Painting Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Sometimes I start in a very realistic fashion, and as I go on from one painting to another of the same kind, it becomes simplified until it can be nothing but abstraction.

Georgia O'Keeffe

You see, should I stand in front of a landscape and paint it, I'm completely ignoring the factor of time. While I am painting it, it's changing, clouds are changing, all sorts of things. So there's the myth there of someone creating in a timeless vacuum.

William S. Burroughs

There is no one who has cooked but has discovered that each particular dish depends for its rightness upon some little point which he is never told. It is not only so of cooking: it is so of splicing a rope; of painting a surface of wood; of mixing mortar; of almost anything you like to name among the immemorial human arts.

Sculpture is more than painting. It is greater To raise the dead to life than to create Phantoms that seem to live.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

If history were a photograph of the past it would be flat and uninspiring. Happily, it is a painting; and, like all works of art, it fails of the highest truth unless imagination and ideas are mixed with the paints.

Every race of people since time began who have attempted to describe God by words or painting, or by carvings, have conveyed their idea that the God who made them and shaped their destinies was symbolized in themselves...

Henry McNeal Turner

Painting has been a smiling mistress to many, but she has been a cruel jilt to me; I did not abandon her, she abandoned me.

Painting, like water, takes any form. Paint is a film of pigment on a plane. It is not real in the way that gravity-bound sculpture is real. It is, however, real.

Squeak Carnwath

Do not let it look as if you reasoned too much. Painting must be impulsive to be worth while.

Charles Webster Hawthorne

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

One is conscious of no brave and noble earnestness in it, of no generalized passion for intellectual and spiritual adventure, of no organized determination to think things out. What is there is a highly self-conscious and insipid correctness, a bloodless respectability submergence of matter in manner--in brief, what is there is the feeble, uninspiring quality of German painting and English music.

Photography is not only drawing with light, though light is the indispensable agent of its being. It is modeling or sculpturing with light, to reproduce the plastic form of natural objects. It is painting with light...

Berenice Abbott

What is more natural in a democratic age than that we should begin to measure the stature of a work of art-especially of a painting-by how widely and how well it is reproduced?

Daniel J. Boorstin

Water and stones. Those are the unpromising ingredients of two very different endeavors... painting, because artists' pigments are made from fluids... mixed together with powdered stones to give color... and the other is alchemy, the stone the ultimate goal.

James Elkins (art historian)

It is in working [painting] that you will find yourself...

It is not the how of painting but the why. To imitate a style would be a little like teaching a tone of voice or a personality.

I frequently lock myself in my studio. I do not often see the people I love, and in the end I shall suffer for it... painting is one's private life.

In the sphere of natural investigation, as in poetry and painting, the delineation of that which appeals most strongly to the imagination, derives its collective interest from the vivid truthfulness with which the individual features are portrayed.

Alexander von Humboldt

A painting is finished when to have done less would be considered a sin and more a crime.

Sculpture and painting are very justly called liberal arts; a lively and strong imagination, together with a just observation, being absolutely necessary to excel in either; which, in my opinion, is by no means the case of music, though called a liberal art, and now in Italy placed even above the other two--a proof of the decline of that country.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

Nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday.

Charles Saatchi

In a purely technical sense, each species of higher organism-beetle, moss, and so forth, is richer in information than a Caravaggio painting, Mozart symphony, or any other great work of art.

Trying to find equivalents for things in words helps me find equivalents in painting.

When we come to understand architecture as the essential nature of all harmonious structure we will see that it is the architecture of music that inspired Bach and Beethoven, the architecture of painting that is inspiring Picasso as it inspired Velasquez, that it is the architecture of life itself that is the inspiration of the great poets and philosophers.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Don't listen to the fools who say that pictures of people can be of no consequence, or that painting is dead. There is much to be done.