Painting Quotes

The dog, the rabbit and the hoop all feature in the painting, and take the place of the orrery.

The worlds I paint leave a lot to engage the imagination by hinting at what lies beyond the four edges of the painting. I think getting beyond the four edges of an opportunity or challenge is one of the basic skills you need in business.

It is no use painting the foot of the tree white, the strength of the bark cries out from beneath the paint.

Well, I've been painting for years. I just started doing a lot more in the last couple.

Impressionism; it is the birth of Light in painting.

Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent - not with how things are but with how they might be - in short, with design.

I think people have to choose between living with contradictions or painting themselves into a corner. I have a lot of contradictions.

It wouldn't be right for me to clown around when I'm painting a president.

When we don't have information, we go to the simplest outlook, to black and white. But then we have to lie to ourselves. Black is never as black as you're painting it and white is never as white.

I wanted to make these people real, not like they were in a painting. Like these are people who don't know they're in a period movie. Those concerns are incredibly immediate.

I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.

Many of the articles printed over the last few months have ended up painting a picture of me that is more than a little distorted.

My only worry is the painting I'm doing. Nothing else.

I believe that painting should come through the avenues of meditation rather than the canals of action.

I'm trying to get every man involved in art, into experimental music, or painting, or novel-writing.

You know, painting has given me a lot of freedom, because for some reason, I've been able to paint things, organize things in a way that I see that don't have any buffers or compromises in them.

I no longer worry whether a painting is about something or not. I am only concerned with the expectation, from a flat surface, of an illusion.

I'm compelled to paint nearly every day. I just felt like making a painting, went out and bought paints and a canvas. Now it fulfills me creatively when I'm not doing music: it's something you can do by yourself and it's totally yours. It's a great adjunct to my life.

In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.

Painting's not important. The important thing is keeping busy.

I have never subscribed to the Dirty Pallet school of painting.

I never know what it's going to look like. Wouldn't be much point in painting if I already knew the outcome. I have a subject in front of me and I start flooding colour and making marks, I don't know, it's improvisation isn't it?

You know, face painting in non-Western cultures is a sign of collectivism, is a sign of one representing the community, it's not unique at all.

See, a painting is much cheaper than making a film. And photography is, you know, way cheap. So if I get an idea for a film, there are many ways to get it together and go realise that film. There's really nothing to be afraid of.

To do a drawing for a painting most often means doing something very sketchy and schematic and then later making it polished.

Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?

Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon - it is the very heart of painting.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

A painting that is well composed is half finished.