote

• There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

  Henri Matisse

  Art, Flower, Rose

  28 Copy quote

• A flattering painter, who made it his care To draw men as they ought to be, not as they are.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Men, Care, Made

  Oliver Goldsmith (1856). “The Works of Oliver Goldsmith: Comprising His Poems, Comedies, Essays, and Vicar of Wakefield”, p.28

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Great art picks up where nature ends.

  Marc Chagall

  Art, Ends, Artist

  92 Copy quote

• Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.

  Edvard Munch

  Art, Eye, Soul

  108 Copy quote

• It therefore should be possible for even the photographer - just as for the creative poet or painter - to use the object as a stepping stone to a realm of meaning completely beyond itself.

  Clarence John Laughlin

  Creative, Use, Stones

  8 Copy quote

• I have tried to preserve in my relationship to the film the same closeness and intimacy that exists between a painter and his canvas.

  Norman McLaren

  Art, Hypnosis, Canvas

  8 Copy quote