Painting Quotes - Page 27

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Photography is not only drawing with light, though light is the indispensable agent of its being. It is modeling or sculpturing with light, to reproduce the plastic form of natural objects. It is painting with light.

  Berenice Abbott

  Photography, Light, Drawing

  Berenice Abbott (1944). “A guide to better photography”

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• There is no right and wrong way to paint except honestly or dishonestly. Honestly is trying for the bigger thing. Dishonestly is bluffing and getting through a smattering of surface representation with no meaning.

  Emily Carr

  Trying, Way, Bigger

  Emily Carr (2009). “Opposite Contraries: The Unknown Journals of Emily Carr and Other Writings”, p.76, D & M Publishers

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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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• 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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• 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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• The ephemeral nature of live performance is the part I love most - it's a monk's sand painting, carefully constructed, then wiped away in an instant.

  Rosanne Cash

  Ephemeral, Sand, Monk

  Rosanne Cash (2010). “Composed: A Memoir”, p.133, Penguin

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• Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.

  Susan Sontag

  Photography, Ongoing, Pieces

  Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

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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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• 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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• Used to be, conservatives revered the Average American, that Norman Rockwell oil painting of diner food, humble faith, honest toil, and Capraesque virtue.

  James Wolcott

  Humble, Oil Painting, Average

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• Paintings, like dreams, have a life of their own and I have always painted very much the way I dream.

  Leonor Fini

  Dream, Art, Way

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• On painting and fighting looke aloofe.
  [On painting and fighting look aloof.]

  George Herbert

  Fighting, Looks, Aloof

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• Seurat and Signac mixed paintings with the dry and abstract laws of science. This approach, in my opinion, usually strays from the purpose of art in general. Because it means that one cannot expect from an artifact, that is created with mathematical laws, to establish an improbable and irrational relationship between the work and the viewer.

  Guity Novin

  Art, Mean, Law

  Negin magazine, No 77, p. 57, 1971.

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• During my youth, I was fascinated by the colors of Van Goth's paintings

  Joseph Pisani

  Color, Youth, Goth

  Article by Natalie Isenring, Tages Anzeiger, January 24, 2008.

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• My favourite painting is often the one or the collection that I am currently working on. This is probably due to the fact that I don't yet know where it will take me.

  Joseph Pisani

  Facts, Favourite, Take Me

  "The Conceptual Artist". Inside Switzerland magazine, Summer 2006.

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• Art, if it is successful in the task of questioning reality, if it is good painting and not merely a performance of dexterity, will be an affirmation of God.

  Patrick Swift

  Art, Successful, Reality

  Patrick Swift (1993). “PS -- of Course: Patrick Swift, 1927-1983”

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• There are dance artists, painting artists and writing artists. Authors are writing artists. You can practice art in whatever medium you choose, and words are mine.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Art, Writing, Practice

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• Everybody's creative. We create our songs and our paintings, our families and our children. Every one of us is on the cutting edge of the future.

  Buffy Sainte-Marie

  Song, Children, Cutting

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• There is an exercise I teach at colleges: Get yourself a canvas and a bunch of acrylics and go into a very dimly lighted room. Dip a brush into one of the colors, slap it on the canvas, don't look, close your eyes, make a painting, don't look, turn the lights on and see what you've got. I think this releases people from the editor in their life that's always standing over their shoulder saying, "Oh, you don't have any talent; who do you think you are?"

  Buffy Sainte-Marie

  Eye, Exercise, College

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• It's not fiction's job to be photographically representative of reality. If I want to make a fictional world where there's no kindness, this doesn't mean I believe there's no kindness in the real world. In fact, what it may mean is that I very much value kindness. Like if you make a painting in which only greens are allowed, it wouldn't mean you don't believe in blue.

  George Saunders

  Jobs, Kindness, Real

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