Studio Ghosts: When you're in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you - your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics... and one by one if you're really painting, they walk out. And if you're really painting YOU walk out.
To be a painter now is to be part of a very small, endangered species.
Take away a painter's vanity, said a famous landscape painter, and he will never touch a pencil again.
I have no wish to be remembered as a painter, for I never was a painter; my idea of that profession was perhaps too exalted; I may say, is too exalted. I leave it to others more worthy to fill the niches of art.
I started out to be a painter and was born into the theater.
Nature or, that which I see, inspires me, puts me, as with any painter, in an emotional state so that an urge comes about to make something, but I want to come as close as possible to the truth and abstract everything from that, until I reach the foundation, still just an external foundation, of things.
The great paintings are the ones with the most subtle value relationships. The closer you could bring your values and still distinguish between them, the stronger you were as a painter.
Philosophers and aestheticians may offer elegant and profound definitions of art and beauty, but for the painter they are all summed up in the phrase: To create a harmony.
The chief consideration for a good painter is to think out the whole of his picture, to have it in his head as a whole... so that he may then execute it with warmth and as if the entire thing were done at the same time.
Whoever thought the immediate alternates with the immediate action is not an abstract painter.
When a painter thinks to disengage from the world outside himself and fantasies unprecedented forms he thinks he will make a painting, he finds in this expression the same effect - I would even say the same picture - that he had unconsciously acquired by his habit to experience reality intensely.
Too many modern painters set themselves satisfied with just a coincidence, the spot in its raw, meaningless form.
A very young painter is seldom alone. If he is an art student, he is in an art school with other students. He does not yet know that one day he will have to face himself as a solitary creature enclosed in a space of four walls... and that he will have to be a self-propelled being, with no one at is side.
No high-minded painter of the last fifty years has been able to come to terms with his art without coming to terms with the problem of cubism.
Painters paint, and history continues to make fools of curators.
The Canadian painter A. Y. Jackson noted that 'failure of sight' was a tiresome problem. He meant we should be able to look at our work-in-progress as if it were previously unseen.
Many of us knuckle-dragging brush-painters think that 'behind the times' is part of our job description. Why deny ourselves the authentic journey of a time-honoured form?
It often takes two to do a good painting - one to paint it, and another to rap the painter smartly with a hammer before he or she can ruin it.
The grandest and simplest things contain worlds within worlds. Seeing them is a matter of the right point of view, and your painter's eye is the special portal to such sights.
As painters...we must always remember that our precious poetic visions and spiritual insights will remain forever locked within us until we can boil them down to a complex arrangement of a few hundred or possibly even thousands of brushstrokes.
A painter is always overjoyed when anybody pays any attention to him at all, puts him in any category, calls him anything - as long as they call him something.
I've gradually fooled myself into becoming a real painter... I really just like to sit in my air-conditioned Rome painting studio surrounded by Medieval and Renaissance architecture and to hold a tube of Alizarin Madder Lake in my artist's hand and marvel at the shiny goop inside.
If I didn't have a conviction that a serious painter can portray Nature more profoundly than the best colour photography, I'd probably give it all up or go abstract or take up photography.
To be a landscape painter is to be a perverse individual.
If you cut a painter's hands off, he'd still feel the urge to pick up a brush.
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