Top 252 Paintings Quotes

I am inspired by life, past experiences, what’s to come, women around me, art, colors, paintings, and emotions.

The Louvre stopped buying paintings in 1848, and neither the Metropolitan nor the Hermitage acquire contemporary material.

I am not really into paintings, to be honest, but for me, the art I love is when I see singers putting their heart into their song, actors giving the performance of their lives, and books and movies that make me feel something I never thought I could; there’s art in everything as long as it’s made with soul.

Seeing Cubism paintings at the Beaubourg makes me very happy and, also, old films.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

I just like art. I get pure pleasure from it. I have a lot of wonderful paintings, and every time I look at them I see something different.

Gray goes with gold. Gray goes with all colors. I’ve done gray-and-red paintings, and gray and orange go so well together. It takes a long time to make gray because gray has a little bit of color in it.

I think art is good at looking back and looking forward. I don’t think art is good at looking head-on. At the end of the day, people are more important than paintings.

I’m just really impressed by oil paintings – I don’t see how people do it! That’s the style I like: classic oil paintings. Abstract art just isn’t my thing.

I find myself chatting with my paintings, not deep and meaningful stuff, but things like ‘hey there buddy’ and ‘oh, look what I did to your nose!’

I had some money, I made the best paintings ever. I was completely reclusive, worked a lot, took a lot of drugs. I was awful to people.

‘Playboy’ made the good life a reality for me and made it the subject matter of my paintings – not affluence and luxury as such, but joie de vivre itself.

Mark Grotjahn’s large new paintings abound with torrents of ropy impasto, laid down in thickets, cascading waves, and bundles that swell, braid around, or overlap one another.

It may be a cliche, but cliche or not, I fear the day when the only marsh harriers or peregrines I can look at are in paintings by Joseph Wolf or Bruno Liljefors – and no matter how beautiful those works may be, life is the great thing: life, life, life.

We are so fortunate, as Australians, to have among us the oldest continuing cultures in human history. Cultures that link our nation with deepest antiquity. We have Aboriginal rock art in the Kimberley that is as ancient as the great Palaeolithic cave paintings at Altamira and Lascaux in Europe.

I will always find even the worst paintings that attempt some kind of representation better than the best invented paintings.

I had earlier done a few paintings on Durga because I am fascinated by her.

I think most paintings are a record of the decisions that the artist made. I just perhaps make them a little clearer than some people have.

I think I’ve always been afraid of painting, really. Right from the beginning. All my paintings are about painting without a painter. Like a kind of mechanical form of painting.

The best way to begin is to say: Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. And now let us have a look at his paintings.

Sometimes people damage paintings or sculpture because they love it. They throw their arms around a statue in a fit of hysterical passion and it falls over.

I mostly paint animals I’m familiar with, but I did a series of paintings of ravens, so I read everything about them.

People who put my paintings on their walls are putting their values on their walls: faith, family, home, a simpler way of living, the beauty of nature, quiet, tranquillity, peace, joy, hope. They beckon you into this world that provides an alternative to your nightly news broadcast.

Often, I find it really hard to see what I’m doing when I’m in the thick of things. I can get too precious and have to force myself to put my paintings aside. There’s a wall in my studio where I hang paintings that I think are done or nearly done. Over time, I’ll realise which ones are working and which aren’t.

I’ve heard that many fine artists have to turn their ‘finished’ paintings to face the wall – otherwise, every time they walk past, they are tempted to pick up a brush and make small adjustments here and there.

I make paintings, try to get others to look at them and hopefully buy them.

I decided to become a painter when my first four paintings where all published and attracted a great deal of interest. I exhibited one of them and it was sold.

I really have to think of myself as a painter first because sculpture came much, much later. As a student at the Art Institute in Chicago, I simply never became involved in sculpture. I did prints, and I did paintings.

Jeff Hardy’s site is literally his paintings and music; it has nothing to do with wrestling and is an artistic venture.

I have always been fascinated by paleontology and prehistoric people, and I’ve always thought that one of the most intriguing moments in human history was the birth of artistic imagination. I always loved those cave paintings.

I’m passionately involved in life: I love its change, its color, its movement. To be alive, to be able to see, to walk, to have houses, music, paintings – it’s all a miracle.

I have always wanted to make paintings that are impossible to walk past, paintings that grab and hold your attention. The more you look at them, the more satisfying they become for the viewer. The more time you give to the painting, the more you get back.

Mom’s paintings are a very small part of the legacy she left behind.

I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn’t aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.

I began observing, making paintings of my surroundings, taking a vow of silence, listening, composing music, writing, and making time for formal education. Then I started telling stories.

I have been very interested and intrigued and congratulatory toward President Bush and his paintings.

I give away thousands of paintings for free.

Never buy four C-plus paintings when you can buy one A.

Each of us is a small part of God’s plan. I’m a small part. I create paintings that are being used by God.

I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.

When you’re on a highway, viewing the western U.S. with the mountains and the flatness and the desert and all that, it’s very much like my paintings.

The Puritans removed organs and paintings from churches, but bought them for private use in their homes.

The architect who first inspired me to follow this profession was Sir John Soane and his Regency home; well, his three homes, now a museum. The place is like an encyclopedia of paintings, antiquities, furniture, sculptures, and drawings.

I did some pastels and I did other pieces in which there was just basically one color per square, and then they would get bigger and I could get 2 or 3 colors into the square, and ultimately I just started making oil paintings.

My father was an amateur oil painter, so some of his oil paintings were on our walls. There was one above the piano of a famous Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko, playing an instrument known as a bandura. I remember that one kind of resonated with me; it was always central in the living room.

I find the history of toys very interesting on an academic level – they’re very much products of their time, just like paintings and furniture tell us about their time.

At art school, a teacher said: ‘The best paintings are when you get lost in a piece of work and start painting in a stream of consciousness.’ I wanted to do music, not art, so started writing lyrics that way. The first song I wrote was called ‘Ice Cream and Wafers.’ The next was ‘Holding Back the Years.’

I don’t think you should have to defend your actions to people who say: ‘You’ve put some paintings on a wall, and if this doesn’t have any deep meaning, then why?’ What about the Dadaists? What were they doing? Weren’t they just having a laugh with their tin hats?

Red is one of the strongest colors, it’s blood, it has a power with the eye. That’s why traffic lights are red I guess, and stop signs as well… In fact I use red in all of my paintings.

A well-designed home has to be very comfortable. I can’t stand the aesthetes, the minimal thing. I can’t live that way. My home has to be filled with stuff – mostly paintings, sculpture, my fish lamps, cardboard furniture, lots of books.

I’ve always wanted my art to be global rather than local. I want to make paintings that people everywhere can relate to.

I stopped painting in 1990 at the peak of my success just to deny people my beautiful paintings, and I did it out of spite.

My dad went to art school when I was one. They scraped and continued scraping, because artists, as we all know, don’t earn a lot of money. It’s a precarious existence and my mum didn’t work, so dad sold paintings.

When you’re buying paintings, it feels grown up.