PAINTING QUOTES II
quotations about painting
The Painter who seeks popularity in Art closes the door upon his own genius.
WASHINGTON ALLSTON
Lectures on Art and Poems
Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.
ORHAN PAMUK
My Name is Red
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"
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.
ALBERT CAMUS
attributed, Words of Wisdom: Albert Camus
You have your brush, you have your colors, you paint paradise, then in you go.
NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS
attributed, Living, Loving & Learning
If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.
GRANDMA MOSES
My Life's History
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
PABLO PICASSO
attributed, Artist to Artist: Inspiration & Advice from Artists Past & Present
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
Never paint your wife or your mother.
GEORGE W. BUSH
"State of the Union with Candy Crowley", CNN, December 14, 2014
There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.
CHARLES DICKENS
Nicholas Nickleby
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
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