Quotes About Painting

Paintings were more than mere wall decorations. Art was a reflection of the artist's soul and the world around them. To paint was to create impressions that brought joy or shed light on humankind's shared journey.

As for your Elizabeth's picture, you must not have it taken for what painter could do justice to those beautiful eyes? It would not be easy, indeed, to catch their expression, but their colour and shape, and the eyelashes, so remarkably fine, might be copied.

Filmmaking is a very collaborative art. Unlike a painting that an artist paints sitting by himself, as a director, you have to work with a team.

I was an art student when I was a boy, and as an art student you don't have to talk to anyone - you just have to paint really wonderful paintings. It's very unlike being an actor, where you have to talk all the time.

I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.

Louise Bonnet is a Los Angeles-based painter of round, fleshy, almost obscene shapes and people. But hers is a very clean, friendly cartoon world, so there's this tension between harmlessness and perversion that is totally unsettling.

In 1984, I was contacted by Michael Taylor, who had won a commission from a sponsor and decided he would like to paint a picture of me. I agreed to do it, because I'm not unused to sitting for portraits: my father was a commercial artist and I used to model for him.

It's very British to go about to see something unusual and paint it.

When Dick Avedon died, I was so upset that I just started painting.

A portrait, to be a work of art, neither must nor may resemble the sitter... one must paint its atmosphere.

Every good composition is above all a work of abstraction. All good painters know this. But the painter cannot dispense with subjects altogether without his work suffering impoverishment.

Three things are needed for success in painting and sculpture: to see beauty when young and accustom oneself to it, to work hard, and to obtain good advice.

If you begin with the middle-tone and work up from it toward the darks so that you deal last with your highest lights and darkest darks, you avoid false accents.

I'm a tireless worker; I don't consider painting a work, it is not an obligation, I do it for pleasure; I haven't found anything that amuses me more than painting.

It was the only thing I had to do. I worked to get rid of the time, even now I work for something to do. Painting is a wonderful way of getting rid of the days.

I'm known as a light artist. But rather than be someone who depicted light, or painted light in some way, I wanted to have the work be light.

Monet's work would have been even greater if he had not abandoned figure-painting.

It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to have to paint it.

Usually I am on a work for a long stretch, until a moment arrives when the air of the arbitrary vanishes, and the paint falls into positions that feel destined.

With monochrome painting... the idiosyncrasy of the work, its difference, its expression, lies in shape.

I work on all parts of my painting at once, improving it very gently until I find that the effect is complete.

The greatest work of an artist is the history of a painting.

As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does

The painting cannot be laid aside even for a day; for it takes constant work to keep 'flowing,' but above that it takes concentration, which in our language is consecration.