Painter Quotes - Page 9

• I have never heard a dancer asking for advice about how to stay focused on her footwork, or a painter complaining about the dull day-to-day task of painting. What task worth doing isn't worth daily effort? Do you think Michelangelo was having fun the whole time he was on his back painting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling?

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Fun, Writing, Thinking

  Teenreads Interview, www.teenreads.com. September 2006.

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• Everyone said to Vincent van Gogh, "You can't be a great painter, you only have one ear." And you know what he said? "I can't hear you".

  Steve Carell

  Ears, Schmucks, Said

  "Fictional character: Barry". "Dinner for Schmucks", www.imdb.com. 2010.

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• A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Creativity, Tree, Becoming

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

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• O thou sculptor, painter, poet! Take this lesson to thy heart: That is best which lieth nearest; Shape from that thy work of art.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Art, Lessons, Shapes

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1859). “The Complete Poetical Works”, p.217

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• Just as the painter thinks with his brush and paints the novelist thinks with his story.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Thinking, Novelists, Fiction

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• Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors, and musicians, are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations, of their age.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Age, Musician, Philosopher

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1994). “The Selected Poetry and Prose of Shelley”, p.227, Wordsworth Editions

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• Writers and painters alike are in the business of consulting their own imaginations, and stimulating the imaginations of others. Together, and separately, they celebrate the absolute mystery of otherness.

  Lynne Truss

  Imagination, Together, Mystery

  "Character studies" by Lynne Truss, www.theguardian.com. June 9, 2007.

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• We must, like a painter, take time to stand back from our work, to be still, and thus see what's what. . . True repose is standing back to survey the activities that fill our days.

  William McNamara

  Reflection, Surveys, Take Time

  William McNamara (1962). “The art of being human”

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• I love to draw-pencil, ink pen-I love art. When I go on tour and visit museums in Holland, Germany or England-you know those huge paintings?-I'm just amazed. You don't think a painter could do something like that. I can look at a piece of sculpture or a painting and totally lose myself in it.

  Michael Jackson

  Art, Thinking, Museums

  FaceBook post by Michael Jackson from Jul 11, 2013

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• Shut your eyes, wait, think of nothing. Now, open them ... one sees nothing but a great coloured undulation. What then? An irradiation and glory of colour. This is what a picture should give us ... an abyss in which the eye is lost, a secret germination, a coloured state of grace ... loose conciousness. Descend with the painter into the dim tangled roots of things, and rise again from them in colours, be steeped in the light of them.

  Paul Cezanne

  Eye, Thinking, Light

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• Only the human figure exists; landscape is, and should be, no more than an accessory; the painter exclusively of landscape is nothing but a bore.

  Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

  Accessories, Landscape, Figures

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• It is not right for painters to think that painting is like prostitution, that 'first you do it for love, then you do it for others, and finally you do it for money.

  Ad Reinhardt

  Thinking, Firsts, Painting

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• The painters have no copyright on modern art!... I believe in, and make no apologies for, photography: it is the most important graphic medium of our day. It does not have to be, indeed cannot be - compared to painting - it has different means and aims.

  Edward Weston

  Photography, Art, Believe

  Edward Weston (1971). “Edward Weston: The Flame of Recognition: His Photographs Accompanied by Excerpts from the Daybooks & Letters”

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• Modern Art is being used to index me. Surely it was a source but photographers have influenced Modern Art quite as deeply as they have been influenced, maybe more. Anyway painters don't have a copyright on M. A. We were all born in the same upheaval.

  Edward Weston

  Art, Upheaval, Photographer

  Edward Weston, Peter C. Bunnell, David Featherstone, Robert Adams (1986). “EW:100: centennial essays in honor of Edward Weston”

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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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• It is possible that scientists, poets, painters and writers are all members of the same family of people whose gift it is by nature to take those things which we call common-place and to 're-present' them to us - the world - in such ways that our self-imposed limitations are expanded.

  Gary Zukav

  Self, People, World

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• The painter's only solid ground is the palette and colors, but as soon as the colors achieve an illusion, they are no longer judged.

  Pierre Bonnard

  Color, Illusion, Achieve

  Antoine Terrasse, Pierre Bonnard (2000). “Discoveries: Bonnard: Shimmering Color”, Harry N Abrams Incorporated

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• Speaking, when you have something to say, is like looking. But who looks? If people could see properly, and see whole, they would all be painters. And it's because people have no idea how to look that they hardly ever understand.

  Pierre Bonnard

  Ideas, People, Looks

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• You can't learn techniques and then try to become a painter. Techniques are a result.

  Jackson Pollock

  Trying, Technique, Results

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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, Paint

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• We learned from Gauguin that every work of art is a transposition, a caricature, a passionate equivalent of a sensation which has been experienced. He freed us from all restraints which the idea of copying naturally placed on our painter's instincts. All artists are now free to express their own personality.

  Maurice Denis

  Art, Freedom, Ideas

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• A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art. The promise of it is felt in the act of creation but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then the painter realises that it is only a picture he is painting. Until then he had almost dared to hope the picture might spring to life.

  Lucian Freud

  Art, Spring, Promise

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• Were it not for this [dissatisfaction], the perfect painting might be painted, on the completion of which the painter could retire. It is this great insufficiency that drives him on. The process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than it is in the picture. The process is in fact habit-forming.

  Lucian Freud

  Perfect, Might, Facts

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• If all the qualities which a painter took from the model for his picture were really taken, no person could be painted twice.

  Lucian Freud

  Taken, Quality, Models

  Lucian Freud, Rolf Lauter, Jean Christophe Ammann, Craig Hartley, Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt am Main, Germany) (2001). “Lucian Freud: naked portraits : Werke der 40er bis 90er Jahre”, Hatje Cantz Publishers

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• The things I felt... about certain painters of the past that... inspired me, like Cezanne and Manet... that complete losing of oneself in the work to such an extent that the work itself... felt as if a living organism was posited there on the canvas, on this surface... That's truly... the act of creation.

  Philip Guston

  Past, Cezanne, Losing

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