Paintings Quotes

Butte was once a grand city. To me, that city is like one big stage for Edward Hopper. You could put your camera anywhere, and you felt you were looking at his paintings.

Photography started as a means of getting reference material for my paintings of nature subjects.

My father is a well known artist, Ted Dyer, who has been painting for many years. Our work is very different, but growing up surrounded by paintings, paints, easels and art books does have an effect.

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely.

All still lifes are actually paintings of the world on the sixth day of creation, when God and the world were alone together, without man!

I make paintings, try to get others to look at them and hopefully buy them.

I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.

I'd never painted anything before. I was quite content to take other people's work since I didn't care anyway about the subject matter. I approached subject matter as a scoundrel. I had nothing to say about it whatsoever. I only wanted to make these exciting paintings.

I think art is good at looking back and looking forward. I don't think art is good at looking head-on. At the end of the day, people are more important than paintings.

My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I've taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, 'The Hornet's Nest,' I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.

Even if you have $20,000 to buy an item, you still try to get a good price at antique stores. I collect furniture, rugs, paintings, frames. It's my hobby to go around to shops and markets.

The Japanese have a wonderful sense of design and a refinement in their art. They try to produce beautiful paintings with the minimum number of strokes.

There's been too much attention on marketing. Can't we just talk about the paintings?

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

One newspaper even published one of my nude paintings - the one of me naked from the waste up.

Some people would say my paintings show a future world and maybe they do, but I paint from reality. I put several things and ideas together, and perhaps, when I have finished, it could show the future.

The paintings are transferred from my computer to a disk, and I can hand it to the printer this way; or I can modem the painting to the printer over the phone lines from my house in Hawaii.

Up until 35 I had a slightly skewed world view. I honestly believed everybody in the world wanted to make abstract paintings, and people only became lawyers and doctors and brokers and things because they couldn't make abstract paintings.

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.

One of the main reasons I am so drawn to Hitchcock is that he planned his shots way in advance on story-boards, which he designed like classic paintings (he was an art connoisseur). It's why he found shooting on set boring - because he had already composed the film in his head.

Wherever you look there are inspirations, books, literature, paintings, landscapes, everything. Just living is an inspiration.

My paintings do not have a center, but depend on the same amount of interest throughout.

I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason.

I think most paintings are a record of the decisions that the artist made. I just perhaps make them a little clearer than some people have.

I will always find even the worst paintings that attempt some kind of representation better than the best invented paintings.

I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended.

Many, many of my paintings have come from the first chapter of Moby Dick.

Does any art have a practical value? People love to talk about how expensive a painting is. That's the only way we can talk about paintings in this century.

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.