Canvas Quotes - Page 21

• Take some wood and canvas and nails and things. Build yourself a theater, a stage, light it, learn about it. When you've done that you will probably know how to write a play.

  Eugene O'Neill

  Writing, Light, Play

  Eugene O'Neill (1987). “Eugene O'Neill, comments on the drama and the theater: a source book”, G. Narr Verlag

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• I work on stretched linen canvas, sized so that the surface already has a sense of tension when I begin. It is a very rich and reactive surface. I begin by drawing on the canvas with a kind of loose line, very simply and freely. I paint very thinly, which allows me to change the drawing if I want to.

  Sean Scully

  Drawing, Lines, Want

  4 Copy quote

• I believe I have had the most trouble with a portrait which I painted in installments - the head on one canvas and the bust on another.

  Mark Twain

  Believe, Portraits, Trouble

  Mark Twain (1935). “The complete short stories and humorous sketches of Mark Twain”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I don't know in advance what I am going to put on canvas any more than I decide beforehand what colours I am going to use.

  Pablo Picasso

  Preparation, Use, Colour

  Pablo Picasso (1972). “Picasso on art: a selection of views”, Viking Adult

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is, I am convinced, no picture that conveys in all its dreadfulness, a vision of sorrow, despairing, remediless, supreme. If I could paint such a picture, the canvas would show only a woman looking down at her empty arms.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Sorrow, Vision, Arms

  52 Copy quote

• Manet wanted one day to paint my wife and children. Renoir was there. He took a canvas and began painting them, too. After a while, Manet took me aside and whispered, 'You're on very good terms with Renoir and take an interest in his future - do advise him to give up painting! You can see for yourself that it's not his metier at all.

  Claude Monet

  Children, Giving Up, Wife

  12 Copy quote

• Those who largely rely on their hands and the beautiful or shocking traces of the imagination that they leave on the canvas ...CONCRETE... one builds a picture.

  Pierre Alechinsky

  Beautiful, Hands, Imagination

  7 Copy quote

• You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters — all that matters, really is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever present consciousness. The rest - women , art, success — is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries.

  Albert Camus

  Art, Mistake, Thinking

  "Happy Death".

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The measure of a man comes down to moments, spread out like dots of pain on the canvas on life. Everything you were, everything you'll someday be, resides in the small, seemingly ordinary choices of everyday life.....Each decision seems as insignificant as a left turn on an unfamiliar road when you have no destination in mind. But the decisions accumulate until you realize one day that they've made you the man that you are.

  Kristin Hannah

  Pain, Men, Choices

  44 Copy quote

• I think... it is somehow very useful, and maybe even essential, for a fine artist to have to somehow make his peace on the canvas with all the things he cannot do. That is what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call 'personality,' or maybe even 'pain.'

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Pain, Struggle, Artist

  Kurt Vonnegut (1987). “Bluebeard: A Novel”, New York : Delacorte Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest art of all the arts. Painting and sculpture are but images, Are merely shadows cast by outward things On stone or canvas, having in themselves No separate existence. Architecture, Existing in itself, and not in seeming A something it is not, surpasses them As substance shadow.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Art, Badass, Bad Ass

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Illustrated)”, p.1489, Delphi Classics

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Empty canvas. In appearance - really empty, silent, indifferent. Stunned, almost. In effect - full of tensions, with thousand subdued voices, heavy with expectations. A little frightened because it may be violated

  Wassily Kandinsky

  Voice, Expectations, May

  66 Copy quote

• This art of conservation is strength, and makes the masterpiece a masterpiece. Otherwise, the man who simply brought all the different colors obtainable, and squeezed them out upon the canvas to give it 'full force,' would be the greatest master, instead of being merely extravagant.

  John F. Carlson

  Art, Men, Color

  John F. Carlson (2013). “Carlson's Guide to Landscape Painting”, p.88, Courier Corporation

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I was called Rembrandt Hope in my boxing days, because I spent so much time on the canvas.

  Bob Hope

  Funny, Sports, Boxing

  28 Copy quote

• With a canvas I'm a group of seven. A migraine, take two Excedrin.

  Drake

  Humble, Two, Groups

  Song: Ignorant Shit, Album: So Far Gone, 2009

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the anxiety to get beautiful colour harmony do not exhaust all combinations on one canvas.

  John F. Carlson

  Beautiful, Anxiety, Harmony

  9 Copy quote

• Another thing that escapes me is HOW to give substance to the forms. One day they look solid and 'real' and they seem to hinge upon each other and splinter and creak, fall with a thud to the bottom of the canvas and drag across the surface, and the next day they are like dust, all lightweight and just stuck there.

  Paula Rego

  Real, Fall, Dust

  John McEwen, Paula Rego (1992). “Paula Rego”

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Canvas. J.C. Penney. $3.98. You like?

  Pat Morita

  Money

  "Fictional character: Mr. Miyagi". "The Karate Kid", www.imdb.com. 1984.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  Joan Miro

  Firsts, Painting, Knows

  62 Copy quote

• A sincere artist is not one who makes a faithful attempt to put on to canvas what is in front of him, but one who tries to create something which is, in itself, a living thing.

  William Dobell

  Art, Faithful, Trying

  54 Copy quote

• every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.

  Oscar Wilde

  Artist, Feelings, Portraits

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Joseph Bristow, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: The picture of Dorian Gray : the 1890 and 1891 texts”, p.7, Oxford University Press on Demand

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• An empty canvas, apparently really empty, that says nothing and is without significance – almost dull, in fact – in reality, is crammed with thousands of undertone tensions and full of expectancy. Slightly apprehensive lest it should be outraged.

  Wassily Kandinsky

  Reality, Dull, Facts

  8 Copy quote

• I was always interested in language. I thought, why not? If a painting, by the normal definition of the term, is paint on canvas, why can't it be painted words on canvas?

  John Baldessari

  Why Not, Definitions, Normal

  Interview with David Salle, www.interviewmagazine.com. October 9, 2013.

  25 Copy quote

  Show source

• If the image was sketched onto the canvas and spontaneously drawn, colour would often be restrained and unfree... The most important and the most difficult liberation process we went trough, the one that has distinguished our art, was the freeing of colour, the transition to a painterly spontaneity.

  Asger Jorn

  Art, Often Is, Important

  "Asger Jorn" by Arken Museum of Modern Art, (p. 162), 2002.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• A blank canvas...has unlimited possibilities.

  Stephanie Perkins

  Possibility, Unlimited Possibilities, Blank

  7 Copy quote