Painter Quotes

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

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

Thomas B. Thorpe

Always recognize the dreamlike qualities of life and reduce attachment and aversion. Practice good-heartedness toward all beings. Be loving and compassionate, no matter what others do to you. What they will do will not matter so much when you see it as a dream. The trick is to have positive intention during the dream. This is the essential point. This is true spirituality.

Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche

There is no game of chance more hazardous than marriage.

Jacques-Louis David

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

It isn't enough to have the eyes of a gazelle... you also need the claws of a cat in order to capture your bird alive and play with it before you eat it, and so join its life to yours. This is the mystery of painting.

I wanted to get it all down, maybe out of my system. I wanted to be able to say, Everything's possible-if you believe and can get excited.

The work of art is born of the artist in a mysterious and secret way. From him it gains life and being. Nor is its existence casual and inconsequent, but it has a definite and purposeful strength, alike in its material and spiritual life.

Wassily Kandinsky

Clio may be the most austere and chaste of the Muses, but she has been known to come down informally from Mount Helicon in a mood so raffish that there are those who claim to have seen her with her slip showing.

Thornton Willis

When you feel colors, you will understand the why of their forms.

Oscar Florianus Bluemner

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

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

Eugène Delacroix

When a Englishwoman is dressed, she is no longer a woman, she is a cathedral. You don't seduce her, you demolish her.

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

A rain-tight roof, frugal living, a box of colors, and God's sunlight through clear windows keep the soul attuned and the body vigorous for one's daily work.

Albert Pinkham Ryder

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

Paint is the only weapon I have with which to fight what I resent. If I could write, I would write about it. If I could talk, I would talk about it. Since I paint, I must paint about it.

Charles Wilbert White

The first and most important thing is to remain free, free in each line you undertake, in your ideas and in your political action, in your moral conduct. The artist especially must remain free from all outer restraints.

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.

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

Bodies have their own light which they consume to live: they burn, they are not lit from the outside.

Speaking to Salvator Rosa of the Italian painter Raphael:

Raphael, to be plain with you, for I prefer to be candid and outspoken, does not please me at all....It is Titian that bears the banner.

Diego Velázquez

What a business is this of a portrait painter! You bring him a potato and expect he will paint you a peach.