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 have made a solemn vow never to send my drawings because people have cheated me. In particular, just today I found... that, having done a drawing of souls in Purgatory for the Bishop of St. Gata, he, in order to spend less, commissioned another painter to do the painting using my work. If I were a man, I can't imagine it would have turned out this way.

Artemisia Gentileschi

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.

Whereas formerly, before the advent of machinery, the commonest article you could pick up had a life and warmth which gave it individual interest, now everything is turned out to such a perfection of deadness that one is driven to pick up and collect, in sheer desperation, the commonest rubbish still surviving from the earlier periods.

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

The mask means to me: freshness of color, sumptuous decoration, wild unexpected gestures, very shrill expressions, exquisite turbulence.

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.

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

There are as many reasons why and ways to fish as there are people who do it.

Russell Chatham

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