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

It is the bareness of drawing that I like. The act of drawing is what locates, suggests, discovers. At times it seems enough to draw, without the distractions of color and mass. Yet it is an old ambition to make drawing and painting one.

The challenge of yoga is to go beyond our limits - within reason. We continually expand the frame of the mind by using the canvas of the body. It is as if you were to stretch a canvas more and create a larger surface for a painting. But we must respect the present form of our body. If you pull too much at once, we will rip the canvas. If the practice of today damages the practice of tomorrow, it is not correct practice.

B. K. S. Iyengar

Detectors... are really the way you express yourself. To say somehow what you have in your guts. In the case of painters, it's painting. In the case of sculptures, it's sculpture. In the case of experimental physicists, it's detectors. The detector is the image of the guy who designed it.

Why do I paint? In my work as a mathematician, form, structure, and economy of expression are important. In music, add tone quality, balance and harmony. And now in painting, these aesthetic values are enhanced by color, contrast, and composition.

Robin Hartshorne

What's so astonishing about not understanding? There are so many things in art, beginning with art itself, that one doesn't understand. A painter doesn't see everything that he has put in his painting.

Overall, the anarchy was the most creative of all periods of Japanese culture for in it there appeared the greatest landscape painting, the culmination of the skill of landscape gardening and the arts of flower arrangement, and the No drama.

The artist does not exist except as a personification, a figure of speech that represents the sum total of art itself. It is painting that is the genius of the painter, poetry of the poet, and a person is a creative artist to the extent that he participates in that genius.

Harold Rosenberg

Music - so different from painting - is the art which we enjoy most in company with others. A symphony, presented in a room with one other listener, would please him but little.

Robert Schumann

When all lies, deceit, pretense is stripped away, what remains? The truth of a painting, or a book or a man.

William S. Burroughs

Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.

Robert Motherwell

Over the past two decades, the boundary between photography and other media like painting, sculpture, or performance has become increasingly porous. It would seem that each medium has absorbed the other, leaving the photographic residing everywhere, but nowhere in particular.

Geoffrey Batchen

Photography as a subject is a good one. Its history is only about 150 years... You only have to know about twenty-five or thirty names and that's it. All you need. In painting there are more than 1,000.

William Wegman (photographer)

People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of what is good or bad art in the theater.

Minnie Maddern Fiske

The painters have no copyright on modern art!... I believe in, and make no apologies for, photography: it is the most important graphic medium of our day. It does not have to be, indeed cannot be - compared to painting - it has different means and aims.

Science, if given its head, is not just cold efficiency; its attitude is tolerant, friendly and humane. It has already become the dominant inspiration of human culture, so that modern poetry, painting and architecture derive their most constructive ideas from scientific thought.

C. H. Waddington

In truth, factual information - names or dates - have never interested me much. Those things are like an alien language that can interfere with the language of the painting, or even prevent its emergence.

Gerhard Richter

It is, in fact, safe to assume that, more often than not, life imitates craft, for who among us can say that our experience does not more closely resemble a macramé plant holder than it does a painting by Seurat. When it comes to art, life is the biggest copycat in the matter of the frame.

If a painting can be forged well enough to fool experts, why is the original so valuable?

Painting depends on freedom. When you're feeling completely free, you can create, and this power to create is, in turn, the greatest freedom of all.

George Rodrigue

Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings.

Gerhard Richter

There's nobody living who couldn't stand all afternoon in front of a waterfall.... Anyone who can sit on a stone in a field awhile can see my painting. Nature is like parting a curtain, you go into it.... as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean.

The most joyous painting is not done for the art world, it is done for the inner world.

Writing, playing, composing, painting, reading, listening, looking-all require that we submit to being swept away by Eros, to a transformation of self of the kind that happens when we fall in love.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

These pictures possibly give rise to questions of political content or historical truth. Neither interests me in this instance. And although even my motivation for painting them is probably of no significance, I am trying to put a name to it here, as an articulation, parallel to the pictures, as it were, of my disquiet and of my opinion.

Gerhard Richter