Painting Quotes - Page 9

• Read in order to write, but paint in order to paint.

  Sara Genn

  Writing, Order, Paint

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• To my way of thinking, the concept drawings that Rembrandt did, the drawings he made that he used to model his artists, to work out the compositions of his paintings: those are cartoons. Look at his sketch for the return of the prodigal son. The expression on the angry younger brother's face. The head is down; the eyebrow is just one curved line over the eyes. It communicates in a very shorthand way. It's beautiful, expressive, and, in a peculiar way, it's more powerful than the kind of stilted, formalized expression in the final painting.

  Jim Woodring

  Beautiful, Brother, Powerful

  Interview with Ross Simonini, staging.believermag.com. 2008.

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• I see paintings everywhere. I look at stuff and it looks like painting to me.

  Julian Schnabel

  Looks, Stuff

  Interview with Mark Grotjahn, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 11, 2013.

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• Painting figures is the hardest, certainly the most taxing genre, and you have to be the most on your game. If you have significant drawing problems, the figure will fall apart and it will read wrong emotionally.

  Jacob Collins

  Beauty, Fall, Games

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• Painting pictures didn't make me a lot of money. I have to eat.

  Ralph Bakshi

  Painting A Picture, Lots Of Money

  Interview with Ken P., www.ign.com. May 25, 2004.

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• I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say "he feels deeply, he feels tenderly".

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Art, People, Want

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• There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning. An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, School, Should Have

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• Painting, like any art, comprises a technique, a workmanlike handling of material, but the accuracy of a tone and the fictitious combination of effects depend entirely on the choice made by the artist.

  Paul Cezanne

  Art, Choices Made, Technique

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• All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression. To call this expression abstract seems to me often to confuse the issue. Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract . . . a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.

  Richard Diebenkorn

  Mean, Artist, Expression

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• If light is the spiritual quality of painting, color is surely its heart and passion.

  Robert Reynolds

  Spiritual, Passion, Heart

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• I always work out of uncertainty but when a painting's finished it becomes a fixed idea, apparently a final statement. In time though, uncertainty returns.. your thought process goes on.

  Georg Baselitz

  Artist, Ideas, Work Out

  Georg Baselitz (2010). “Georg Baselitz: Collected Writings and Interviews”

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• When you are painting you should take a flat mirror and often look at your work within it, and it will then be seen in reverse, and will appear to be by the hand of some other master, and you will be better able to judge of its faults than in any other way.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Mirrors, Hands, Judging

  Leonardo (da Vinci) (1957). “Notebooks”

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• Drawing is the most direct and personal kind of graphic expression. Unlike painting, it doesn't forgive. You put down your black line, and there it is - as inevitable as death.

  Tomi Ungerer

  Expression, Drawing, Black

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• A painting is nothing more than light reflected from the surface of a pigment-covered canvas. But a great painter can make you see the depth, make you feel the underlying emotion, make you sense the larger world. That, too, is the power of science: to sense and convey the depth and dimensionality of nature, to glance at the surface and to divine the shape of the universe around us.

  Carl Safina

  Light, Curiosity, Depth

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• I don't own any of my own paintings because a Picasso original costs several thousand dollars and that's a luxury I cannot afford.

  Pablo Picasso

  Art, Luxury, Dollars

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• In painting, as in the other arts, there's not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula. You come to nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat.

  Pierre-Auguste Renoir

  Art, Matter, Made

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• Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere.

  Philip Guston

  Memories, Artist, Magic

  Philip Guston, Clark Coolidge (2011). “Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations”, p.278, Univ of California Press

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• Once they witnessed one of his painting sold at auction for $100,000. And asked how you do it, he said, 'I feel as a horse must feel when the beautiful cup is given to the jockey.'

  Edgar Degas

  Beautiful, Horse, Art

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• If you're going to be an artist, all life is your subject. And all your experience is part of your art. A youngster told me recently that he was going to give himself a year to see if he has talent. A year! It takes a lifetime to see if you have it. Painting is total engagement.

  Ben Shahn

  Art, Years, Giving

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• Paintings are but research and experiment. I never do a painting as a work of art. All of them are researches. I search constantly and there is a logical sequence in all this research.

  Pablo Picasso

  Art, Research, Logical

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• Painting and sculpture, labour and good faith, have been my ruin and I continually go from bad to worse. Better it would have been for me if I had set myself to making matches in my youth. I should not be in such distress of mind.

  Michelangelo

  Stress, Mind, Sculpture

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• Have not Manet and Monet, Cézanne and Matisse, rendered to painting something of the same service which Keats and Shelley gave to poetry after the solemn and ceremonious literary perfections of the eighteenth century? They have brought back to the pictorial art a new draught of joie de vivre; and the beauty of their work is instinct with gaiety, and floats in sparkling air. I do not expect these masters would particularly appreciate my defence, but I must avow an increasing attraction to their work.

  Winston Churchill

  Art, Air, Appreciate

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• Something sacred, that's it. We ought to be able to say that such and such a painting is as it is, with its capacity for power, because it is "touched by God."

  Pablo Picasso

  Power, Sacred, Able

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• It is better decoration when, in painting, some monstrosity is introduced for variety and a relaxation of the senses and to attract the attention of mortal eyes, which at times desire to see that which they have never seen.

  Michelangelo

  Eye, Relaxation, Desire

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• In my opinion painting should be considered excellent in proportion as it approaches the effect of relief, while relief should be considered bad in proportion as it approaches the effect of painting.

  Michelangelo

  Relief, Opinion, Excellent

  Quoted in Robert J Clements (ed) Michelangelo: A Self-Portrait (1968).

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