Painting Quotes - Page 14

• What interests me is all the stuff that goes into abstract and abstract-figurative art. Not the styles, but the stuff that, in various combinations, make the styles: mixing and matching painting methods and ideas.

  Ed Askew

  Art, Ideas, Style

  Interview with Christian Filardo, logger.believermag.com. November 27, 2013.

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• In part of Lord Kames' Elements of Criticism, he says that "music improves the relish of a banquet." That I deny,--any more than painting might do. They may both be additional pleasures, as well as conversation is, but are perfectly distinct notices; and cannot, with the least propriety, be said to mix or blend with the repast, as none of them serve to raise the flavor of the wine, the sauce, the meat, or help to quicken appetite. But music and painting both add a spirit to devotion, and elevate the ardor.

  Laurence Sterne

  Music, Wine, Criticism

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• Once you realize that the world is your own projection, you are free of it. You need not free yourself of a world that does not exist, except in your own imagination! However is the picture, beautiful or ugly, you are painting it and you are not bound by it. Realize that there is nobody to force it on you, that it is due to the habit of taking the imaginary to be real. See the imaginary as imaginary and be free of fear.

  Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

  Beautiful, Fear, Real

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• You take a painting, you have a white, virginal piece of canvas that is the world of purity, and then you put your imagery on it, and you try to bring it back to the original purity.

  Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

  White, Trying, Pieces

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• Nothing is so improving to the temper as the study of the beauties either of poetry, eloquence, music, or painting.

  David Hume

  Taste, Study, Temper

  David Hume (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of David Hume (Illustrated)”, p.579, Delphi Classics

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• the most deeply moving element in the contemplation of beauty is the element of loss. We desire to hold; but the sunset melts into the night, and the secret of the painting on the wall can never be the secret of the buyer.

  Pamela Hansford Johnson

  Beauty, Wall, Moving

  Pamela Hansford Johnson (1952). “Catherine Carter: A Novel”, London Macmillan 1952.

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• A novel should be as like life as a painting, but not as like life as a piece of waxwork.

  Mary Russell Mitford

  Pieces, Should, Novel

  Mary Russell Mitford (1870). “The Life of Mary Russell Mitford ; Related in an Selection from Her Letters to Her Friends. Ed. by A.G. Estrange”, p.62

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• One of the marks of true genius is a quality of abundance. A rich, rollicking abundance, enough to give indigestion to ordinary people. Great artists turn it out in rolls, in swatches. They cover whole ceilings with paintings, they chip out a mountainside in stone, they write not one novel but a shelf full. It follows that some of their work is better than other. As much as a third of it may be pretty bad. Shall we say this unevenness is the mark of their humanity - of their proud mortality as well as of their immortality?

  Catherine Drinker Bowen

  Writing, Artist, People

  Catherine Drinker Bowen (1961). “The Nature of the Artist: An Address Delivered at the Dedication Ceremonies for Lee Pattison Recital Hall, Wilbur Hall, Mary Kimberly Residence Hall”

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• what a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that's what writing is, I think that's what painting is. It's seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life. What all artists are trying to do is to make sense of life.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Writing, Character, Artist

  Nadine Gordimer, Nancy Topping Bazin, Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990). “Conversations with Nadine Gordimer”, p.140, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• And no book, and possibly no painting, when it is finished, is ever exactly like the first dream of it.

  Patricia Highsmith

  Dream, Art, Book

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• I can always paint very well with my eyes, but with my hands it doesn't always work out.

  Kathe Kollwitz

  Eye, Hands, Work Out

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• Unlike music or poetry or painting, food rouses no response in passionate and emotional youth. Only when the surge of the blood is quieted does gastronomy come into its own with philosophy and theology and the sterner delights of the mind.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Philosophy, Food, Emotional

  Dorothy L Sayers (2009). “The Documents in the Case”, p.39, Hachette UK

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• Photography is not only drawing with light, though light is the indispensable agent of its being. It is modeling or sculpturing with light, to reproduce the plastic form of natural objects. It is painting with light.

  Berenice Abbott

  Photography, Light, Drawing

  Berenice Abbott (1944). “A guide to better photography”

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• The biggest part of painting perhaps is faith, and waiting receptively, content to go any way, not planning or forcing. The fear, though, is laziness. It is so easy to drift and finally be tossed up on the beach, derelict.

  Emily Carr

  Beach, Waiting, Laziness

  Emily Carr (2009). “Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr”, p.247, D & M Publishers

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• There is no right and wrong way to paint except honestly or dishonestly. Honestly is trying for the bigger thing. Dishonestly is bluffing and getting through a smattering of surface representation with no meaning.

  Emily Carr

  Trying, Way, Bigger

  Emily Carr (2009). “Opposite Contraries: The Unknown Journals of Emily Carr and Other Writings”, p.76, D & M Publishers

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• Sometimes I could quit paint and take to charring. It must be fine to clean perfectly, to shine and polish and know that it could not be done better. In painting that never occurs.

  Emily Carr

  Perfection, Shining, Done

  Emily Carr (2009). “Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr”, p.92, D & M Publishers

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• What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting.

  August Wilhelm von Schlegel

  Art, Portraits, Portraiture

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• Since I have known God in a saving manner, painting, poetry, and music have had charms unknown to me before. I have received what I suppose is a taste for them, or religion has refined my mind and made it susceptible of impressions from the sublime and beautiful. O, how religion secures the heightened enjoyment of those pleasures which keep so many from God, by their becoming a source of pride!

  Henry Martyn

  Beautiful, Art, Pride

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• (Canada) - the most parochial nationette on earth ... I have been living in this sanctimonious icebox ... painting portraits of the opulent Methodists of Toronto. Methodism and money in this city have produced a sort of hell of dullness.

  Wyndham Lewis

  Cities, Canada, Portraits

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• Painting is so difficult that I would give it up if it were not so enjoyable.

  William McGregor Paxton

  Giving, Difficult, Enjoyable

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• We share a huge visual memory bank, mostly through painting and other images in history. I think when a modern photograph taps into those, sometimes very subliminally, it makes people respond.

  Chris Hondros

  Memories, Thinking, People

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• You start by copying other people's paintings or music or whatever. You get all of those skills before you branch out. Really creative people have a fantastic ability to copy things and then combine them in new ways. And whether we're talking about genes or memes, recombination is the real heart of creativity.

  Susan Blackmore

  Real, Heart, Creativity

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• Painting is my vehicle of transit. I don't always know where I am going or what it means.

  Leonora Carrington

  Mean, Vehicle, Knows

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• The ephemeral nature of live performance is the part I love most - it's a monk's sand painting, carefully constructed, then wiped away in an instant.

  Rosanne Cash

  Ephemeral, Sand, Monk

  Rosanne Cash (2010). “Composed: A Memoir”, p.133, Penguin

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• What has made it work, or what makes certain paintings successful or not, has to do with my being a painter and a thinking, feeling person, more than my sex, color, height, origin.

  Helen Frankenthaler

  Sex, Successful, Thinking

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