Painter Quotes

Where I used to strive for movement and restlessness I now attempt to sense and express the complete total calm of objects and the surrounding air.

Lyonel Feininger

I am essentially a painter of the kind of still life composition that communicates a sense of tranquillity and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all else.

Giorgio Morandi

The most interesting part of my life is of no concern to the public.

He becomes the interpreter of the infinite, subtle qualities of the spiritual idea centering in all created things, expounding for us the laws of beauty... revealing to us glimpses of the absolute idea of perfect harmony.

Edward Mitchell Bannister

Until the war [between France and Germany] as you know, my life was a mess. I wasted it. It was only at l'Estaque, when (1870-1871) I thought things over, that I really understood Pissarro, a painter like myself... He was a determined man. I was overcome by a passion for work. It wasn't that I hadn't been working before, I was always working. But what I always missed, you know, was a comrade like you..

Boccioni and I were swiftly persuaded that with this show in Paris we were staking our all; for a flop would have meant kissing our fine aspirations goodbye. This is why we decided to go to Paris, to see what the art situation there was like.

Rentals sank, living rose. I could not afford help. I must be owner, agent, landlady and janitor. I loathed landladying... I tried in every way to augment my income. Small fruit, hens, rabbits, dogs - pottery... I never painted now - had neither time nor wanting. For about fifteen years I did not paint.

Divisionism is a complex system of harmony, an aesthetic rather than a technique.
The point is only a means.
To divide is to seek the power and harmony of color, through representing colored light by pure elements, and through employing the optical mixture of these pure elements, separated and proportioned according to the essential laws of contrast and graduation.

I do not always find the streets interesting, so I wait until I see picturesque groups and those that compose well in relation to the whole.

I'm an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.

One should never spurn a penitent criminal: in his despair he may become twice as much a criminal as before.

Mikhail Lermontov

Theirs is a story of African-American strength and courage. I share it now as my parents told it to me, because their struggles and triumphs ring true today. People all over the world are still on the move, trying to build better lives for themselves and for their families.

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

Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak the other within one's wall, even if only for a moment, a moment before one immures oneself again.

Rabih Alameddine

I have a predilection for painting that lends joyousness to a wall.

Pierre Auguste Renoir

There are Six Essentials in painting. The first is called spirit; the second, rhythm; the third, thought; the fourth, scenery; the fifth, the brush; and the last is the ink

Courbet comes in 1849 with the intention of overthrowing past art and constructing it anew. While he speaks only of realism, of which he proclaims himself the messiah, his pictures show pre-eminently those qualities which are learned in the museums.

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

All the best artists have shown that the greatest achievement in the production of fine color is the concealment of pigments, and not the parade of them; and we may say the same of execution.

Asher Brown Durand

Life without labor is crime, and labor without art is brutality.

John Wesley Hardrick

There is no game of chance more hazardous than marriage.

Jacques-Louis David

The new is very ancient, one might almost say that it is always the most ancient thing there is.

Eugène Delacroix

Religion without art is a dead system of dogmas which have no effect on life.

Anagarika Govinda

If you should desire some news of me, Go ask the little horned toad whose home is in the dust.

I work from the people that interest me, and that I care about, in rooms that I live in and know. I use the people to invent my pictures, and I can work more freely when they are there.