Painter Quotes

Vincent van Gogh

Salvador Dali

Pablo Picasso

Rembrandt

Peter Paul Rubens

Claude Monet

Frida Kahlo

Knowing how to paint and to use one's colors rightly has not any connection with originality. This originality consists in properly expressing your own impressions.

I don't believe in making pencil sketches and then painting landscape in your studio. You must be right under the sky.

William Merritt Chase

New skin, a new land! And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me.

Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.

Katherine Porter

The painting develops before my eyes, unfolding its surprises as it progresses. It is this which gives me the sense of complete liberty, and for this reason I am incapable of forming a plan or making a sketch beforehand.

What is called a sincere work [of art] is one that is endowed with enough strength to give reality to an illusion.

I cannot now change my style, which I acquired, as you can imagine, by dint of labour.

Impressionism was the name given to a certain form of observation when Monet, not content with using his eyes to see what things were or what they looked like as everybody had done before him, turned his attention to noting what took place on his own retina (as an oculist would test his own vision).

John Singer Sargent

No one could have less faith in the absolute and definitive importance of the work created by man, because I believe that this world is nothing but a dream...

The artist discards all theories, both his own and those of others. He forgets everything when he is in front of his canvas.

Georges Rouault

One of the reasons why I have no regular job, and why I have not had a regular job for years, is quite simply that my ideas differ from those of the gentlemen who hand out the jobs to individuals who think as they do. It is not just a question of my appearance, which is what they have sanctimoniously reproached me with. It goes deeper, I do assure you.

Vincent van Gogh

Art is something subversive. It's something that should not be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things that one must steal, to be used against the established order.

There is nothing that special to see when looking at me. I'm a painter who paints day in day out, from morning till evening - figure pictures and landscapes, more rarely portraits.

July 13, 1954 was the most tragic day of my life. I had lost my beloved Frida forever. To late now I realized that the most wonderful part of my life had been my love for Frida.

I do consider my engaged poetry as a personal mission, a duty towards a society which evolves into a system of control of consciences: one even becomes a suspect for not thinking correctly!

Small pictures since the Renaissance are like novels; large pictures are like dramas in which one participates in a direct way.

I was not able to work in the several excursions and ascensions made in the neighborhood, where it was very beautiful. One is so surprised by these grand aspects that it would be necessary to remain a long time before finding the interpretation capable of rendering them. I am going to finish the season at Auvers. There is nothing like one's natural every-day surroundings where one really takes pleasure. The pictures we do then feel the effect of their home-life, and the sweet sensations we experience in it.

Charles-François Daubigny

The people itself (and I do not mean the 'masses') has always given art its essential style. The artist merely clarifies and fulfills the will of the people. But when the people does not know what it wants, or worst of all, wants nothing.... then its artists, driven to seeking their own forms, remain isolated, and become martyrs... Folk art – that is, the feeling of people for artistic form – can arise again only when the whole jumble of worn-out art concepts of the nineteenth century has been wiped from the memory of generations.

Of Caravaggio:

This man has come into the world to destroy painting.

Nicolas Poussin

I don't think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal and that's all I would have asked for, for I know I'm worth as much as they.

Re Arkansas: Its airs—just breathe them, and they will make you snort like a horse.

Thomas B. Thorpe

I painted these 'Variations' for some years and then I found it necessary to find form for the face, because I had come to understand that great art can only be painted with religious feeling. And that, I could only bring to the human face. I understood that the artist must express through his art, in forms and colours, the divine in him. Therefore a work of art is God made visible and art is 'a longing for God'.

Alexej von Jawlensky

You like the Earth, Man, and you — pawing the ground — think of God, the little nursling will recognize you, and will think of you with love, because God lives even in it also. Give nourishment to the developing little creatures, either to plant or to animal, and it will develop for your sweet amazement. Give food for the wild animal starving, and it will slick to you.

Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka

I can't paint the way they want me to paint and they know that too.
Of course you will say that I ought to be practical and ought to try and paint the way they want me to paint. Well, I will tell you a secret. I have tried and I have tried very hard, but I can't do it. I just can't do it! And that is why I am just a little crazy.

When I lived in Cookham I was disturbed by a feeling of everything being meaningless. But quite suddenly I became aware that everything was full of special meaning and this made everything holy... I observed this sacred quality in most unexpected quarters.

Stanley Spencer