Quotes About Interpretation

With a painting, you don't have to go back and paint it again.

Occasionally, when I get mad at a woman, I'll do some great, awful painting about her.

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

Painting is a language of its own. You cannot interpret one form of expression with another form of expression.

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.

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.

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.

You know, painting has given me a lot of freedom, because for some reason, I've been able to paint things, organize things in a way that I see that don't have any buffers or compromises in them.

Easel painting means small painting.

When I'm painting and drawing I only do people. Acting is obviously portraiture - and writing is as well.

Painting, I think it's like jazz.

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.

I love film - it's like painting.

In film, you're painting a canvas. I got really excited about that.

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.

A great painting is a great painting.

To me, this was an oxymoron, doing a painting of a dancer. Dancers are always moving.

If you look at a painting that you love by one of the great masters, every time you go back to it, you see something different - a different attitude or brushstroke. 'Hamlet' is like an entire gallery of old masters.

I have to go with what the painting says to me. The painting is always informing me. I'm its servant; it's not mine. I'm doing what it wants.

The question I ask myself when adapting a book is how do I be true to the spirit and soul of the character? How would I describe this character in my medium? If you asked one person to do a painting of something and another to create a sculpture of it, you'll never ask, 'Why doesn't the painting look like the sculpture?'

I like to think of my work and the way people approach it in the same way people approach a Lichtenstein painting. You can write a one-hundred-page dissertation about why he used comics. Or it could be like, 'This is cute!'

I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended.