Painting Quotes

A painting is music you can see and music is a painting you can hear.

For me there is no gap between my painting and my so-called 'decorative' work. I never considered the 'minor arts' to be artistically frustrating; on the contrary, it was an extension of my art.

The most interesting painting is one that expresses more of what one thinks than of what one sees

A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.

The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.

You bring to a painting your own experience.

The act of painting is about one heart telling another heart where he found salvation.

Destroying a tropical rainforest for profit is like burning all the paintings of the Louvre to cook dinner.

It took me twenty years to discover painting: twenty years looking at nature, and above all, going to the Louvre.

Critic asks: 'And what, sir, is the subject matter of that painting?' - 'The subject matter, my dear good fellow, is the light.

My work is about your seeing. There is a rich tradition in painting of work about light, but it is not light -- it is the record of seeing. My material is light, and it is responsive to your seeing.

Painting is no problem. The problem is what to do when you're not painting.

I would advise young artists to paint as they can, as long as they can, without being afraid of painting badly.

More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed.

Dwight is a sad clown. You've seen those paintings of sad clown.

I am good at only two things, and those are gardening and painting.

Someday my paintings will be hanging in the Louvre. [Vincent Van Gogh]

The painter should paint not only what he has in front of him, but also what he sees inside himself. If he sees nothing within, then he should stop painting what is in front of him.

I am painting with the same enthusiasm as a Marseillaise eats bouillabaisse ...
I am painting big sunflowers.

If commercialization is putting my art on a shirt so that a kid who can't afford a $30,000 painting can buy one, then I'm all for it.

When you start a painting, it is somewhat outside you. At the conclusion, you seem to move inside the painting.

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.

Every good picture leaves the painter eager to start again, unsatisfied, inspired by the rich mine in which he is working, hoping for more energy, more vitality, more time - condemned to painting for life.

Pictures just come to my mind and I tell my heart to go ahead.

Every form is a base for color, every color is the attribute of a form.

If I had been around when Rubens was painting, I would have been revered as a fabulous model. Kate Moss? Well, she would have been the paintbrush.

All the fingerprint paintings are done without a grid.

Without atmosphere a painting is nothing.

There is no reason not to consider the world as one gigantic painting.

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.

When I stand before a canvas, I never know what I'll do, and I am the first one surprised at what comes out.

I feel as though I haven't seen an object until I actually start painting it.

Every artist is supposed to get emotional. You're painting pictures of emotions.

Now will never leave. It is always here. Like a clear canvas, it awaits our painting.

Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it, Picasso did it with Cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new paintings again.

Sculpture is made by taking away, while painting is made by adding.

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

When I work alone, my process is like painting. With Fleetwood Mac, it's more like movie making.

Cezanne, you see, is a sort of God of painting.

I'm 38 years old and Limp Bizkit is just something I do. If I was a painter, it would just be a type of painting I make.

When I hesitate, I do not paint. When I paint, I do not hesitate.

Good painting is like good cooking; it can be tasted, but not explained.

Casting is sort of like looking at paintings. You don't know what you'll like, but you recognize it when you see it.

I have always enjoyed drawing and painting but I don't always find the time to do much these days.

If I feel a painting I'm working on doesn't have imagery or emotion, I paint it out and work over it until it does.

Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.

I am out to introduce a psychic shock into my painting, one that is always motivated by pictorial reasoning: that is to say, a fourth dimension.

I have generally found that persons who had studied painting least were the best judges of it.

A painting is finished when the artist says it is finished.

No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.