PAINTING QUOTES
quotations about painting
Painting dissolves the forms at its command ... it melts them into color.
ALEXANDER ELIOT
Sight and Insight
If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.
VINCENT VAN GOGH
attributed, The Ultimate Book of Quotations
Life is a great big canvas, throw all the paint you can on it.
DANNY KAYE
attributed, Say It Right: A Guide to Effective Oral Business Presentations
The best color to paint with is love.
JAROD KINTZ
This Book Is Not For Sale
I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.
VINCENT VAN GOGH
attributed, Marry Your Muse: Making a Lasting Commitment to Your Creativity
Painting doesn't mean just describing, it's a state of spirit.
CARYL CHURCHILL
Mad Forest
PAINTING, n. The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
I don't paint what I look at, but what looks at me.
FRANÇOISE GILOT
"Artist Françoise Gilot, on life with and after Picasso", CBS News, August 20, 2017
I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.
FRIDA KAHLO
"Mexican Autobiography", Time Magazine, April 27, 1953
With hue like that when some great painter dips
His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
The Revolt of Islam
Painting with all its technicalities, difficulties, and peculiar ends, is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.
JOHN RUSKIN
attributed, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations
The good painter has two principal things to depict: man and the purpose of his mind. The first is easy, the second is difficult, since he must do it by the gestures and movements of the limbs, and this is to be learnt from the dumb, who more than all other men excel in it.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.
PABLO PICASSO
attributed, "War and Peace", Jean Cocteau's Journals
I've been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas, I just think about it.
STEVEN WRIGHT
stand-up routine
Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed; contemplating it, everyone can create a story at the will of his imagination and--with a single glance--have his soul invaded by the most profound recollections; no effort of memory, everything is summed up in one instant. A complete art which sums up all the others and completes them. Like music, it acts on the soul through the intermediary of the senses: harmonious colors correspond to the harmonies of sound. But in painting a unity is obtained which is not possible in music, where the accords follow one another, so that the judgment experiences a continuous fatigue if it wants to reunite the end with the beginning. The ear is actually a sense inferior to the eye. The hearing can only grasp a single sound at a time, whereas the sight takes in everything and simultaneously simplifies it at will.
PAUL GAUGUIN
Notes Synthetiques
Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.
PABLO PICASSO
attributed, A Year of Painting: Exercises for Expressive Painting
The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerises some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves.
VINCENT VAN GOGH
letter to Theo van Gogh, October 1884
Painting is silent poetry.
SIMONIDES OF CEOS
attributed, Plutarch's Essays
I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
The Painted Veil
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
OSCAR WILDE
The Picture of Dorian Gray