Paint Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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...

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.

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

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

William F. Buckley, Jr.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Georgia O'Keeffe

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?

They will come, not to paint the bay and the sea and the boots and the moors, but the warmth of the sun and the colour of the wind. A whole new concept. Such stimulation. Such vitality.

Rosamunde Pilcher

Through poverty, godhunger, the family debacle, I kept a sense of worth. I could limn and paint like no-one else in this human-wounded land: I was worth the while of living. Now my skill is dead. I should be.

You will learn to paint trees only by understanding them, their growth, their nature, their movement - and realizing that they are conscious living things. A tree seldom if ever encroaches upon the liberty of another tree. It never wastes its growth in unnecessary twistings.

John F. Carlson

Art ain't about paint. It ain't about canvas. It's about ideas.

When I paint from a photograph, conscious thinking is eliminated. I don't know what I am doing. My work is far closer to the Informel than to any kind of 'realism'. The photograph has an abstraction of its own, which is not easy to see through.

Gerhard Richter

God does not work by only one method, paint in only one color, play in only one key, nor does he make only one star shine onto the earth...

Eberhard Arnold