Paint Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

What skilful limner e'er would choose To paint the rainbow's varying hues, Unless to mortal it were given To dip his brush in dyes of heaven?

If one could only reproduce nature, and always with less beauty than the original, why paint at all?

Georgia O'Keeffe

When you paint things exactly as they are, you don't show people anything that they couldn't see for themselves; you're telling them what they already know.

I have a studio in the country - in the woods - but my paintings look more real to me than what is outdoors. You walk outside; the rocks are inert; even the clouds are inert. It makes me feel a little better. But I do have a faith that it is possible to make a living thing, not a diagram of what I have been thinking: to posit with paint something living, something that changes each day.

You belong in the most secret part of you. Don't worry about cool, make your own uncool. Make your own, your own world. If you fear, make it work for you—draw and paint your fear and anxiety.

Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask whether your country has been inhaling paint-thinner fumes.

The method of printing with three wooden blocks produces painterly prints. But Hercules Segers first applied a layer of paint to his papers or fabrics for his smooth compositions of skies, horizons and foregrounds, and then printed on to them, in a very effective and painterly manner.

Samuel Dirksz van Hoogstraten

It is better to paint from memory, for thus your work will be your own...

Those dabs of paint and lines become art when form and flow are created out of lower-level perceptual elements. When they combine harmoniously they give rise to perspective, foreground and background, and ultimately to emotion and other aesthetic attributes.

You cannot paint the Mona Lisa by assigning one dab each to a thousand painters.

William F. Buckley, Jr.

If you feel something calling you to dance or write or paint or sing, please refuse to worry about whether you're good enough. Just do it. Be generous. Offer a gift to the world no one else can offer : yourself.

Glennon Doyle Melton

Geologists brave the awesome fury of volcanoes and earthquakes; oceanographers plumb the hidden depths of the world. What do chemists do? Well, they make paint, among other things.

Objects of every sort are materials for the new art: paint, food, chairs, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things which will be discovered by the present generation of artists...

If you give a child something very complex to paint, such as a bouquet of flowers or a natural landscape, if he is very good, eventually he will get back - like Cezanne - to the essential forms of what he sees.

Robert Motherwell

Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don't know in your own soul.

The Christos-image
is most difficult to disentangle
from its art-craft junk-shop
paint-and-plaster medieval jumble
of pain-worship and death-symbol.

The actual breakthrough in the privacy of the studio, when one dares to apply paint in a new manner, is a solitary thrill, dependent upon no one else.

Mary Carroll Nelson

Painting is traditional but for me that doesn't mean the academy. I felt a need to paint; I love painting. It was something natural - as is listening to music or playing an instrument for some people. For this reason I searched for themes of my era and my generation. Photography offered this, so I chose it as a medium for painting.

Gerhard Richter

Painting, like water, takes any form. Paint is a film of pigment on a plane. It is not real in the way that gravity-bound sculpture is real. It is, however, real.

Squeak Carnwath

Characterization is not divorced from plot, not a coat of paint you slap on after the structure of events is already built. Rather characterization is inseparable from plot.

Philosophy can forsake too easily the details of experience… many writers and painters have demonstrated that thinking long about what art is or ought to be ruins the power to write or paint.

Robert Adams (photographer)

Flatterers are the worst kind of traitors, for they will strengthen thy imperfections, encourage thee in all evils, correct thee in nothing, but so shadow and paint thy follies and vices as thou shalt never, by their will, discover good from evil, or vice from virtue.

If you want to honor me, give some young boy or girl who's coming along trying to create arts and write and compose and sing and act and paint and dance and make something out of the beauties of the Negro race-give that child some help.

Langston Hughes

All pictures that's painted with sense and with thought / Are painted by madmen as sure as a groat; / For the greater the fool in the pencil more blest, / And when they are drunk they always paint best.

My mountain is dead. As soon as she has dried, I'll bury her under a decent layer of white paint. But I haven't done with the old lady; far from it!