Paint Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

What interests me is to paint the kind of anti-sensitivity that impregnates modern civilization. I think art since Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art. It is Utopian. It has less and less to do with the world. It looks inward — neo-Zen and all that. Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

Roy Lichtenstein

The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.

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.'

Concerning God, freewill and destiny: Of all that earth has been or yet may be, all that vain men imagine or believe, or hope can paint or suffering may achieve, we descanted.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

There's no one on the island telling them they're not good enough, so they just go ahead and sing and paint and write.

I paint my pictures with all the considerations which are natural to my intelligence, and according as my intelligence understands them.

Drawing is the basis of art. A bad painter cannot draw. But one who draws well can always paint.

When Spring unlocks the flowers to paint the laughing soil.

Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.

Terry Pratchett

It's as if a child with a brush and too much enthusiasm has been set free with a tin of black paint inside me.

I paint not the things I see but the feelings they arouse in me.

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

Alas, because I'm no longer innocent. We're civilized beings. Whether we like it or not, we have the cares and concerns of classical civilization in our bones. I want to express myself clearly when I paint. In people who feign ignorance there is a kind of barbarism even more detestable than the academic kind: it's no longer possible to be ignorant today. One no longer is. We come into the world armed with facility. Facility is the death of art and we must rid ourselves of it.

Don't stop to paint the material, but push on to give the spirit.

When you write for a living and you can't do anything else, you know that sooner or later that the deadline is going to come screaming down on you like a goddamn banshee. There's no avoiding it...So one day you just don't appear at the El Adobe bar anymore; you shut the door, paint the windows black, rent an electric typewriter and become the monster you always were - the writer.

Hunter S. Thompson

How do you see this tree? Is it really green? Use green, then, the most beautiful green on your palette. And that shadow, rather blue? Don't be afraid to paint it as blue as possible.

Live a balanced life — learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.

For even the painter himself cannot be fully aware of the way in which the picture gets made: there is a wide area of the unpredictable in the act of pushing paint about in the definition of an image.

When I want to do a painting with one colour overlapping another, it has to be a real overlap, not a depicted overlap. I didn't want to paint an overlap, meaning that it would be a deception or illusion. I no longer wanted to depict space, but to make a work that existed in literal space. Thus, my recent works are one canvas as a relief over another canvas. Another important example of a panel painting that explores the idea of the mural was Red Yellow Blue White 1952. It's the only one I ever did using actual dyed fabric of ready-made colours, which moves the painting into the realm of real objects.

Ellsworth Kelly

If I could paint how I feel, I'd draw bullseye on your forehead my anger is not misdirected unless it somehow misses you

I paint by all the daylight we have and that is little enough, less perhaps than you have by much... imagine to yourself how a purl must look through a burnt glass.

When young people are too rigidly sequestered from [the world], their lively and romantic imaginations paint it to them as a paradise of which they have been beguiled; but when they are shown it properly, and in due time, they see it such as it really is, equally shared by pain and pleasure, hope and disappointment.

Painting is very physical as it is, painting scenes of men in action gives me a great pleasure. It's one of the aspects of human behavior that most interests me. It's instinct, and it's my instinct to paint it.

Francis Bacon (artist)

It is Rome's secret charm to reconcile
Imagination with our long last sleep.
We are resign'd ourselves, and suffer less
For those we love. The people of the South
Paint closing life in hues less terrible
Than do the gloomy nations of the North :
The sun, like glory, even warms the grave.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

But there is better. Simplicity, being direct. Everything else is just a game, just building castles in the sky... Basically I don't think of anything when I paint. I see colours. I strive with joy to convey them on to my canvas just as I see them. They arrange themselves as they choose, any old way. Sometimes that makes a picture. I'm brainless animal. Very content if I could be just that.