Quotes About Painting

My work since the late '80s specifically questioned what was presented as the "natural" order of things in the history of post war NY painting.

Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much of my writing is verbal painting.

Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrated painter.

When I'm stressed or I have some things I have to get off my mind, I go to the canvas and I paint.

I hardly ever stretch the canvas before painting.

And I usually use myself as a model, posing in front of a mirror as I dab the strokes on the canvas.

Painting with broad strokes, I feel like a lot of journalism makes it out to be like the collective consciousness has a finite imagination for multiple women at one time in a similar genre.

I love color. When I paint, I use a lot of color. I love art that has a vibrancy of color and compositions. I adore the Impressionists, and I'm influenced strongly by them as a self-taught artist.

I've been asked which of the other arts novel-writing is most like, and I have come to believe it is acting. Of course, in terms of pattern it can be like music, in terms of structure it can be like painting, but the job to me is most like acting.

When I first started painting, I had an interesting nightmare about Cleveland - I dreamed the houses there were encased in this free-floating cage structure. I guess Cleveland was a confining place for me, even though my parents weren't too conservative.

I think that I make chords when I paint, so I think you would be listening to the cello. It's deep, and it's resonant. A lot of people have compared me to Brahms - that slightly melancholic sensuality that's highly structured. Well, that describes my work right there.

I have always been structured. What has changed is the proportions. Now it is eight hours of paperwork and one of painting.

I should like to achieve free, spontaneous painting delineating a powerful, strong structured image. One must be possible with the other. A difficult problem in itself, but one which I shall achieve.

When I came into the game, my influence was so heavy in the States and overseas people was painting murals of me, people tattooing me on them.

We don't have to paint what we're doing in crass language, understand? Don't use the words money or power, and don't insinuate there are payoffs involved. Perhaps it isn't precisely the most noble or overly patriotic mission, but it can be construed as being in the best interest of continued capitalism and we both know that the U.S. was built and supported by good old capitalism.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

Thank God for white paint because many of my paintings have paintings underneath them because I'm a perfectionist and if I don't like my art I'm pretty sure no one else will.

I've come up through art school, through painting, through graphic design, through advertising, through TV commercials and music video. I've designed books, built billboards, matchbooks, corporate identities. I continuously paint, I've done conceptual art pictures.

I wanted to wear the mantle and the pearls. I wanted to know the man who painted her like that.

There is a difference between Catholic and Protestant attitudes to painting," he explained as he worked, "but it is not necessarily as great as you may think. Paintings may serve a spiritual purpose for Catholics, but remember too that Protestants see God everywhere, in everything. By painting everyday things-tables and chairs, bowls and pitchers, soldiers and maids-are they not celebrating God's creation as well?

One painting was of an observatory, the other of a boy on a bluff. Both featured starry skies—and both, Mr. Benedict had told them, were the work of a childhood friend.

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

The humans had painted themselves as victims, dragons as barbaric monsters.

But there were also men of far greater value who were drawn to Cubism, men whose language was paint or sculpture: among them Léger, Picabia, Delaunay, La Fresnaye, Le Fauconnier, Dufy for a while and Friesz, Lhote, Kisling, Herbin of the Bateau-Lavoir, Survage, Marcoussis, Diego Rivera, Mondrian, Archipenko, Brancusi, Lipchitz, and perhaps the most important of them all, the three brothers Jacques Villon, Duchamp-Villon, and Marcel Duchamp.