Painter Quotes

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

Mathematicians who build new spaces and physicists who find them in the universe can profit from the study of pictorial and architectural spaces conceived and built by men of art.

If men would only take the chances of doing right because it is right, instead of the immediate certainty of the advantage of doing wrong, how much happier would their lives be.

Benjamin Haydon

I would like to make something that is real in itself that does not remind anyone of any other things, and that does not have to be explained like the letter A, for instance.

If we view a great mountain soaring into the sky, it may excite us, evoke an uplifted feeling within us. There is an interplay of something we see outside of us with our inner response. The artist takes that response and its feelings and shapes it on canvas with paint so that when finished it contains the experience.

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.

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

Oscar Florianus Bluemner

When you long with all your heart for someone to love you, a madness grows there that shakes all sense from the trees and the water and the earth. And nothing lives for you, except the long deep bitter want. And this is what everyone feels from birth to death.

Somehow, one never really runs away, or I never have, and I find that the faster I go the more catches up with me... all the while time stands, to me, still - straight up and down like a great white sheet.

Our ideas are the offspring of our senses; we are not more able to create the form of a being we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence.

The ideal artist is he who knows everything, feels everything, experiences everything, and retains his experience in a spirit of wonder and feeds upon it with creative lust.

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

Anagarika Govinda

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

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

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.

Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.

Richard Diebenkorn

Day comes and goes, night comes and goes...
Sinking your head in hands clasped tight,
You wonder why there still comes no
Apostle of wisdom, truth and right.

Taras Shevchenko

I was extremely timid and to be made to feel that I was not wanted, although in a place where I had every right to be, even months afterwards caused me sometimes weeks of pain. Every time any one of these disagreeable incidents came into my mind, my heart sank, and I was anew tortured by the thought of what I had endured, almost as much as the incident itself.

Henry Ossawa Tanner

The greatness of art is not in the display of knowledge, or in material accuracy, but in the distinctness with which it conveys the impressions of a personal vital force, that acts spontaneously, without fear or hesitation.

As it grows ever more complicated today, musical art seeks out combinations more dissonant, stranger, and harsher for the ear. Thus, it comes ever closer to the noise-sound.

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

Simplicity: The New Competitive Advantage in a World of More, Better, Faster.

The most perfect steersman that you can have, and the best helm, lies in the triumphal gateway of copying from nature. And this outdoes all other models; and always rely on this with a stout heart, especially as you begin to gain some judgment in draftsmanship.

Cennino Cennini

[on the high seas] the English are increasing their insolence and barbarity. [T]hey cut to pieces the captain of a ship coming from Spain and threw all the crew into the sea for having defended themselves valiantly.

Peter Paul Rubens

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