Quotes About Painting

I am only interested in painting the actual person, in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong.

When I'm working, I'm pretty busy with that, but when I'm not, yeah, I like to make music. I sing in jazz bars and stuff, and then I mainly paint every day. It's kind of like a different side of my mind I like to use, and it keeps the other one fresh, and yeah, writing, I've been writing with some friends.

Contrary to what many Westerners believe, Islam has a rich tradition of secular painting in spite of its ban on images. It is only in religious rituals that the use of pictorial representation is totally prohibited.

Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.

I would love to have been a painter in the tradition of the surrealist painters who I admire so much.

My whole purpose of taking on miniature painting was to break the tradition, to experiment with it, to find new ways of making meaning, to question the relevance of it.

I'm not a painter by any stretch of the imagination; I'm a dyed-in-the-wool traditional illustrator, and I begin with black and white. If I need colour, I add it over the top. There's a calligraphic element to it... it's about the texture of lines on the page.

Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

Art is important because when people start to forget, art reminds them what happened. Like 'Guernica.' People would not remember the tragedy of Guernica today if it were not for that painting.

My interest in society - at times so pronounced that the word 'snob' comes a little to mind - derives from the fact that I like an immense number of things which society, money, and position bring in their train: painting, tapestries, rare books, smart dresses, dances, gardens, country houses, correct cuisine, and pretty women.

I was trained as a fine artist. I went to a progressive public school in Pennsylvania that developed these talents, but I was never able to apply to a decent college because I had no math, no science - I was allowed to just paint all day and write.

I was a painting contractor for a while and then a dog trainer. I opened my own business dog training and had some success.

We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

I have to take it as a given that I have got a certain ability to do something. I can be an artist, which is take something and transform it into another thing. I can just see something, and I can see my painting.

In the bit of painting that I've done, I'm interested in colour and texture. I'm very interested in transparency.

It is generally admitted that the most beautiful qualities of a color are in its transparent state, applied over a white ground with the light shining through the color.

Well, then, let's not just trust the likelihood based on painting.

Reading is an act of friendly isolation. When we are reading, we make ourselves unapproachable in a tactful way. Perhaps that is exactly what has interested painters for so long in the portrayal of readers: showing people in a state of deepest intimacy not intended for outsiders. If the viewer were to approach the reader in real life, this condition would immediately be threatened. So painting allows us to see what we actually cannot see, or see only at the price of destroying it.

Don't work bit by bit, but paint everything at once by placing tones everywhere. —CAMILLE PISSARRO

I'm not at all interested in painting the object just as it is in nature. Certainly I'm much more interested in the mood of a thing than the truth of a thing.

I owe you the truth in painting, and I will tell it to you.

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting

I paint the cot, As truth will paint it, and as bards will not.

My skills are not of the highest caliber, but I know a thing or two, and I occasionally produce a painting that contains passages of truth and beauty.