Painter Quotes - Page 36

• Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Real, Writing, Artist

  H. P. Lovecraft (2016). “The Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories”, p.46, H. P. Lovecraft

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• The 'medium' is unaware of its attractiveness, that's all. Everyone loves comics. I've proven this to my own satisfaction by handing them out to acountants, insurance brokers, hairdressers, mothers of children, black belts, pop stars, taxi drivers, painters, lesbians, doctors etc. etc. The X-Files, Buffy, the Matrix, X-Men - mainstream culture is not what it once was when science fiction and comics fans huddled in cellars like Gnostic Christians dodging the Romans. We should come up into the light soon before we suffocate.

  Grant Morrison

  Christian, Mother, Stars

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• Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the “Nation,” it’s time for all of us to sit up and worry.

  Arundhati Roy

  Art, Independent, Thinking

  "Come September". Arundhati Roy's Speech at the Lensic Performing Arts Center, Santa Fe, NM, September 29, 2002.

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• I am a painter with letters. I want to restore everything, mix everything up and say everything.

  Jean-Luc Godard

  Letters, Want

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• When I say be creative I don't mean that you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem.

  Rajneesh

  Inspirational, Spiritual, Mean

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• Right now, scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portrait the patron wants done, And if they are smart, they'll make sure their work subtly flatters the patron. Not overtly. Subtly.

  Michael Crichton

  Smart, Portraits, Done

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• I don't like to make a distinction between the writer and the painter , finally , because I do both things anyway . Everybody's dreaming and trying to put down their dreams in the way that their hand knows best . I feel as much a unity , as much comradeship , with painters as I do writers .

  Clive Barker

  Dream, Hands, Unity

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• He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter.

  James Joyce

  Attitude, Dark, Light

  James Joyce (2016). “DUBLINERS (Modern Classics Series): The Sisters, An Encounter, Araby, Eveline, After the Race, Two Gallants, The Boarding House, A Little Cloud, Counterparts, Clay, A Painful Case, Ivy Day in the Committee Room, Mother, Grace & The Dead”, p.164, e-artnow

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• Your favorite colour . . . it's green?" "That's right." Then I think of something to add. "And yours is orange." "Orange?" He seems unconvinced. "Not bright orange. But soft. Like the sunset," I say. "At least, that's what you told me once." "Oh." He closes his eyes briefly, maybe trying to conjure up that sunset, then nods his head. "Thank you." But more words tumble out. "You're a painter. You're a baker. You like to sleep with the windows open. You never take sugar in your tea. And you always double-knot your shoelaces.

  Suzanne Collins

  Sunset, Sleep, Eye

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• Now let's take up the minorities in our civilisation, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that!

  Ray Bradbury

  Dog, Book, Cat

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• If people knew what Matisse, supposedly the painter of happiness, had gone through, the anguish and tragedy he had to overcome to manage to capture that light which has never left him, if people knew all that, they would also realize that this happiness, this light, this dispassionate wisdom which seems to be mine, are sometimes well-deserved, given the severity of my trials.

  Henri Matisse

  Happiness, Light, People

  Henri Matisse, Jack D. Flam (1995). “Matisse on Art”, p.11, Univ of California Press

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• Art critic! Is that a profession? When I think we are stupid enough, we painters, to solicit those people's compliments and to put ourselves into their hands! What shame! Should we even accept that they talk about our work?

  Edgar Degas

  Art, Stupid, Thinking

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• Man has used human rhythmic movement as raw material out of which to create works of art, as the composer of music uses sound, the sculptor uses stone and wood, the painter his pigments, and the writer - words.

  Ted Shawn

  Dance, Art, Men

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• Gertrude Jekyll, like Monet, was a painter with poor eyesight, and their gardens - his at Giverny in the Seine valley, hers in Surrey - had resemblance's that may have sprung from this condition. Both loved plants that foamed and frothed over walls and pergolas, spread in tides beneath trees; both saw flowers in islands of colored light - an image the normal eye captures only by squinting.

  Eleanor Perenyi

  Love, Wall, Flower

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• Probably the most potent desire for a painter, an image-maker, is to see it. To see what the mind can think and imagine, to realize it for oneself, through oneself, as concretely as possible.

  Philip Guston

  Thinking, Mind, Vision

  Philip Guston, Clark Coolidge (2011). “Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations”, p.281, Univ of California Press

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• In our time there are many artists who do something because it is new; they see their value and their justification in this newness. They are deceiving themselves; novelty is seldom the essential. This has to do with one thing only; making a subject better from its intrinsic nature.

  Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

  Art, Essentials, Novelty

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• You come to nature with all her theories, and she knocks them all flat.

  Pierre-Auguste Renoir

  Art, Nature, Theory

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• If you deny yourself access to the child within because you're too serious, you also block your connection to the divine Light and your feminine self. Every creator who's any good uses their feminine side to create with.. Whether a scientist working on a hunch, a painter working on the interplay of colors, or a musician dealing with the juxtaposition of notes and chords.

  Stuart Wilde

  Children, Block, Light

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• A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man or woman who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether they be painter or ploughman.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Hard Work, Night, Men

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• Beethoven was so hard of hearing, he thought he was a painter.

  George Carlin

  Stupid, People, Hearing

  George Carlin (1998). “Brain Droppings”, Hyperion

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• The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

  Piet Mondrian

  Art, Humble, Humility

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• For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh.

  Georges Rouault

  Art, Night, Laughing

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• The painter's appreciation for beauty is more conscious, for he spends his life trying to communicate his feelings to others.

  Emile Gruppe

  Appreciation, Feelings, Trying

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• Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Disappointment, Silence, Personality

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.312, Courier Corporation

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• A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Inspirational, Children, Attitude

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.244, Library of America

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