Quotes About Painting

Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts. There are seven words that will make a person love you. There are 10 words that will break a strong man's will. But a word is nothing but a painting of a fire. A name is the fire itself.

If she was beautiful at rest she was doubly so awake. Asleep she was a painting of a fire. Awake she was the fire itself.

For an Impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject, but to realize sensations.

The Landscape becomes reflective, human and thinks itself though me. I make it an object, let it project itself and endure within my painting....I become the subjective consciousness of the landscape, and my painting becomes its objective consciousness.

I tried to make everything breathe in this painting: faith, quiet suffering, religious and primitive style, and great nature with its scream.

Novelists and poets are the landscape artists and portrait painters; academic writers are the people with big paint sprayers who repaint your basement.

Prague is far more than the sum of its physical parts or its history. It is a city of the mind and the imagination, a city that exists as vividly in poetry and painting and music and legend as it does in brick and stone... Just as the physical city of Prague would be unimaginable without its unique topography, without its palaces, its churches, its parks, its streets, and its hostelries, so the Prague of the mind would be unimaginable without its storytellers and the tales they weave.

One of the problems with technology is that no photograph, as superb and outstanding as it may be, will ever be as satisfying as the most middle-rate painting.

I had grown up under the heroic spell of the Abstract Expressionist painters

What he loved about poetry: it could do in a few seconds what a novel did in days. A painting could be like that, too, and a sculpture. But sometimes you wanted something to take days and days.

I had painted a lot of landscapes, had stood before many while they burned their remote beauty into my skin, but had never done both at the same time. Don't know why. I was comfortable painting indoors and I liked best to retrieve those images from memory where they might be stained by awe and jumbled together with other things I loved. Now that I had tried the other, I wanted to do more.