Painting Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Well, I looked at Picasso [at the Picasso exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, in 1939] until I could smell his armpits and the cigarette smoke on his breast. Finally, in front of one picture – a bone figure on a beach – I got it. I saw that the figure was not his real subject. The plasticity wasn't either – although the plasticity was great. No. Picasso had uncovered a feverishness in himself and is painting it – a feverishness of death and beauty.

William Baziotes

Atheists don't hate fairies, leprechauns, or unicorns because they don't exist. It is impossible to hate something that doesn't exist. Atheists — like the painting experts hated the painter — hate God because He does exist.

Realism's 'truth' as embodied in painting and literature now solely consists of things capable of being seen by the eye or heard by the ear. Realism is concerned only with the external shell of nature. People content with the discoveries they have made ignore the fact that there are other things to be discovered, even broader avenues to be explored. They have found bacteria, but not what they consist of.

Art itself, in all its methods, is the child of religion. The highest and best works in architecture, sculpture and painting, poetry and music, have been born out of the religion of Nature.

James Freeman Clarke

I heard the comments of the crowd in front of the painting of 'Burial at Ornans', I had the courage to read the nonsense that was printed regarding this picture and I wrote this article...

Gustave Courbet

Never trust an ugly woman. She's got a grudge against the world,' said Grandma who was no oil painting herself.

Richard Peck (writer)

The root of all religions, from the Baha'i point of view, is based on the theory that man will gradually come to understand the unity of the world and the oneness of mankind. It teaches that all the prophets are one – that science and religion are the two great powers which must be balanced if man is to become mature. I feel my work has been influenced by these beliefs. I've tried to decentralize and interpenetrate so that all parts of a painting are of related value.

Film-making encompasses everything, from tricking people into investing in it, to putting on the show, to trying to distill down to moments in time, and ape reality but send this other message. It's got everything. When I was a kid I loved to draw, and I loved my electric football sets, and I painted little things and made sculptures and did matte painting and comic books and illustrated stuff, and took pictures, had a darkroom, loved to tape-record stuff. It's all of that. It's not having to grow up. It's four-dimensional chess, it's strategy, and it's being painfully honest, and unbelievably deceitful, and everything in between.

How we come to have the world-views we do is an interesting question. No doubt reason plays a part, but human needs for meaning and purpose are usually more important. At times personal taste may be what decides the issue. There is nothing to say that, when all the work of reason is done, only one view of the world will remain. There may be many that fit everything that can be known. In that case you might as well choose the view of the world you find most interesting or beautiful. Adopting a world-view is more like selecting a painting to furnish a room than testing a scientific theory. The test is how it fits with your life.

I covered the walls of both basement rooms with Milino, a cheap substitute for canvas, stretched string backwards and forwards across the rooms and attached widths of packing-paper to them, so that they reached down to the floor and as far as the walls that I wanted to paint. I wanted to create a labyrinth which would somehow help to prevent a compositional idea from establishing itself all too quickly. I had the idea of working on all the walls pretty well at the same time, as if they were one large painting completely surrounding me. By constantly wandering in the labyrinth I sought to realise a form of de-composition.

It struck me as I waited that all great enterprises are about logistics. Not genius or inspiration or flights of imagination, skill or cunning, but logistics. Building pyramids or landing spacecraft on Jupiter or invading whole continents or painting divine scenes over the roofs of chapels: logistics.

I see the future development of painting taking place in workshops... not in any holy temple of the arts.

Mondrian? His mind was too subtle. He worked in the light. I work in the darkness... Mondrian is the Buddha of painting. I saw him once. You wondered how a man could radiate such charisma.

Sometimes there are four or five pictures under the painting.

All great questions must be raised by great voices, and the greatest voice is the voice of the people - speaking out - in prose, or painting or poetry or music; speaking out - in homes and halls, streets and farms, courts and cafes - let that voice speak and the stillness you hear will be the gratitude of mankind.

Robert F. Kennedy

The ultimate goal of all visual artistic activity is construction! Architects, painters and sculptors must learn again to know and understand the multi-faceted form of building in its entirety as well as its parts. Only then will they of their own accord fill their works with the architectonic spirit they have lost in the art of the salon. Let us establish a new guild of craftsmen without the presumption of class distinctions building a wall of arrogance between craftsmen and artists. Together let us call for, devise and create the construction of the future, comprising everything in one form: architecture, sculpture and painting.

Feeling must have a medium in order to function at all; in the same way, thought must have symbols. It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being, just as do responses tot the objects of the external world... The medium of painting is such changing and ordering on an ideal plane, ideal in that the medium is more tractable, subtle, and capable of emphasis (abstraction is a kind of emphasis) than everyday life.

The main qualifications to the lesser position of painting is that advances in art are certainly not always formal ones.

Whereas certain people start with a recollection or an experience and paint that experience, to some of us the act of doing is the experience; so that we are not quite clear why we are engaged on a particular work. And because we are more interested in plastic matters than we are in matters of words, once can begin a painting and carry it through and stop it and do nothing about the title at all. All pictures are full of association.

William Baziotes

A painting is complete when it has the shadows of a god.

One day I had painted a bunch of keys on a canvas, my bunch of keys. I didn't know what to put next to them. I needed something that would be the absolute opposite of a bunch of keys. So when I finished work I went out. I had only walked a few yard when what should I see in a shop windows? A postcard of the Mona Lisa! At once I knew that was what I needed; what could have made a greater contrast to the keys?... Then I also added a can of sardines. It was such a strong contrast. [on his painting 'La Joconde aux Clés'].

At first I intended to carry on working in St. Prex [in Switzerland, circa 1914 – 1915] in the same way I had been working in Munich [location of his Blaue Reiter / Blue Rider period]. But something inside me prevented me from painting colourful, sensuous pictures. Suffering had changed my soul, telling me to find other forms and colours to express what was on my mind.

Alexej von Jawlensky

In 1907 I was most strongly influenced by Giotto during my first Italian trip, as well as by Etruscan sculpture and the early Etruscan landscape painting in the Vatican library in Rome.

As an Indian, I remained convinced that the bhav or the feeling of a painting is important, and these put together, can make a good artistic expression. This is what I tried to do during my years in France.

There was no telling who this head, or this leg, or that arm, belonged to... So I scattered the limbs in my painting and realized that in this way I was getting much closer to the truth than Michelangelo did when he concentrated on every separate muscle.