60 Painting Quotes

If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

What a splendid thing watercolour is to express atmosphere and distance, so that the figure is surrounded by air and can breathe in it.

What I always longed to do was to be able to paint like I can draw, most artists would tell you that, they would all like to paint like they can draw.

With chemical film, it was possible to alter photographs, but you had to be an expert. That's not true any more. The LA Times fired a photographer at the beginning of the Iraq War for editing two shots together. Photography is crumbling. Certainly it is for the newspapers a bit now, isn't it? There will be painting again, absolutely!

I can get excitement watching rain on a puddle. And then I paint it. Now, I admit, there are not too many people who would find that exciting. But I would. And I want life thrilling and rich. And it is. I make sure it is.

Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk. Why shouldn't painting be too?

Drawing is the artist's most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality.

A painter paints the appearance of things, not their objective correctness, in fact he creates new appearances of things.

That's one thing that's always, like, been a difference between, like, the performing arts, and being a painter, you know. A painter does a painting, and he paints it, and that's it, you know. He has the joy of creating it, it hangs on a wall, and somebody buys it, and maybe somebody buys it again, or maybe nobody buys it and it sits up in a loft somewhere until he dies. But he never, you know, nobody ever, nobody ever said to Van Gogh, 'Paint a Starry Night again, man!' You know? He painted it and that was it.

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.

The thing that makes you know that Vernon Ward is a good painter is if you look at his ducks, you can see the eyes follow you around the room.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

What a splendid thing watercolour is to express atmosphere and distance, so that the figure is surrounded by air and can breathe in it.

To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

Painting is something that takes place among the colors, and ... one has to leave them alone completely, so that they can settle the matter among themselves. Their intercourse: this is the whole of painting. Whoever meddles, arranges, injects his human deliberation, his wit, his advocacy, his intellectual agility in any way, is already disturbing and clouding their activity.

The so-called conscientiousness of the great majority of painters is nothing but perfection laboriously applied to the art of being boring.

A picture must possess a real power to generate light ... for a long time now I've been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light.

A painter must compensate the natural deficiencies of his art. He has but one sentence to utter, but one moment to exhibit. He cannot, like the poet or historian, expatiate.

I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.

The painter of the future will be a colorist, such as has never yet existed. Manet was working towards it, but as you know the Impressionists have already got a stronger color than Manet. This painter of the future- I can't imagine him doing the rounds of the local dives, having false teeth and frequenting the Zouave brothel like me.

I have three masters: Nature, Velazquez and Rembrandt.

I do not literally paint the table, but the emotion it produces on me...

In future I will live by my water-colours.

In my yellow room, sunflowers with purple eyes stand out against a yellow background; the ends of their stalks bathe in a yellow pot on a yellow table. In one corner of the painting, the painter's signature: Vincent. And the yellow sun, coming through the yellow curtains of my room, floods all this flowering with gold, and in the morning, when I wake up in my bed, I have the impression that it all smells very good. Oh yes! he loved yellow, did good Vincent, the painter from Holland, gleams of sunlight warming his soul, which detested fog. A craving for warmth. When the two of us were together in Arles, both of us insane, and constantly at war over beautiful colors, I adored red; where could I find a perfect vermilion? He, taking his yellowest brush, wrote on the suddenly purple wall: I am of sound mind, I am the Holy Ghost.

I've started painting much more freely, and faster. I think it's working in the theatre that did it. You know what the Glyndebourne scene-painters said about my The Magic Flute? They said they had to wear sunglasses to paint it.

How awful it is not being able to see clearly any more! I have had to give up drawing and painting and for years now content myself with sculpture ... But if my eyesight continues to dim I won't even be able to model any more. What will I do with my days then?

My paintings are allegories not portraits.

The more I think about colour, the more convinced I become that this reflected half-tint is the principle that must predominate, because it is this that gives the true tone, the tone that constitutes the value, the thing that matters in giving life and character to the object. Light, to which the schools teach us to attach equal importance and which they place on the canvas at the same time as the half-tint and shadow, is really only an accident. Without grasping this principle, one cannot understand true colour, I mean the colour that gives the feeling of thickness and depth and of that essential difference that distinguishes one object from another.

Painting, in the beginning, was a trade like any other. Some men became picture-makers as others became glaziers or carpenters. Painters painted shields, saddles and banners. The primitive painter was more of a craftsman than we are; he learned his trade superlatively well before he thought of letting himself go. The reverse is true today.

Ferdinand-Victor-Eugene Delacroix, a painter of noble lineage, who carried a sun in his head and storms in his heart; who for forty years played upon the keyboard of human passions, and whose brush- grandiose, terrifying or tender- passed from saints to warriors, from warriors to lovers, from lovers to tigers, and from tigers to flowers.

His remains the finest palette in France and nobody in our country has possessed at once such calm and pathos, such shimmering color. We all paint in him.

One must paint all the phenomena of the world as an enigma.

Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements at the painter's disposal for the expression of his feelings.

La peinture est le plus beau de tous les arts; en lui se resument toutes les sensations, a son aspect chacun peut, au gre de son imagination, creer le roman, d'un seul coup d'?il avoir l'ame envahie par les plus profonds souvenirs; point d'effort de memoire, tout resume en un seul instant. - Art complet qui resume tous les autres et les complete. - Comme la musique, il agit sur l'ame par l'intermediaire des sens, les tons harmonieux correspondant aux harmonies des sons; mais en peinture on obtient une unite impossible en musique ou les accords viennent les uns apres les autres, et le jugement eprouve alors une fatigue incessante s'il veut reunir la fin au commencement. En somme, l'oreille est un sens inferieur a celui de l'?il. L'ouie ne peut servir qu'a un seul son a la fois, tandis que la vue embrasse tout, en meme temps qu'a son gre elle simplifie.

Comment voyez-vous cet arbre? Il est bien vert? Mettez donc du vert, le plus beau vert de votre palette; - et cette ombre, plutot bleue? Ne craignez pas la peindre aussi bleue que possible.

One may wonder if any painter in the last century put more meaning into his sense of color than Gauguin.

The vision of the artist or the poet is the intermediate determinant between the subject (the person) and the objective pole (the world-waiting-to-be). It will be nonbeing until the poet's struggle brings forth an answer - meaning. The greatness of a poem or a painting is not that it portrays the thing observed or experienced, but that it portrays the artist's or the poet's vision cued off by his encounter with the reality. Hence the poem or the painting is unique, original, never to be duplicated. No matter how many times Monet returned to paint the cathedral at Rouen, each canvas was a new painting expressing a new vision.

Pintar un cuadro es o muy sencillo o imposible.

Modernist tasks and liberties have stirred up a canny diffidence among painters of the largest accomplishment when pressed to talk about their art. It appears unseemly, or naive, to have much to say about the pictures or to attach to them any explicit 'program.' No more theories expounding an ideal way of painting. And, as statements wither and with them counter-statements, hardly anything in the way of provocation either. Decorum suggests that artists sound somewhat trapped when being drawn out, and venturing a few cagey glimpses of intention.

Starry starry night, paint your palette blue and grey Look out on a summer's day with eyes that know the darkness in my soul Shadows on the hills, sketch the trees and the daffodils Catch the breeze and the winter chills, in colors on the snowy linen land.

The medieval pictures I painted were inspired by the impressions of old Schwabing.

I more or less dissolved the objects(in my improvisations) so that not all of them could be recognised at once,so that the spiritual overtones could be gradually experienced by the viewer one after the other...and here and there even purely abstract forms came in of their own accord,in other words,that had to have a purely painterly effect.

My paintings are small but each one is an enigma

There's one of [Jean-Michel Basquiat's] paintings called Riding With Death. That's my favorite. (1995)

Painting isn't an aethetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us.

Yo no digo todo, mas pinto todo.

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.

The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen.

'My painting does not come from the easel. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.' -Quoted in 'Jackson Pollock: is he the greatest living painter in the United States?' LIFE 8 Aug. 1949: 42-45

A dripping wet canvas covered the entire floor. ... There was complete silence. ... Pollock looked at the painting. Then, unexpectedly, he picked up can and paint brush and started to move around the canvas. It was as if he suddenly realized the painting was not finished. His movements, slow at first, gradually became faster and more dance like as he flung black, white, and rust colored paint onto the canvas. He completely forgot that Lee and I were there; he did not seem to hear the click of the camera shutter. ... My photography session lasted as long as he kept painting, perhaps half an hour. In all that time, Pollock did not stop. How could one keep up this level of activity? Finally, he said 'This is it.'

Sounds and ideas are hanging in the air;I am devouring them and stuffing myself.A comment he wrote after viewing an exhibition of Viktor Hartmann's drawings and paintings which inspired his suite Pictures at an Exhibition

Is this a painting?