Painting Quotes

One must act in painting as in life, directly.

The painting develops before my eyes, unfolding its surprises as it progresses. It is this which gives me the sense of complete liberty, and for this reason I am incapable of forming a plan or making a sketch beforehand.

Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.

There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.

If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.

Where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong.

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.

Now I'm a painter. That was another opportunity I was able to pursue, I've been painting all my life, now it's become a second career because of my success in the movies.

Every song is like a painting.

My painting is visible images which conceal nothing... they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.

The final test of a painting, theirs, mine, any other, is: does the painter's emotions come across?

You buy any book on color theory today, and it's just complete poppycock. Everybody comes out of school painting pink, purple and green. The whole damn cartoon industry has pink purple and green on their mind.

The majority of my work is from life. I spend most fine days from May to October painting outside.

People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of what is good or bad art in the theater.

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.