Quotes About Painting

In the trunk of her car, my mother used to keep a collapsible easel, a clutch of brushes, a little wooden case stocked with tubes of paint, and, tucked into the spare-tire well, one of my father's old, tobacco-stained shirts, for a smock.

Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn't realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.

The work ethic at art school is completely different than the work ethic amongst people who get into music. People who paint, it's an honorable thing to spend all day and all night in front of your canvas - that is the romantic vision of the painter.

It is impossible to know what fate will bring. If you love to write or paint, you will keep on writing or painting, and things will either work out or not, and you just have to keep being in the process.

I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.

The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

I enjoy painting. It's an incredible release of tension, and I feel very excited doing it. I squeeze out some wonderful red paint, and I get a thrill. My heart starts beating faster. It's almost a sensual thing working with these thick acrylic paints. I almost want to put my hands in.

If I failed in acting, I wanted to have a backup, thus I chose architecture. I learnt painting as well.

Heart is tied with a lot of controversies, a lot of heartbreaks in show business. With 'Love Marie' who I really am in the real world. I feel more free, I feel more clean. I feel like people don't judge me, and that is why I shy away from being Heart when it comes to my painting.

I'm too intelligent to be a good painter; to be a good painter you've got to be a bit stupid - with the exception of Velázquez who is a genius.

The arts which need interpretation are the arts of time -- music and poetry -- and not the arts of space -- sculpture and painting.

I visit him a few times downtown while he paints. We talk about how he's going to Spain for the fall semester and he shows me a painting he did and points to this one part, a bridge, and tells me he thought of me when he painted it. It is so sad how knowing something so small can make me so happy.

Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it.

The artist has some internal experience that produces a poem, a painting, a piece of music. Spectators submit themselves to the work, which generates an inner experience for them. But historically it's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectators experience should be identical to, or have anything to do with, the artist's. That idea comes from an over-industrialized society which has learned to distrust magic.

There is something particularly fascinating about seeing places you know in a piece of art - be that in a film, or a photograph, or a painting.

It may be that just as tonality recurs in music and realism in painting, so the idea of liberalism recurs in politics-though each time in a different vein.

I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.

In the middle 1940s... I heard everyone live. Painting, the theater; everything was happening. It was an exciting time when New York was the place to be.

Instead of using brushes all the time, try a palette knife to paint.

I draw all the time. Drawing is my backbone. I don't think a painter has to be able to draw, I just think that if you draw, you better draw well.

Such compositions, line and color ideas, such wonders come into my mind and have stuck! - They will this time be dismissed only by being painted out.

I didn't know what to expect from a famous movie star; maybe that he'd be sort of stuck-up, you know. But not Gary Cooper. He horsed around so much... that I had a hard time painting him.

I advance all of my canvas at one time.

No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book, or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.