Top 310 Painter Quotes

I am not a painter, nor an artist. Therefore I can see straight, and that may be my undoing.

To make money, I did portraits . The truth is so bizarre! I’m kind of embarrassed. I was like a 19th-century pirate painter. I’d say, ‘Your mom would love a painting of you!’ A salesman! I’d hawk paintings.

I went to UCLA and studied studio art. I thought I was going to be a gallery painter, photographer, or ceramicist. Then, when I graduated, that didn’t happen immediately. I didn’t suddenly get solo shows in Chelsea, and I realized that is actually kind of difficult to break into.

The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies every thing placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence.

I am not an artist. I am not a painter.

I never consciously said, ‘I want to be an actor.’ It sounds stupid, but it’s kind of like being a painter or something. You don’t say, ‘From today on I’m going to be a painter.’ It’s not something conscious – you’ve just been painting pictures all your life.

The boyhood dream of becoming a painter stays important to me.

It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.

I think there’s a deep impulse in most humans to do creative stuff, whether that’s music or art, photography or writing. Most people at some point in their life say they want to do something creative – they want to be an actor, a director, a writer, a poet, a painter or whatever.

With a painter’s temperament, all that’s needed are the means of expression sufficient to be intelligible to the wide public.

Not to compare an actor to a painter, but you can go through different phases and still be the same artist, y’know?

It’s like a painter with various layers of paint. I start with a drum loop and add keyboards, and then melodies start to take shape. The vocals happen later. I’ve never really done therapy before, but it’s a form of therapy. Everything else falls away.

Louise Bonnet is a Los Angeles-based painter of round, fleshy, almost obscene shapes and people. But hers is a very clean, friendly cartoon world, so there’s this tension between harmlessness and perversion that is totally unsettling.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

In 2005, I worked as a scenic painter for a while when I was taking a break from music.

By the beginning of the 20th Century, Cannes and the coastal strip that winds its rocky way to Monaco was the winter resort for the rich, the Royals and a few well-heeled writers and artists, such as the impressionist painter Auguste Renoir.

I’m quite a precious painter; my style is a messy fine art – sort of impressionist. I do portraits, I love painting other artists, but recently, I’ve been playing around with self portraits, putting on different characters.

My father was a painter and he taught art. He once said to me, ‘I never knew an Indian child who could not draw.’

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’ve had times where I’ve joked, like, ‘I’m going to move to Vermont and become a painter.’ And sometimes that joke felt like, ‘Oh that’s a good idea.’ But it was only, like, a daydream for a moment to, like, escape.

I feel like I’ve cheated. I never knew what to do. I was never a good enough painter to earn a living, and so I drifted into the theatre, and I’ve had a successful life. I feel guilty that I’ve never done a day’s work in my life!

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

In a perfect world, I would be a painter. I love working with my hands. I don’t get to do it as much as I like, but I am finding a way to make more time as life goes on because it’s a really great outlet for me to express myself.

I wanted to be a painter, really, when I was growing up as a kid. It was one thing that really took a grip on me.

If I was a painter, I would have hundreds of finished and unfinished canvases in my studio waiting for people to see, and it is the same with my music. I’ve got so many pieces of music and songs waiting to be heard.

I wanted to be a painter.

I do paint, and I wanted to actually be a painter. Sometimes I’ll whip out paints. It’s tough to find the motivation, but it’s also a solitary, lonely occupation. What I like about acting is that it is such a collaborative thing.

There is no scientific discoverer, no poet, no painter, no musician, who will not tell you that he found ready made his discovery or poem or picture – that it came to him from outside, and that he did not consciously create it from within.

I spent three years there and encountered great teachers who gave me enough stimulation to last me for the rest of my life – Josef Albers, painter; Buckminster Fuller, inventor; Max Dehn, the mathematician, and many others. Through them, I came to understand the total commitment required if one must be an artist.

I was always pretty decent at fast stick work or doing stuff that seems impressive that’s not really; I was pretty tasteful and had good ideas musically. But I had a terrible sense of tempo, which is like being a blind painter. The conductor would just rip into me, and it lasted for years.

I would love to have been a painter in the tradition of the surrealist painters who I admire so much.

I do feel Scottish in some way. Maybe it’s to do with visiting my grandparents here every summer as a child, but I am aware of my Scottish ancestry. It’s there all right, but it would be pushing it to label me a Scottish painter. Or, indeed, an anywhere painter.

I have a little studio in Chinatown, and I sometimes go there and rearrange my brushes. But I would have to stop acting altogether in order to become a painter. At the moment, I’m still interested and active as an actor and director. Besides, I rather think acting and painting are all part of the same creative urge.

The painter must give a completely free rein to any feeling or sensations he may have and reject nothing to which he is naturally drawn.

The anarchist painter is not the one who will create anarchist pictures, but the one who will fight with all his individuality against official conventions.

Because I’m so busy and because I think of myself as a painter, I desperately guard the time that I have to paint. And sometimes I’m irresponsible to my career in order to paint. Because painting is obsessive. I forget to eat. I forget to sleep.

A painter has his brushes, a musician his instrument and as an actor you use your body.

The great poet is a great artist. He is painter and sculptor. The greatest pictures and statues have been painted and chiseled with words. They outlast all others.

I went to art school, wanting to be a painter and then I got into photography. Then it was movies, and I liked the images. One of the things that interested me in film was that I was communicating in images. That was something I did intuitively and could not even talk about until I started having to do interviews.

My father was a painter. There was a lot of singing. We hung around with a lot of folk musicians. My family knew a lot of great folk musicians of the time, like Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Leadbelly. They were all people we knew.

I spent all of my childhood at a performance art camp. Putting on plays, it was more like commedia dell’arte. It wasn’t career-oriented in any way. It was more fun and therapeutic, so I never really thought of it as something I would end up doing. I was more convinced I was going to be a painter.

I went to art high school and thought I’d be a painter. Unfortunately I didn’t finish high school, but that’s always been part of my work.

I didn’t want to be a writer. First I wanted to act, and then I wanted to be a painter like my big sister.

The thrill of a photo-realist painter is if you get really close to the painting, it looks just like a photograph. Whereas in my case, if you get close to my paintings, they totally fall apart – so I’m about as far from a photo-realist as it gets.

My wife is a painter, musician, and fiber artist. We married in 1993, and as she worked, I found that my reading about art was helping me understand what she was doing, just as seeing her work gave me a language with which to speak of art.

My mom’s an artist in every way. She’s a painter, a photographer. She’s a wanderer – always searching, always seeing. I guess you could say my mom gave me her eyes.

I was originally a painter, and I made films sort of as an extension of that, and then I started to try to make dramatic films because the early films were experimental films.

I’m an independent artist, but I do have a good business relationship with Lego, since I’m a unique customer. They’re aware of what I’m doing. A painter may not have a relationship with a paint maker, but there’s only one company that makes Lego.

My sister-in-law is a painter, and I’ll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She’ll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting.