PAINTING QUOTES II

quotations about painting

Painting quote

The Painter who seeks popularity in Art closes the door upon his own genius.

WASHINGTON ALLSTON

Lectures on Art and Poems

Tags: Washington Allston


Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.

ORHAN PAMUK

My Name is Red


My first paintings were of my dreams. They were more real to me than the reality I was living in--I didn't like my reality. I remember waking up, and the memory of my dreams was so strong that I would write them down, and then I would paint them, in just two very particular colors, a deep green and a night blue. Never anything else.

MARINA ABRAMOVIC

Walk Through Walls: A Memoir

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The question so often asked of modern painting, "What is it?", contains more than the dull skepticism of the man who is not going to have the wool pulled over his eyes. It speaks of a fundamental placement in relation to the work, that of a voyager in the world coming upon a strange object. The reader reconstitutes the work by his active participation, by approaching the object, tapping it, shaking it, holding it to his ear to hear the roaring within. It is characteristic of the object that it does not declare itself all at once, in a rush of pleasant naïveté.

DONALD BARTHELME

"After Joyce"

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The principle of painting is also to make a choice. "Even genius," writes Delacroix, ruminating on his art, "is only the gift of generalizing and choosing." The painter isolates his subject, which is the first way of unifying it. Landscapes flee, vanish from the memory, or destroy one another. That is why the landscape painter or the painter of still life isolates in space and time things that normally change with the light, get lost in an infinite perspective, or disappear under the impact of other values.

ALBERT CAMUS

The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

Tags: Albert Camus


A painter does a painting, and he paints it and he paints it, and that's it, you know. He has the joy of creating it, it hangs on a wall, and somebody buys it, and maybe somebody buys it again, or maybe nobody buys it and it sits up in a loft somewhere until he dies. But he never, you know, nobody ever, nobody ever said to Van Gogh, 'Paint us Starry Night again, man!' You know? He painted it and that was it.

JONI MITCHELL

Miles of Aisles

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Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

BALTHUS

attributed, Art that Changed the World


Painting is something that takes place among the colors ... one has to leave them alone completely, so that they can settle the matter among themselves. Their intercourse: this is the whole of painting. Whoever meddles, arranges, injects his human deliberation, his wit, his advocacy, his intellectual agility in any way, is already disturbing and clouding their activity.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

letter to his wife, October 21, 1907

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In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.

JOHN BERGER

Ways of Seeing

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It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

ALBERT CAMUS

attributed, Words of Wisdom: Albert Camus

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If a painting of a tree was only the exact representation of the original, so that it looked just like the tree, there would be no reason for making it; we might as well look at the tree itself. But the painting, if it is of the right sort, gives something that neither a photograph nor a view of the tree conveys. It emphasizes something of character, quality, individuality. We are not lost in looking at thorns and defects; we catch a vision of the grandeur and beauty of a king of the forest.

CALVIN COOLIDGE

speech, January 17, 1925

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If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

GRANDMA MOSES

My Life's History


I wanted to paint a picture some day that people would stand before and forget that it was made of paint. I wanted it to creep into them like a bar of music and mushroom there like a soft bullet.

O. HENRY

"Masters of Arts", The Complete Works of O. Henry

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You have your brush, you have your colors, you paint paradise, then in you go.

NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS

attributed, Living, Loving & Learning


Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

PABLO PICASSO

attributed, Artist to Artist: Inspiration & Advice from Artists Past & Present

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Never paint your wife or your mother.

GEORGE W. BUSH

"State of the Union with Candy Crowley", CNN, December 14, 2014

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Subject-painting isolates, in both time and space, an action that normally would become lost in another action. Thus the painter arrives at a point of stabilization. The really great creative artists are those who, like Piero della Francesca, give the impression that the stabilization has only just taken place, that the projection machine has suddenly stopped dead. All their subjects give the impression that, by some miracle of art, they continue to live, while ceasing to be mortal.

ALBERT CAMUS

The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

Tags: Albert Camus


Once, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm. Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner intended to paint. What he intended to paint was a representation of the storm.

DAVID MARKSON

Wittgenstein's Mistress


There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.

CHARLES DICKENS

Nicholas Nickleby

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If a picture is daubed with many glaring colors, the vulgar eye admires it; whereas he judges very contemptuously of some admirable design sketched out only with a black pencil, though by the hand of Raphael.

ISAAC WATTS

attributed, Day's Collacon