Paint Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

You're really not right, are you? Yeah, I know. It was all the paint chips I ate as a kid. They were good, but chromosomally damaging. (Nick)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

Why do you paint?
For exactly the same reason I breathe.
That's not an answer.
There isn't any answer.
How long hasn't there been any answer?
As long as I can remember.
And how long have you written?
As long as I can remember.
I mean poetry.
So do I.

I'm not interested in 'abstracting' or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it - drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea.

Willem de Kooning

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Even the blue-and-white Delftware tile is back up on the wall because, when you took it down, the pale square of paint behind it broke your heart.

To paint is to destroy what preceded. I never try to make a painting, but a chunk of life. It is a scream; it is a night; it is like a child; it is a tiger behind bars.

Never paint except with the three primary colors [red, blue, and yellow] and their derivatives.

Camille Pissarro

You know how to paint pleasure, cruelty, arrogance in glowing colors.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Only today can art be metaphysical, and it will continue to be so. Art will free itself from the needs and desires of men. We will no longer paint a forest or a horse as we please or as they seem to us, but as they really are.

A painting by Caspar David Friedrich is not a thing of the past. What is past is only the set of circumstances that allowed it to be painted.... it is therefore quite possible to paint like Caspar David Friedrich today.

Gerhard Richter

I actually started as a model builder and quickly progressed into production design, which made sense because I could draw and paint. But I kept watching that guy over there who was moving the actors around and setting up the shots.

James Cameron (director)

Think of a fine painter attempting to capture an inner vision, beginning with one corner of the canvas, painting what she thinks should be there, not quite pulling it off, covering it over with white paint, and trying again, each time finding out what her painting isn't, until she finally finds out what it is. And when you finally do find out what one corner of your vision is; you're off and running.

I don't feel any direct relationship between what I do and existing art. Though there is unavoidable progression: the things all paintings have in common are paint, and color, and some means of application. With the standard you can make any two pictures appear either alike of different. I don't think whether they're alike or different is really very interesting.

Robert Rauschenberg

I always get into arguments, with people who want to retain the old values in painting — the humanistic values that they always find on the canvas. If you pin them down, they always end up asserting that there is something there besides the paint on the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object. Any painting is an object..

Maybe I'm not very human. What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of the house.

I don't think it's possible to write a good play or paint a good picture and be a good Republican.

Even castles in the sky can do with a fresh coat of paint.

Haruki Murakami

The more materialistic science becomes, the more angels shall I paint. Their wings are my protest in favor of the immortality of the soul.

Edward Burne-Jones

A strong naked arm – a tanned powerful neck a young woman rests her head on the arching chest.
She closes her eyes and listens with open and quivering lips to the words he whispers into her long flowing hair.
I should paint that image just as I saw it – but in the blue haze.
Those two at that moment, no longer merely themselves, but simply a link in the chain binding generation to generation.
People should understand the significance, the power of it.

And that is true in 85 percent of kids; it's kids who live in old, dilapidated, mostly urban housing. But that still leaves 15 percent of the cases that occur in middle- or upper-class families, usually associated with home renovations. People are sanding paint, removing banisters, cleaning up windowsills, and they don't realize that they're spewing lead dust around in the house. And then the kids get it.

Fight with yourself when you paint, not with the model. A student is one who struggles with himself for order.

I chose to paint because the medium as such has a particular meaning. It is almost synonymous with what is popularly viewed as Art - art with a capital A-with all the glory, the piety, and the authority that it commands.

I wasn't gonna paint. And I wasn't gonna do ostentatious drawings. I wasn't gonna have gallery pictures. I was gonna hide somewhere where nobody would find me and express myself entirely. I'm like a guerrilla warfare in my best books.

O sin, how you paint your face! how you flatter us poor mortals on to death! You never appear to the sinner in your true character; you make fair promises, but you never fulfil one; your tongue is smoother than oil, but the poison of asps is under your lip!