Painting Quotes - Page 14

• the most deeply moving element in the contemplation of beauty is the element of loss. We desire to hold; but the sunset melts into the night, and the secret of the painting on the wall can never be the secret of the buyer.

  Pamela Hansford Johnson

  Beauty, Wall, Moving

  Pamela Hansford Johnson (1952). “Catherine Carter: A Novel”, London Macmillan 1952.

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• Describing beauty is almost impossible because we perceive it, rather than describe it. If you look at a Rembrandt painting and start to try and describe what the beauty is you see, your words sound absolutely pathetic.

  John Lennox

  Trying, Sound, Looks

  Source: www.asenseofawe.net

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• In matters like writing and painting, a man does what he has to do - if he has to write, why then, he writes; and if he doesn't feel the urgent need of writing, there are dozens of professions in which it is easier to earn a comfortable living.

  Malcolm Cowley

  Writing, Men, Doe

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• When you see Hitler burning paintings by Salvador Dali and Picasso he's telling you that this time period and these men and this culture didn't exist, and I've seen that happen in other countries, Sudan for instance, it's not enough to kill them you have to destroy all of their markings that they left that was their history.

  George Clooney

  Country, Men, Culture

  "The Monuments Men - George Clooney interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• What interests me is all the stuff that goes into abstract and abstract-figurative art. Not the styles, but the stuff that, in various combinations, make the styles: mixing and matching painting methods and ideas.

  Ed Askew

  Art, Ideas, Style

  Interview with Christian Filardo, logger.believermag.com. November 27, 2013.

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• In part of Lord Kames' Elements of Criticism, he says that "music improves the relish of a banquet." That I deny,--any more than painting might do. They may both be additional pleasures, as well as conversation is, but are perfectly distinct notices; and cannot, with the least propriety, be said to mix or blend with the repast, as none of them serve to raise the flavor of the wine, the sauce, the meat, or help to quicken appetite. But music and painting both add a spirit to devotion, and elevate the ardor.

  Laurence Sterne

  Music, Wine, Criticism

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• You take a painting, you have a white, virginal piece of canvas that is the world of purity, and then you put your imagery on it, and you try to bring it back to the original purity.

  Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

  White, Trying, Pieces

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• Nothing is so improving to the temper as the study of the beauties either of poetry, eloquence, music, or painting.

  David Hume

  Taste, Study, Temper

  David Hume (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of David Hume (Illustrated)”, p.579, Delphi Classics

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• One of the marks of true genius is a quality of abundance. A rich, rollicking abundance, enough to give indigestion to ordinary people. Great artists turn it out in rolls, in swatches. They cover whole ceilings with paintings, they chip out a mountainside in stone, they write not one novel but a shelf full. It follows that some of their work is better than other. As much as a third of it may be pretty bad. Shall we say this unevenness is the mark of their humanity - of their proud mortality as well as of their immortality?

  Catherine Drinker Bowen

  Writing, Artist, People

  Catherine Drinker Bowen (1961). “The Nature of the Artist: An Address Delivered at the Dedication Ceremonies for Lee Pattison Recital Hall, Wilbur Hall, Mary Kimberly Residence Hall”

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• what a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that's what writing is, I think that's what painting is. It's seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life. What all artists are trying to do is to make sense of life.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Writing, Character, Artist

  Nadine Gordimer, Nancy Topping Bazin, Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990). “Conversations with Nadine Gordimer”, p.140, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• I can always paint very well with my eyes, but with my hands it doesn't always work out.

  Kathe Kollwitz

  Eye, Hands, Work Out

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• Unlike music or poetry or painting, food rouses no response in passionate and emotional youth. Only when the surge of the blood is quieted does gastronomy come into its own with philosophy and theology and the sterner delights of the mind.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Philosophy, Food, Emotional

  Dorothy L Sayers (2009). “The Documents in the Case”, p.39, Hachette UK

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• What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting.

  August Wilhelm von Schlegel

  Art, Portraits, Portraiture

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• Sometimes I could quit paint and take to charring. It must be fine to clean perfectly, to shine and polish and know that it could not be done better. In painting that never occurs.

  Emily Carr

  Perfection, Shining, Done

  Emily Carr (2009). “Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr”, p.92, D & M Publishers

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• The drama embraces and applies all the beauties and decorations of poetry. The sister arts attend and adorn it. Painting, architecture, and music are her handmaids. The costliest lights of a people's intellect burn at her show. All ages welcome her.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Art, Drama, Light

  Robert Aris Willmott (1866). “Pleasures, Objects, and Advantages of Literature”, p.87

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• (Canada) - the most parochial nationette on earth ... I have been living in this sanctimonious icebox ... painting portraits of the opulent Methodists of Toronto. Methodism and money in this city have produced a sort of hell of dullness.

  Wyndham Lewis

  Cities, Canada, Portraits

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• Painting is so difficult that I would give it up if it were not so enjoyable.

  William McGregor Paxton

  Giving, Difficult, Enjoyable

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• We share a huge visual memory bank, mostly through painting and other images in history. I think when a modern photograph taps into those, sometimes very subliminally, it makes people respond.

  Chris Hondros

  Memories, Thinking, People

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• You start by copying other people's paintings or music or whatever. You get all of those skills before you branch out. Really creative people have a fantastic ability to copy things and then combine them in new ways. And whether we're talking about genes or memes, recombination is the real heart of creativity.

  Susan Blackmore

  Real, Heart, Creativity

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• What has made it work, or what makes certain paintings successful or not, has to do with my being a painter and a thinking, feeling person, more than my sex, color, height, origin.

  Helen Frankenthaler

  Sex, Successful, Thinking

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• I have never expected anything from my work but the satisfaction I could get from it by the very fact of painting and saying what I couldn't say otherwise.

  Frida Kahlo

  Art, Work, Satisfaction

  Frida Kahlo (1995). “The Letters of Frida Kahlo: Cartas Apasionadas”, Chronicle Books Llc

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• Remember always, in painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter will be your manner, and the fewer your words; and in painting, as in all the arts and acts of life the secret of high success will be found, not in a fretful and various excellence, but in a quiet singleness of justly chosen aim.

  John Ruskin

  Art, Secret, Excellence

  John Ruskin (1868). “Precious Thoughts, Moral and Religious”, p.155

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• There are pictures by Titian so steeped in golden splendors, that they look as if they would light up a dark room like a solar lamp.

  George Stillman Hillard

  Dark, Light, Rooms

  George Stillman Hillard (1854). “Six Months in Italy”, p.52

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• Without the definiteness of sculpture and painting, music is, for that very reason, far more suggestive. Like Milton's Eve, an outline, an impulse, is furnished, and the imagination does the rest.

  Henry Theodore Tuckerman

  Music, Imagination, Doe

  Henry Theodore Tuckerman (1852). “The Optimist: A Series of Essays”, p.61

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• I get inspiration from things that have nothing to do with painting: caricature, items from newspapers, sights in the street, proverbs, nursery-rhymes, children's games and songs, nightmares, desires, terrors. ... That question [why do you paint?] has been put to me before and my answer was, 'To give terror a face.' But it's more than that. I paint because I can't help it.

  Paula Rego

  Song, Art, Children

  John McEwen, Paula Rego (1992). “Paula Rego”

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