Painting Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

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.

Weirdly, an image of Adrian's Love painting came back to me. I thought of the jagged red streak, slashing through the blackness, ripping it apart. Staring at Jill and her inconsolable pain, I suddenly understood his art a little bit better.

You can't ask a man to talk sensibly about the art of painting if he simply doesn't know anything about it. But by God, how can he [Zola was his youth friend, who used Cezanne as a model in his novel 'L'Oeuvre'] dare to say that a painter is done because he has painted one bad picture? When a picture isn't realized, you pitch it in the fire and start another one.

Well, it's just a sense of personal satisfaction. Just like taking a good photograph or painting a picture or playing a good golf game or something, it's the thing in itself that justifies it.

William Rehnquist

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

By the unification of architecture, sculpture and painting a new plastic reality will be created.

The most deeply moving element in the contemplation of beauty is the element of loss. We desire to hold; but the sunset melts into the night, and the secret of the painting on the wall can never be the secret of the buyer.

Pamela Hansford Johnson

Every minute everything is different everywhere. It is all flowing... The duty or beauty of a painting is that there is no reason to do it nor any reason not to. It can be done as a direct act or contact with the moment and that is the moment you are awake and moving. It all passes and is never true literally as the present again leaving more work to be done.

Robert Rauschenberg

I consider my painting finished when my eyes goes to a particular spot on the canvas. But if I put the picture away about thirty feet on the wall and the movements keep returning to me and the eye seems to be responding to something living, then it is finished.

William Baziotes

After completing my work (his murals for the Jewish Theater) I thought, as has been agreed, that ot would be shown in public as a series of my latest things. The management will agree with me that I can find no inner peace as a painter until the 'masses' see my work etc. It turned out that the things (the murals) had been put into a 'cage', as it were, where they can be seen at the very best by (if you will forgive me for saying so) Jews at close quarters. I like the Jews a lot (there's enough 'proof' of that) but I like the Russians as well and some other nationalities, and I am used to painting serious things for many 'nationalities'.

On the way I stood a moment looking out across the marshes with tall cattails, a patch of water, more marsh, then the woods with a few birch trees shining white at the edge on beyond. In the darkness it all looked just like I felt. Wet and swampy and gloomy, very gloomy. In the morning I painted it. My memory of it is that it was probably my best painting that summer..

Georgia O'Keeffe

I wondered if I would appear on a temple wall painting someday. A blonde Egyptian girl with purple highlights running sideways through the palm trees, screaming "Yikes!" in hieroglyphics as Neith chased after me. The thought of some poor archaeologist trying to figure that out almost lifted my spirits.

The truth is I am a perfect part of the exact point at which all individual human beings meet and the spectrum of voices weaving themselves in between and screaming 'every sick thought you've ever had and every twisted feeling you've ever felt are what make this painting complete.'

Buddy Wakefield

Acting is like painting pictures on bathroom tissues. Ten minutes later you throw them away and they are gone.

Shelley Winters

I'll get an inspiration and start painting; then I'll forget everything, everything except how things used to be and how to paint it so people will know how we used to live.

By painting colours and lines and forms seen in a quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does.

No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. I hope in time to have a more balanced and Miltonic style. But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music, and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive, and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

I wanted an art that was faithful to itself [loyal] and would have nothing to do with the business of creating illusions. I dreamed of painting glasses from which no-one would ever think of drinking, beaches that would be quite unsuitable for bathing, nudes who would be definitively chaste. I wanted an art which in the first place would appear as a representation of the impossible.

Jazz is a language. It is people living in sound. Jazz is people talking, laughing, crying, building, painting, mathematicizing, abstracting, extracting, giving to, taking from, making of. In other words, living.

I started painting as a hobby when I was little. I didn't know I had any talent. I believe talent is just a pursued interest. Anybody can do what I do.

This is a dark painting with a bit of violence because I was very affected by Diana's death. I cried all day because I liked her, warts and all. Most of all I liked the way that she wanted to be loved and didn't mind admitting it.

I painted like that because I wanted to get through to something new - a kind of painting that was my own.

You take a painting, you have a white, virginal piece of canvas that is the world of purity, and then you put your imagery on it, and you try to bring it back to the original purity.

Louise Nevelson

There is a great difference between painting a face and not washing it.