Top 715 Painting Quotes

I dream a lot. I do more painting when I’m not painting. It’s in the subconscious.

As soon as I went to painting school in New York, I took an experimental film course, and everything clicked and came together. I realized my love of music and drama and the visual arts all came together.

I did photography, painting, and drawing, but I prefer sculpture. I like it because it’s very physical.

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.’

Contrary to what many Westerners believe, Islam has a rich tradition of secular painting in spite of its ban on images. It is only in religious rituals that the use of pictorial representation is totally prohibited.

Painting and music were the only things I worked at industriously and faithfully.

Cooking is like painting or writing a song. Just as there are only so many notes or colors, there are only so many flavors – it’s how you combine them that sets you apart.

I counterfeited Mark Kostabi’s artworks. During the eighties, Mark didn’t paint his own paintings. Instead, he had other artists painting them, and he just added his signature. So what I did was to use some of the same painters, and signed his name myself.

I wanted to dress the woman who lives and works, not the woman in a painting.

I loved painting and drawing for many reasons. One of them was that all it really required was me, a pencil and a pad. It was something I was passionate about, and still am.

Strange story about Degas. He hated women, didn’t want to be with them. Yet he spent much of his life painting them. He had seen his father maltreat his mother, must have had a deep fear that he’d do the same thing.

There’s not a lot of pictorial evidence from the Highlands, because only the very wealthy had their portraits painted – but there is one well-known painting of the two sons of the Duke of Argyll, wearing tartan.

Nothing’s sacred anymore. Those girls and I got so close. They were painting me naked every day for months. It was kind of like going to a really bizarre sleepover. It’s what you guys imagine we do: One naked girl and seven pairs of hands all over her.

I tell my workshop students, ‘I want you to think of yourselves as artists. Then, when you’re writing, you’re painting, you’re crafting, you’re making a design, you’re sculpting, you’re creating choreography, sound, a sound script.’

I try to vote as left as I can. I hope that my paintings will coincide and be far left, but frequently… the painting rebels and goes fascist on me.

If you look at a painting that you love by one of the great masters, every time you go back to it, you see something different – a different attitude or brushstroke. ‘Hamlet’ is like an entire gallery of old masters.

All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time.

Painting, drawing – I’m really into photography, I’ve done it since high school.

Unlike painting, sculpture, or music, typefaces must be useful to someone. Fortunately for designers, the digital age has produced new problems to solve – developing typefaces that work on mobile phones, for one – and enabled better solutions to old problems.

Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

The substance of painting is light.

You buy any book on color theory today, and it’s just complete poppycock. Everybody comes out of school painting pink, purple and green. The whole damn cartoon industry has pink purple and green on their mind.

I am a great lover of art, in many forms: paintings, objets, textiles. I don’t have the talent for painting, but I have a very good sense of colour, a love of visual beauty.

My working habit is to separate my aims as a painting from my aims as a poet. They come from very different places and ultimately lead me to very different places… I’ll leave what I mean by ‘places’ ambiguous.

You don’t need a framework. You need a painting, not a frame.

I’m trying to get every man involved in art, into experimental music, or painting, or novel-writing.

Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon – it is the very heart of painting.

The real sustains the same relation to the ideal that a stone does to a statue – or that paint does to a painting. Realism degrades and impoverishes.

The reason I play music is to touch people – for selfish reasons, as well. It feels good to make someone else feel something, whether it’s a kiss, a painting, good idea or it’s a song.

When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing.

‘Pomegranate,’ started with my imagining a bullet going through the fruit and causing it to bleed. My initial associations were with pomegranates in old masters painting and their Judeo-Christian symbolism.

I don’t have much of a problem with interruptions. I keep a detailed record of paint and materials as a work on each painting. I can restart exactly where I left off.

You can be creative in anything – in math, science, engineering, philosophy – as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance.

If you do things, whether it’s acting or music or painting, do it without fear – that’s my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there’s nothing to lose.

How are we going to make painters by lecturing to them? We are going to make questioners, doubters, and talkers. We are going to make painters by painting ourselves, and by showing the paintings of others. By working frankly from our convictions, we are going to make them work frankly from theirs.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

I was dishwasher, then promoted to chef in a local kitchen in a restaurant in Seattle, and I was working on a building site as well, putting in insulation and painting houses, and then doing some classes at a community college nearby.

I have always loved contemporary dance, but it has always been a bit of a mystery to me. But choreography is very much like what I do when you are putting characters in frame on the page. It’s so impressive what they do with their bodies. It’s like painting: an abstraction.

I think of a piece, and then people who are competent fabricate it. But lately I’ve started finger painting, which probably should be a joke but isn’t!

I’m the most Colombian of the Colombians, even though I’ve lived 47 years outside of Colombia. I’ve lived 13 years in New York, and I never did a painting about New York. I’ve lived in France more than 30 years, and I’ve never painted Paris.

I’m not knocking conceptual art; it’s another department, but it doesn’t move me like painting.

A painting of a person can be descriptive, but for me it’s about all the things that make up a picture – the feelings, the brushstrokes – more than describing somebody. People latch on to the personalities when they talk about my work and forget the other parts.

I always start a painting with the sky.

I have a publishing company of books by me and books of others. It drew people to poetry readings and photo exhibitions and painting exhibitions that I’ve been doing for years before that.

I love art. I used to have a painting of Gorbachev that was given to my family by Gorbachev.

I have ridiculously bad eyesight, but I have learned to live with an impressionistic view. Life is a Monet painting. I wander around enjoying myopia.

Well, let’s say we acknowledged the School of French Painting – the Paris School of painting as the leading force and vitality of the time. I think that was understood and felt and experienced.

Painting is damned difficult – you always think you’ve got it, but you haven’t.

No one blames themselves if they don’t understand a cartoon, as they might with a painting or ‘real’ art; they simply think it’s a bad cartoon.

What is the use of good painting? We want a spell cast upon the optical part of our existence! We seldom really see the world, but when we do, we become as still as a picture.

A great painting is a great painting.

Coming out of college with a degree in fine arts and painting isn’t worth much any more.

The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear… What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away… We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities.

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.