Quotes About Perception

I get a lot of people that say, 'You know what, I heard that you're a painter, and I thought, 'Oh, another model who is saying she's an artist.' They assumed it was going to be a few splashes on a canvas.

I have always been a fan of Salvador Dali, but Amrita Sher-Gil, who was an Indian-Hungarian painter, is another favourite. She was painting Indian women, and, growing up here, I'd never seen anyone paint Indian women, so that was really incredible to see a painting of someone who looks like you. I think that has a lot of impact on you.

Real painters understand with a brush in their hand.

I think that most people think painters are kind of ridiculous, you know?

Painters 'see' the world; musicians 'hear' it.

Through a painting we can see the whole world.

Language is much closer to film than painting is.

There's something always instinctively visually right about nature. There's no difference, to my eye, between looking at a great painting and looking at nature. Because painting, when it's great, has the same immutable rightness, unquestioned rightness, about it.

I'm not knocking conceptual art; it's another department, but it doesn't move me like painting.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

If you want to paint the inner life, you paint it from the exterior. From the exterior, you breathe the inner life into your painting.

I always feel attacked when I'm asked about my painting.

Painting contains a divine force which... makes the dead seem almost alive.

If it weren't for how esoteric the art world likes to be, I would love actually to play the music in the shows, painting the music that influences me most.

If I had been around when Rubens was painting, I would have been revered as a fabulous model. Kate Moss? Well, she would have been the paintbrush.

I believe that the reason why I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective. There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.

There are people who don't respond to color. That's what painting is. It's color.

A painting has to be beautiful. Even in its grotesqueness.

My parents felt that acting was far too insecure. Don't ask me what made them think that painting would be more secure.

When I go to an art gallery and stand in front of a painting, I don't want someone telling me what I should be seeing or thinking; I want to feel whatever I feel, see whatever I see, and figure out what I figure out.

Painting is a coalescing of experience.

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.

As a kid, there was a painting of 'Appeal to the Great Spirit' that I would see when I would get oatmeal bowls out of the cupboard. This painting, it was so real to me that it frightened me.

In England, there is a dividing line between artists and illustrators, who are thought inferior to painters. Well, that's absolute rubbish. Some of the most creative work is being done in children's books. In Japan, everything is art. They don't say painting is better than ceramics or dress design.