Quotes About Painting

I consider myself lucky to have had wonderful teachers. They expose you to a lot and basically teach you how to paint. I think of my career as a series of lucky incidents.

Chinese people do business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people. We do torture. Best torture.

Chinese people do many things," she said simply. "Chinese people do business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people. We do torture. Best torture.

Some boy in my class said Chinese people do Chinese torture." "Chinese people do many things," she said simply. "Chinese people do business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people. We do torture. Best torture.

What you call your lies are fiction and myths. The art of creating a disguise can be as beautiful as the creation of a painting… I created a woman for my artist life, bold, gay, courageous, generous, fearless; and another to please my father, a clear-sighted woman with a love of beauty, harmony, and self-discipline, critical and selective; and still another who lives in chaos, embraces the weak and the stumbling and the confused.

Altogether a noble form of self-deception, since the ultimate truth is that if a man is sensual, he will carry sensuality into his friendships too, into everything, including his enjoyment of music and painting etc.

Just as photography in the past freed painting from its concern for a certain sort of accuracy, so the phonograph will eventually no doubt rid the novel of the kind of dialogue which is drawn from the life and which realists take so much pride in.

truth? The Louvre

ALLUMINOR  (ALLU'MINOR)   n.s.[allumer, Fr. to light.] One who colours or paints upon paper or parchment; because he gives graces, light an ornament, to the letters or figures coloured.Cowell. 

Ich könnte jetzt nicht zeichnen, nicht einen Strich, und bin nie ein größerer Maler gewesen als in diesen Augenblicken.

In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.

All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this — as in other ways — they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.

The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.

Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.

When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act. Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)

The collaboration which sometimes follows is seldom based on good will: usually on desire, rage, fear, pity or longing. The modern illusion concerning painting (which post-modernism has done nothing to correct) is that the artist is the creator. Rather he is a reciever. What seems like creaton is the act of giving form to what he has recieved.

Thus painting itself had to be able to demonstrate the desirability of what money could buy. And the visual desirability of what can be bought lies in its tangibility, in how it will reward the touch, the hand, of the owner.

the very basic theme of poetry is that of time passing, the very basic theme of painting is that of the moment made permanent.

The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman. The moralizing, however, was mostly hypocritical. You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.

The child's face is close to her own now, but there is still no detail. It is a blur, a watercolor painting left out in the rain, the shades running, blending into one another. Only the eyes remain clear; black and hungry, jealous of life.

In a moment when criticism shows a singular dearth of direction every man has to be a law unto himself in matters of theatre, writing, and painting. While the American Mercury and the new Ford continue to spread a thin varnish of Ritz over the whole United States there is a certain virtue in being unfashionable.

A novel should be as like life as a painting, but not as like life as a piece of waxwork.

I want it to be more universal than that - like a painter doesn't have to explain his life story away to justify his painting.

My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impression of nature.