Painter Quotes

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

Russell Chatham

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

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.

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

Although we are necessarily concerned, in a chronicle of events, with physical action by the light of day, history suggests that the human spirit wanders farthest in the silent hours between midnight and dawn. Those dark fruitful hours, seldom recorded, whose secret flowerings breed peace and war, loves and hates, the crowning or uncrowning of heads.

My greatest fortune was that I was ordered to take up art for the good of my health

Kyffin Williams

The warm green of the grass, sprinkled with flowers of many hues, is a carpet whereon we walk with noiseless tread.

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

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 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

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

Christian Boltanski

If you fall asleep on horseback, the horse will stop by the rock. Art is a car. Kitsch is a horse.

You can write a letter with a typewriter, a pencil, or a crayon. What you have to say is the important thing.

Everything that you paint may be used as evidence against you.

Pierre Alechinsky

...the Matisse of long ago, so alert, such a battler, always giving as good as he got.

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

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.

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

Another fitting example here is that of Hercules Segers, disregarded and yet a great artist......His observation was unwavering and effective, particularly in his design of landscapes and compositions, with imaginary mountains and caves. It was as if he were pregnant with whole provinces, giving birth to them with immeasurable spaces, and picturing them to a marvel in his paintings and prints.

Samuel Dirksz van Hoogstraten

The Plover and the Clover can be told apart with ease, By paying close attention to the habit of the Bees, For Entomologists aver, the Bee can be in Clover, While Etymologists concur, there is no B in Plover.

Robert William Wood

When Troy was built, you recollect I dabbled as an Architect; A very sorry one, you'll say, But worse since then have come in play, And of the art I've understood Enough, to do more harm than good...

There are few subjects where there exists greater diversity of opinions regarding practically everything than in paleontology.

Gommaert van der Gracht

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

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