American Painter Quotes

Georgia O'Keeffe

Mark Rothko

John Singer Sargent

Thomas Eakins

Norman Rockwell

Winslow Homer

Gilbert Stuart

Impressionism was the name given to a certain form of observation when Monet, not content with using his eyes to see what things were or what they looked like as everybody had done before him, turned his attention to noting what took place on his own retina (as an oculist would test his own vision).

John Singer Sargent

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

I don't believe in making pencil sketches and then painting landscape in your studio. You must be right under the sky.

William Merritt Chase

We are getting mixed up with the French tradition. In talking about the necessity to 'finish' a thing, we then said American painters 'finish' a thing that looks 'unfinished', and the French, they 'finish' it. I have seen Henri Matisse's that were more 'unfinished' and yet more 'finished' than any American painters. Matisse was obviously in a terrific emotion at the time and he was more 'unfinished' than 'finished'.

William Baziotes

I didn't want to be a woman artist, I just wanted to be an artist.

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

The last mad throb of red just as it turns green; the ultimate shriek of orange calling all the blues of heaven for relief and support... each color almost regains the fun it must have felt within itself on forming the first rainbow.

Painting, which is essentially a rhythmic harmony of coloured spaces.

Arthur Wesley Dow

I taught in the Academy from the opening of the schools until I was turned out, a period much longer than I should have permitted myself to remain there. My honors are misunderstanding, persecution and neglect, enhanced because unsought.

Whether its [David] Berkowitz, whether its [Ted] Bundy, whether its Williams, Wayne Williams down in Atlanta or any of the others, or Charlie Manson—I don't comment about other cases for the simple fact is that I wasn't there.

John Wayne Gacy

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

John Wesley Hardrick

I'm an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.

When Jackson talked about painting he didn't usurp anything that wasn't himself. He didn't want to change anything, he wasn't using any outworn attitude about it, he was always himself. He just wanted to be in it because he loved it. The response in the person's mind to that mysterious thing that has happened before has nothing to do with 'who did it first'. Tomlin however, did hear these voices and in reference to his early work and its relation to Braque, I like him for that. He was not an academician of Cubism even then; he was an extremely personal and sensitive artist.

My painting is what I have to give back to the world for what the world gives to me.

Georgia O'Keeffe

Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything.

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

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.'

Small pictures since the Renaissance are like novels; large pictures are like dramas in which one participates in a direct way.

To play your colors by eye is worse than playing the piano by ear.

I have many ideas for lights. I will paint only lights at night.

Once you know about a work of mine you own it. There's no way I can climb inside somebody's head and remove it.

Lawrence Weiner

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].

Re Arkansas: Its airs—just breathe them, and they will make you snort like a horse.

Thomas B. Thorpe

The reason for the survival of the award system is purely commercial.

I am who I am today because of the love and happiness you have brought into my life. I love and adore you the best.

To Erin

Vincent Golshani