Painting Quotes

Painting self-portraits without clothes on has also given me some publicity.

I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness.

Around 1980, I went back to painting with a vengeance.

You can't work in the movies. Movies are all about lighting. Very few filmmakers will concentrate on the story. You get very little rehearsal time, so anything you do onscreen is a kind of speed painting.

Photography suits the temper of this age - of active bodies and minds. It is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately.

All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time.

A painting is like a man. If you can live without it, then there isn't much point in having it.

Very quickly a painting is turned into a facsimile of itself when one becomes so familiar with with it that one recognizes it without looking at it.

I stopped painting in 1990 at the peak of my success just to deny people my beautiful paintings, and I did it out of spite.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.

You don't need a framework. You need a painting, not a frame.

There's this inherent screenplay structure that everyone seems to be stuck on, this three-act thing. It doesn't really interest me. To me, it's kind of like saying, 'Well, when you do a painting, you always need to have sky here, the person here and the ground here.' Well, you don't.

And I think a painting has such a limited life anyway.

I felt the need to get back to painting and I thought the best way was to start drawing, so I enrolled in a life drawing class. I soon discovered that people made very interesting subjects and I am still surprised that I had never discovered it before.

People were very affected by the war. But it didn't mean you stopped painting unless you were called into the Army; then you just couldn't paint. But otherwise one continued.

Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.

Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that.

For example, in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents - as an element - the greatest difficulty in manipulation.

It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it.

In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?

Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.

It was a huge challenge to learn digital painting well enough so that computers don't pop into mind when one sees one.

With a painting, you don't have to go back and paint it again.

Every time I started painting it was like a new experience, but they all came out the same.

Lets tell young people the best books are yet to written; the best painting, the best government the best of everything is yet to be done by them.

Well, I have a very simple method of painting.

I think you have to control the materials to an extent, but it's important to let the materials have a kind of power for themselves; like the natural power of gravity, if you are painting on a wall, it makes the paint trickle and it drips; there is no reason to fight that.

I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.

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.