Painting Quotes

He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.

Every painting I do is related to the last one: it may be a continuation of a previous painting or it may be a reaction against it.

Look at any inspired painting. It's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation.

When I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.

Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.

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.

No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.

Remember that a painting - before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.

Painting does what we cannot do - it brings a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

I believe the reason I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective.

Painting and writing are solitary arts.

When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't.

Used to be, conservatives revered the Average American, that Norman Rockwell oil painting of diner food, humble faith, honest toil, and Capraesque virtue.

I have sworn to die painting.

When I was younger, I had no interest. But after I went to Paris to see the collections for the first time a few years ago, they made a huge impression on me. I realized that fashion is an art form, like acting or painting.

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

And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission.

But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it.

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?