Painter Quotes

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!

It is not bright colors but good drawing that makes figures beautiful.

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

I never take photographs myself. I don't feel like a photographer, more like a recycler

Christian Boltanski

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.

The day I joined this Israeli and Arabs youth movement, my life began to get complicated. Suddenly it was no longer black and white.

Jonathan Kis-Lev

Once you know about a work of mine you own it. There's no way I can climb inside somebody's head and remove it.

Lawrence Weiner

Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate — it is the sensation of its own realization. [a written art note by Twombly on a painting he created in 1957].

It is really too ridiculous for a reasonably intelligent person to expose himself to this kind of administrative caprice.

Frédéric Bazille

I wanted to revolutionise habits and contemporary life - to liberate nature, to free it from the authority of old theories and classicism... I felt a tremendous urge to re-create a new world seen through my own eyes, a world which was entirely mine.

Maurice de Vlaminck

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

I am who I am today because of the love and happiness you have brought into my life. I love and adore you the best.

To Erin

Vincent Golshani

The means of expression is the optical mixture of tones, of tints (of local color and the illuminating color: sun, oil lamp, gas, etc.), that is, of the lights and of their reactions (shadows) following the laws of contrast, of gradation, of irradiation.

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.

Love is a disease which fills you with a desire to be desired.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

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.

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 am interested only in the unknown and I work for my own astonishment.

The greatest travelers have not gone beyond the limits of their own world; they have trodden the paths of their own souls, of good and evil, of morality and redemption.

There is no game of chance more hazardous than marriage.

Jacques-Louis David

Let us strive to have eyes that see well, that see with sagacity: that is all I ask. If you want to see that leg as ugly, I know that there will be cause for you to do so, but I will tell you, "Take my eyes and you will see it as beautiful."

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

The grand manner consists of four elements: subject or theme, concept, structure, and style. The first requirement, fundamental to all the others, is that the subject and the narrative be grandiose, such as battles, heroic actions, and religious themes.

Nicolas Poussin

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

Pierre Auguste Renoir

How happy a thing were a wedding,
And a bedding,
If a man might purchase a wife
For a twelvemonth and a day

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