Paint Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Sometimes I think dent-resistant side panels are a waste of money, but then I remember ladies be always throwing themselves at my car, and titties can wreak havoc on a paint job.

A painter is somebody who sees. I paint the moment when I set out. When I set out to see. And it's the same thing for the viewer. When he approaches the canvas, he is advancing towards an encounter. The encounter with vision.

I don't pretend to be a gentleman, but I am entitled to paint what I see

It should also be born in mind that the research on 'movement' and the dynamic outlook on the world, which were the basis of Futurist theory, in no way required one to paint nothing but speeding cars or ballerinas in action; for a person who is seated, or an inanimate object, though apparently static, could be considered dynamically and suggest dynamic forms. I may mention as an example [his paintings] the 'Portrait of Madame S.' (1912) and the 'Seated Woman' (1914).

Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it.

Samuel Butler (novelist)

I have told him nothing [an art-journalist in Paris who wrote in 1887: 'Seurat sees his paternity of the theory Neo-Impressionism contested by misinformed critics and unscrupulous comrades'], but what I have always thought: the more of us (Neo-Impressionists) there are, the less originality we will have, and the day when everyone this technique, it will no longer have any value and people will look for something new as is already happening... It is my right to think this and to say it, since I paint in this way [Neo-Impressionistic], only to find a new approach which is my own.

We Christian writers must paint evil with the blackest of brushes, not to sow fear, but to call out the monsters to be scattered by our light. If Satan cloaks himself as an angel of white, intent on deceiving the world, any attempt on our parts to minimize evil is only complicit with his strategy... Turn to the light; don't fear the shadows it creates.

But there was something else that the Abstract Expressionists taught us: they began to use something besides the conventional means of art; to want other kinds of paint, or kinds of canvas, or ways of making pictures that weren't the usual ways. Some of the next generation, the Pop Art artists [like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, picked up this attitude and began to put actual things into art. We [Morris Louis and Noland] were making abstract art, but we wanted to simplify the selection of materials, and to use them in a very economical way. To get to raw canvas, to use the canvas un-stretched – to use it in more basic or fundamental ways, to use it as fabric rather than as a stretched surface.

I'll get an inspiration and start painting; then I'll forget everything, everything except how things used to be and how to paint it so people will know how we used to live.

It sometimes takes a foreigner to come and see a place and paint it. I remember someone saying they had never really noticed the palm trees here until I painted them.

Stones, bones, clouds — experience gives me shapes — but sometimes the shapes I paint end up having no resemblance to the actual experience.

Georgia O'Keeffe

When I'am outlining the skin of a lovely peach with soft touches of paint, or a sad old apple, I catch a glimpse in the reflections they exchange of the same mild shadow of renunciation, the same love of the sun, the same recollection of the dew.... Why do we divide up the world? Does this reflects our egoism?... The prism is our first step towards God, our seven beatitudes.

As an artist I have always tried to be faithful to my vision of life, and I have frequently been in conflict with those who wanted me to paint not what I saw but what they wished me to see.

Work at the same time upon water, sky, branches, ground, keeping everything going on an equal basis and unceasingly rework until you have got it. Paint generously and unhesitatingly, for it is best not to lose the first impression.

Camille Pissarro

Phoebus, arise,
And paint the sable skies,
With azure, white, and red.

William Drummond of Hawthornden

My mother began to go crazy. Not in a 'Let's paint the kitchen red!' sort of way. But crazy in a 'gas oven, toothpaste sandwich, I am God' sort of way.

Augusten Burroughs

One does not paint for design students or historians but for human beings, and the reaction in human terms is the only thing that is really satisfactory to the artist.

The thing that I love about acting is the fact that I can help people feel things, know themselves or feel less alone. It's my form of expression, in the same way that someone might paint a picture or sing a song in that you're hoping that it moves somebody outside of their own way of thinking.

Naturally, the result is the thing [in painting] and it doesnvery vibrantt make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

Jackson Pollock

He invented the Fuse Box Dwarf, a little man who popped out at you from behind the paint cans in the cellarway and screamed, "Dreeb! Dreeb! I am the Fuse Box Dwarf!" Lewis was not scared by the little man, and he felt that those who scream "Dreeb" are more to be pitied than censured.

You should not paint the chair, but only what someone has felt about it.

I knew that I must paint not what I saw, but only what was in me, in my soul. Figuratively speaking, it was like this: In my heart I felt as if there were an organ, which I had to sound. And nature, which I saw before me, only prompted me. And that was a key that unlocked this organ and made it sound... They are songs without words.

Alexej von Jawlensky

I can't understand how anyone is able to paint without optimism. Despite the general pessimistic attitude in the world today, I am nothing but an optimist.

The intellectual abstraction of the second period of Cubism was of great importance, however. By its aspirations to the eternal and its 'concept of proportion inspired by the Classics' it revived the sense of craftsmanship concept in many painters. And this perfectly coincided with another of my ambitions – which was to make, with paint, an object having the same perfection of craftsmanship that a cabinet-maker would put into a piece of furniture.

Well, I have a very simple method of painting. It's to paint directly on the canvas without any funny business, as it were, and I use almost pure turpentine to start with, adding oil as I go along until the medium becomes pure oil. I use as little oil as I can possibly help, and that's my method. It's very simple... Yes, linseed oil. I used to use poppy oil, but I have heard that poppy oil is given to cracking pigment too, so I use it no longer... I find linseed oil and white lead the most satisfactory mediums.