Painting Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I held out the painting of the cat and the snake. It's a cat and a snake, Thoth said. Thank you, god of wisdom. You placed it for us to find, didn't you? You're trying to give us some sort of clue. Who, me? Just kill him, Horus said. Shut up, I said. At least kill the guitar.

There is a branch of painting next in profit to Portrait and quite within your power without any more drawing them I'm answer for you having, which is Drapery & Landskip.

Thomas Gainsborough

As I was painting today, some thoughts came to me and I want to write them down for people I love. I know that I shall not live very long. But I wonder, is that sad? Is a celebration more beautiful because it lasts longer? And my life is a celebration, a short, intense celebration. My powers of perception are becoming finer.... with almost every breeze I take, I get a new sense and understanding of the linden tree, of ripened wheat, of hay... I suck everything up into me. And if only now love would blossom for me, before I depart; and if I can paint three good pictures, then I shall go gladly, with flowers in my hair..

Paula Modersohn-Becker

I'd been painting rats for three years before someone said 'that's clever it's an anagram of art' and I had to pretend I'd known that all along.

When I began to write as a very young person in a rigidly racist and inhibited colonial society, I felt, as many others did, that I existed marginally on the edge of the world of ideas, of imagination and beauty. These, taking shape in poetry and fiction, drama, painting and sculpture, were exclusive to that distant realm known as 'overseas'.

Nadine Gordimer

When Picasso does pure painting he is a great artist. When he paints as an cubist, putting one tone next to another, the arrangement of planes is fine and the result very strong. But those who imitate him achieve nothing worthwhile.

Aristide Maillol

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

Marshall McLuhan

The house was filled with the piano and violin. I turned towards the art of painting.

The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by Rachel.

.. No academy could have given me all I discovered by getting my teeth into the exhibitions, the shop windows, and the museums of Paris. Beginning with the market – where, for lack of money, I bought only a piece of a long cucumber – the workman in his blue overall, the most ardent followers of Cubism, everything showed a definite feeling for proportion, clarity, an accurate sense of form, of a more painterly kind of painting, even in the canvases of second-rate artists.

I made the flames lick the surface of the painting in such a way that is recorded the spontaneous traces of the fire. But what is it that provokes in me this pursuit of the impression of fire? Why must I search for its traces? Because every work of creation, quite apart from its cosmic position, is the representation of pure phenomenology – every phenomenon manifests itself of its own accord. This manifestation is always distinct from form, and is the essence of the immediate, the trace of the immediate.

.. no true artist ends with the style that he expected to have when he began,... it is only by giving oneself up completely to the painting medium that one finds oneself and one's own style.

Robert Motherwell

Your eyes, accustomed to semi-darkness, will soon open to more radiant visions of light. The shadows which we shall paint shall be more luminous than the high-lights of our predecessors, and our pictures, next to those of the museums, will shine like blinding daylight, compared with deepest night. We conclude that painting cannot exist today without divisionism... [Paul Signac initiated divisionism slightly earlier, together with Seurat] - for the modern painter, must be an innate complementariness which we declare to be essential and necessary.

Umberto Boccioni

The time has passed for our sensations in painting to be whispered. We wish them in the future to sing and re-echo upon our canvasses in deafening and triumphant flourishes.

Umberto Boccioni

For the historian everything begins and ends with time, a mathematical, godlike
time, a notion easily mocked, time external to men, 'exogenous,' as economists
would say, pushing men, forcing them, and painting their own individual times
the same color: it is, indeed, the imperious time of the world.

Fernand Braudel

Any time I make a record it's followed by a painting period. It's good crop rotation.

Since geometry is the right foundation of all painting, I have decided to teach its rudiments and principles to all youngsters eager for art.

Albrecht Dürer

It must be remembered that painting is not the mere gratification of sight.

Joshua Reynolds

Here you are, put this somewhere, on your work table. You must always have this before your eyes... It's a new order of painting. Our Renaissance starts here... There's a pictorial truth in things. This rose and this white lead us to it by a path hitherto unknown to our sensibility..

Our women at home learn to cook and embroider. Some of them take up painting, but that is the extent of our accomplishments. Even our professional women, actresses and singers, do nothing outside their own line of art. Your picture actresses crowd a dozen engagements into each day. I am too tired after my work at the studio. I can do nothing more.

Within one hour of touching the brush to canvas for the first time, my students have a total, complete painting.

The Night-watch [large and famous painting of Dutch 17th century painter Rembrandt]... the grandiose - I don't say it in bad part - grows tiresome after a while. There are mountains like that; when you stand before them you shout Nom de Dieu, but for every day a simple little hill does well enough. Listen Monsieur Vollard, if the 'Raft of the Medusa' hung in my bedroom, it would make me sick.

It was difficult to believe these things had taken place such a very long time ago. The events seemed distant, as though he had only read about them and not experienced them at all. He knew that at this point his death was far closer, far more tangible. That was something he could almost touch. One could feel one's mortal form progressing slowly to ruin, like that old abbey—the signs were undeniable. Things went wrong inside a man and did not come right again. That was the truth that hung over one's head like a blade. Injuries and illnesses were no longer easily repaired. And as with some part of a painting that he could never get right, the great danger was to see nothing but what was wrong. The trap of age.

The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias.

When we were so friendly with Picasso, there was a time when we had difficulty in recognizing our own pictures. Later, when the revelation went deeper, differences appeared. Revelation is the one thing that cannot be taken from you. But before the revelation took place, there was still a marked intention of carrying painting in a direction that could re-establish the bond between Picasso and ourselves.