Quotes About Painting

Knowing how to paint and to use one's colors rightly has not any connection with originality. This originality consists in properly expressing your own impressions.

Not even by painting my window with colourful dreams can I block out the noise of the life outside, oblivious to my gazing at it.

Since Courbet, it's been believed that painting is addressed to the retina. That was everyone's error. The retinal shudder! Before, painting had other functions: it could be religious, philosophical, moral... our whole century is completely retinal, except for the Surrealists, who tried to go outside it somewhat.

Painting, for me, is a dynamic balance and wholeness of life; it is mysterious and transcending, yet solid and real.

Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?

Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect, but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion.

Well, painting is the one thing I do, that is just me. It's me and easels, and the pencils. And as long as I don't drool too much over the canvas, the colors come out pretty good. And it's a chance to express all that I've got inside, that I sometimes keep hidden. And I think that's why I paint big broad, wide open landscapes.

Eisenhower had about the most expressive face I ever painted, I guess. Just like an actor's. Very mobile. When he talked, he used all the facial muscles. And he had a great, wide mouth that I liked. When he smiled, it was just like the sun came out.

I painted the Astor-Victoria sign seven times, and it's 395 feet wide and 58 feet high. I dropped a gallon of purple paint on Seventh Avenue and 47th Street from 15 stories up and didn't kill anybody. I dropped a brush at Columbus Circle. It fell on a guy's camel-hair coat.

It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism.

I have just returned from Arenas and feel very tired. His Excellency loaded me with a thousand honours; I have painted his portrait and that of his wife and boy and girl with unexpected success, for other artists had been there previously and not been successful.

I was drawn to painting and filmmaking because I was interested in communicating visually, which spills over into my tendencies as a writer.

I work on stretched linen canvas, sized so that the surface already has a sense of tension when I begin. It is a very rich and reactive surface. I begin by drawing on the canvas with a kind of loose line, very simply and freely. I paint very thinly, which allows me to change the drawing if I want to.

I think when somebody's painting they don't necessarily... I'm not illustrating what I know. I'm mapping out, like topographically, some terrain I am satisfied with, how awkward that mark is.

The final test of a painting, theirs, mine, any other, is: does the painter's emotions come across?

I was a terrible painter - my portraits looked like the evil chimera love-children of Picasso's demoiselles and the BBC test card clown.

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.

I didn't want painting to be simply an act of emphasizing one color to do something to another color, like using red to intensify green, because that would imply some subordination of red. I didn't want color to serve me.

days.Behind the bar was a painting of a reclining naked woman. Over time, several would-be marksmen had tried to augment the painting by putting bullet holes in strategic places. Most had missed.

My friend (if I may still call him that) believed in humanity, and so he also believed in order, in the order of painting and the order of words, since words are what we paint with. He believed in redemption. Deep down he may even have believed in progress. Coincidence, on the other hand, is total freedom, our natural destiny. Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don't know what they are.

What are you doing here?" All right, he was standing in front of an easel, holding a paint palette and brush. "Taxidermy?" he responded with just a touch of his own sarcasm.

The hardest part of training a painter is showing him how to introduce emotion into his work,

Some men are gifted to paint, some to write, and some to lead men. For me it was always to e this, not to kill men, although in the years to come I was to kill more than I liked, but to command such situations as this.

Popart was oorspronkelijk bedoeld als een belediging, maar al in 1963 moest Lichtensteien in een interview vaststellen dat het moeilijk was een schilderij te maken dat de mensen niet aan de wand zouden willen hangen: alles werd aan de wand gehangen, de mensen zouden eraan gewend raken. Zelfs tegen de alom afgewezen commerciële kunst was men niet haatdragend genoeg.