Quotes About Painting

It's to paint directly on the canvas without any funny business, as it were, and I use almost pure turpentine to start with, adding oil as I go along until the medium becomes pure oil. I use as little oil as I can possibly help, and that's my method.

Maybe I am not very human - what I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.

Music is a temporal art. Its patterns exist in time and require duration for their development and completion. Although painting and architecture and sculpture make statements about relationships between space, objects, and colours, these relationships are static.

It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themselves. And even external nature, with her climates, her tides, and her equinoctial storms, cannot, after Van Gogh's stay upon earth, maintain the same gravitation.

Regardless of what unsavory picture that has been painted of governmental organization, it is still far better than private corporation in appreciating the talent of working professionals.

'Art or anti-art?' was the question I asked when I returned from Munich in 1912 and decided to abandon pure painting or painting for its own sake. I thought of introducing elements alien to painting as the only way out of a pictorial and chromatic dead end.

Well, one always has an instinct to be a painter, and I've done quite a lot of painting at one time or another, though not with any public success.

When I have used cartoon images, I've used them ironically to raise the question, 'Why would anyone want to do this with modern painting?'

I have a pretty big range of interests. I love art; I love going to the museums. I dabble in painting, and although I'm not very good at it, I enjoy it.

for Kahlo, painting was a way of coping with being alone. That is, she painted herself as a second self, or 'imaginary companion', because she was so often emotionally alone.

From 1926 until her death she would continue to paint and draw numerous self-portraits, bestowing them as binding gifts to her husband, Diego Rivera, and to friends, lovers and admirers, beseeching them to remember her, always.

If the world could remain within a frame like a painting on the wall, I think we'd see the beauty then and stand staring in awe.

A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.

I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.

When I was 12 years old, I went to Natchitoches, La.; it was summer vacation with my family. We visited a plantation, Melrose. And I met an Afro-American woman who was a painter. I already had some idea of what I wanted to do in life, and one of the things that interested me was painting.

I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality, I can see myself, and it has helped me to say what I want to say in paint.

Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.

You buy any book on color theory today, and it's just complete poppycock. Everybody comes out of school painting pink, purple and green. The whole damn cartoon industry has pink purple and green on their mind.

I like to paint and spend a lot of time doing art. For me, it's about hearing yourself and putting it out there as art. It's like a therapy thing.

They say I'm insane because I need to have so much creative control. They say I'm unmanageable, but I'm not. I just know what I like. I'm obsessed with it. If you can't control it, that's like having somebody else paint your pictures. How could you do that? I never could.

Everybody thinks they know what art should be. But very few of them have the sense that is necessary to experience painting, that is the sense of sight, that sees colors and forms as living reality in the picture.

In fact, the figure in The Last Supper is not a woman: only the most partisan reading can place Mary Magdalene in the scene. Viewers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would have read the painting quite differently.

Such artistic forays into the countryside had been made easier by the invention, in 1824, of metal tubes for oil paints, which replaced the messy and awkward pig bladders in which artists of previous generations had kept their paints; and by the introduction of collapsible three-legged stools and portable easels, both of which could be carried into the countryside by the artist.18

Italians had a "national peculiarity" to use distinctive hand gestures and body language when they spoke: a resource that was, he believed, obvious to an Italian like Leonardo when he came to paint The Last Supper.