20th-century Painter Quotes

Salvador Dali

Frida Kahlo

Francis Bacon (artist)

Mark Rothko

Willem de Kooning

Lucian Freud

Norman Rockwell

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.

Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.

Katherine Porter

New skin, a new land! And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me.

For me, painting means the continuation of dreaming by other means.

My greatest fortune was that I was ordered to take up art for the good of my health

Kyffin Williams

I never take photographs myself. I don't feel like a photographer, more like a recycler

Christian Boltanski

Paint is the only weapon I have with which to fight what I resent. If I could write, I would write about it. If I could talk, I would talk about it. Since I paint, I must paint about it.

Charles Wilbert White

Clio may be the most austere and chaste of the Muses, but she has been known to come down informally from Mount Helicon in a mood so raffish that there are those who claim to have seen her with her slip showing.

Thornton Willis

You can write a letter with a typewriter, a pencil, or a crayon. What you have to say is the important thing.

Simplicity: The New Competitive Advantage in a World of More, Better, Faster.

Everything that you paint may be used as evidence against you.

Pierre Alechinsky

When you long with all your heart for someone to love you, a madness grows there that shakes all sense from the trees and the water and the earth. And nothing lives for you, except the long deep bitter want. And this is what everyone feels from birth to death.

By contemplation I swear,
By the beginning of speech,
By the flight of a dove from the mind.
A word is in the cage

Painting is an act, a sequence of movements one bears within oneself, whose source is one's inner being.

My wife was born in Hemingford Grey in Huntingdon and we knew and loved its river, the Great Ouse. We sat by it, we meditated by it, we walked its banks, we explored it by canoe, skiff and pont. I knew its mills, its sluices, its locks, its churches, its meadows and, further afield, its fens. It became part of my life.

Life without labor is crime, and labor without art is brutality.

John Wesley Hardrick

I paint what I see in America, in other words I paint the American scene.

Only give me your word that if I increase your paper's circulation you'll give me a job.

Santiago Martínez Delgado

It seems to me that art is a great miracle-it is the showing forth of the Holy Spirit transubstantiation. It is to find and proclaim the poetry of life, without which there is no life.

Realism' has been abandoned in the search for reality: the 'principal objective' of abstract art is precisely this reality.

I've never claimed that this is investment art. When we first started out, all the art colleges and universities across the country would sort of badmouth what we were doing. It's funny that a lot of them now are sending us letters saying, 'We may not totally agree with the way you paint, but we appreciate what you're doing, because you're sending literally thousands of people into art colleges.'

Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.

Richard Diebenkorn

I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn't an ideal world, it should be. So I painted only the ideal aspects of it - pictures in which there are no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers... only foxy grandpas who played baseball with the kids and boys who fished from logs and got up circuses in the backyard.

Norman Rockwell

Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate — it is the sensation of its own realization. [a written art note by Twombly on a painting he created in 1957].

Mathematicians who build new spaces and physicists who find them in the universe can profit from the study of pictorial and architectural spaces conceived and built by men of art.