Paint Quotes - Page 36

• Paint with joy - with the same joy that you would make love to a woman.

  Pierre-Auguste Renoir

  Joy, Making Love

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• Rentals sank, living rose. I could not afford help. I must be owner, agent, landlady and janitor. I loathed landladying... I tried in every way to augment my income. Small fruit, hens, rabbits, dogs - pottery... I never painted now - had neither time nor wanting. For about fifteen years I did not paint.

  Emily Carr

  Dog, Years, Rose

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• My mountain is dead. As soon as she has dried, I'll bury her under a decent layer of white paint. But I haven't done with the old lady; far from it!

  Emily Carr

  Determination, White, Mountain

  Emily Carr (2009). “Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr”, p.99, D & M Publishers

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• It's all the unwordable things one wants to write about, just as it's all the unformable things one wants to paint - essence.

  Emily Carr

  Writing, Essence, Want

  Emily Carr (2009). “Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr”, p.165, D & M Publishers

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• Writing is a splendid sorter of... feelings, better even than paint.

  Emily Carr

  Writing, Feel Better, Feelings

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• I can paint until I'm forty. After that I intend to dry up.

  Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

  Dry Up, Forty, I Can

  San Diego Museum of Art, Nora Desloge, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Phillip Dennis Cate, Julia Frey (1989). “Toulouse-Lautrec: the Baldwin M. Baldwin Collection, San Diego Museum of Art”, Museum

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• No small dabs of colour - you want plenty of paint to paint with.

  John Singer Sargent

  Dabs, Want, Colour

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• The thicker you paint, the more it flows.

  John Singer Sargent

  Flow

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• It's no easy matter to paint a background. I venture to say that the old painters had more difficulty with their grounds than with their figures. You know the story of Vandyke brought to Rubens with this recommendation: 'He already knows how to paint a background.' 'That is more than I can do!' was the reply.

  William Morris Hunt

  Venture, Matter, Stories

  William Morris Hunt (1976). “William Morris Hunt on painting and drawing”, Dover Pubns

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• The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world... the picture... which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him.

  Pierre Bonnard

  Book, Artist, World

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• I hate repetition, I really do. It's like asking a painter to paint the same picture every day of his life.

  Peter Cushing

  Hate, Asking, Repetition

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• You must first realize the thing completely in your mind. Then grasp the brush, fix your attention so that you see clearly what you wish to paint; start quickly, move the brush, follow straight what you see before you, as the buzzard swoops down when the hare jumps out. If you hesitate one moment, it is gone.

  Morris Graves

  Moving, Mind, Wish

  "Chinese Painting: Leading Masters and Principles". Book by Osvald Sirén, Volume 2, p. 14, 1974.

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• It is to aid in making the arts operative rather than only positively or negatively pleasurable... it is to paint a record, in so far as I am increasingly capable, of man's deepst capacities... I seek to paint of how form manifests its subtlest quality named 'idea.

  Morris Graves

  Art, Men, Ideas

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• To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting.

  Philip Guston

  Painting, Argument, Begin Again

  Philip Guston, Clark Coolidge (2011). “Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations”, p.53, Univ of California Press

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• Sometimes I scrape off a lot. You have on the floor, like cow dung in the field, this big glob of paint... and it's just a lot of inert matter, inert paint. Then I look back at the canvas, and it's not inert - it's active, moving and living.

  Philip Guston

  Moving, Looks, Cows

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• Usually I draw in relation to my painting, what I am working on at the time. On a lucky day a surprising balance of forms and spaces will appear... making itself, the image taking hold. This in turn moves me toward painting - anxious to get to the same place, with the actuality of paint and light.

  Philip Guston

  Moving, Light, Lucky Day

  Magdalena Dabrowski, Philip Guston (1988). “The drawings of Philip Guston”

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• There comes a point when the paint doesn't feel like paint. I don't know why. Some mysterious thing happens. I think you have all experienced it... What counts is that the paint should really disappear, otherwise it's craft.

  Philip Guston

  Thinking, Mysterious Things, Crafts

  "Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics". Book edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York, p. 67, quoting 'transcript of a public forum at Boston university', conducted by Joseph Ablow (1966), 1990.

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• I have a studio in the country - in the woods - but my paintings look more real to me than what is outdoors. You walk outside; the rocks are inert; even the clouds are inert. It makes me feel a little better. But I do have a faith that it is possible to make a living thing, not a diagram of what I have been thinking: to posit with paint something living, something that changes each day.

  Philip Guston

  Country, Nature, Real

  Philip Guston, Clark Coolidge (2011). “Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations”, p.54, Univ of California Press

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• Lots of artists who paint have the experience to one degree or another... where their thinking doesn't precede their doing... It's a funny thing, what I really hate yet I have to go through with it, is the preparation.

  Philip Guston

  Hate, Artist, Thinking

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• I will paint for money any time.

  Winslow Homer

  Money

  Winslow Homer, Robert W. Schlageter, Cummer Gallery of Art (1977). “Winslow Homer's Florida, 1886-1909: exhibition April 22 to May 29, 1977, Cummer Gallery of Art, Jacksonville”

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• The only people I have ever seen paint successfully, consistently, with great authority, unselfconsciously and without fear of failing were about four years old.

  Brian Johnson

  Years, People, Four

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• My willingness to explore and work freely is not without risk, and at times, I find myself caught in a bind... Knowing I can fix whatever goes wrong allows me to paint, not without thought, but without hesitation.

  Brian Johnson

  Knowing, Risk, Caught

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• It does take a long time and a lot of paint to become our own artist.

  Kate Jackson

  Time, Artist, Long

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• One could go on for ever as to whether the paint should be thick or thin, whether to paint the woman or the square, hard-edge or soft, but after a while such questions become a bore. They are merely problems in aesthetics, having only to do with the outer man.

  Lee Krasner

  Men, Squares, Goes On

  Robert Carleton Hobbs, Lee Krasner (1993). “Lee Krasner”, Abbeville Press

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• Emotion that I experienced on first seeing the fresh paint come out of the tube.. ..the impression of colours strewn over the palette: of colours - alive, waiting, as yet unseen and hidden in their little tubes...

  Wassily Kandinsky

  Waiting, Experience, Unseen

  "Kandinsky" by Frank Whitford, Paul Hamlyn Ltd, London, 1967.

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