Painting Quotes - Page 37

• In the interests of everyone the artist had a responsibility to use his medium well. In the Tibetan culture, most of the paintings are of deities or Buddhas, and they try to send a message of the value of the spiritual.

  Dalai Lama

  Spiritual, Responsibility, Artist

  4 Copy quote

• Within the category of Kitsch we can thus distinguish between more and less successful paintings. Kitsch, too has its masterpieces.

  Karsten Harries

  Successful, Kitsch, Categories

  Karsten Harries (2010). “Between Nihilism and Faith: A Commentary on Either/Or”, p.87, Walter de Gruyter

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• During the days of my youth, critics and art-lovers resorted freely to this term of abuse. Even some of the most renowned Old Masters were also pilloried as having manufactured insipid and sugary paintings that were offensive to good taste.

  Ernst Gombrich

  Art, Abuse, Taste

  Ernst Hans Gombrich (2002). “The preference for the primitive: episodes in the history of Western taste and art”, Phaidon Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• What is painting but the act of embracing, by means of art, the surface of the pool?

  Leon Battista Alberti

  Art, Mean, Pool

  Leon Battista Alberti, Cecil Grayson (1972). “On painting and On sculpture: The Latin texts of De pictura and De statua”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• A really intelligent man makes an indifferent painter. For painting requires a certain blindness, a partial refusal to be aware of all the options.

  Peter Greenaway

  Intelligent, Men, Certain

  4 Copy quote

• You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.

  Rodney Atkins

  Song, Writing, Eye

  7 Copy quote

• I was attracted to a lot of different art forms - dancing, painting. But there's something about music that people hold so close. It's such a powerful art form, and that's why I live for it.

  Ani DiFranco

  Art, Powerful, People

  "Talking With Ani DiFranco". Interview with Alexander Billet, www.counterpunch.org. January 24, 2012.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Psychoanalysis comes down to the process itself - the self, and life. I think I can say that I'm friends with the unconscious life, but I've never tried to make a painting directly from a dream.

  Malcolm Morley

  Dream, Thinking, Self

  "Malcolm Morley and the self". Interview with Emily McDermott, www.interviewmagazine.com. April 20, 2015.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• The paintings have a lot to do with the idea of seeing and doing, and the relationship between your hand and your eye, and the object.

  Malcolm Morley

  Eye, Hands, Ideas

  "Malcolm Morley and the Self". Interview with Emily McDermott, www.interviewmagazine.com. April 20, 2015.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Girls seemed to like artists! I felt very drawn to the idea of power, really, and doing painting as a power trip, in a sense. This idea of power has always driven me.

  Malcolm Morley

  Girl, Artist, Ideas

  "Malcolm Morley and the Self". Interview with Emily McDermott, www.interviewmagazine.com. April 20, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I had a total revelation with the feminist moment, with Carolee Scheeman and Marina Abromovic and of course Joan Jonas; that was a big breakthrough with me. And through them, I was introduced to Chris Burden and Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci. You can almost call it a gang, because the works are always talking together. That stuff had a huge impact on me, but other than that, my interest had always been old paintings.

  Ragnar Kjartansson

  Impact, Talking, Feminist

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's odd to see a black person painting his nails in Miami, especially in the hip-hop community.

  SpaceGhostPurrp

  Hip Hop, Community, Black

  Interview with Carrie Battan, pitchfork.com. June 18, 2012.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I understand - and often make fun of - the desire to run to the wall text before running to the painting.

  Frances Stark

  Running, Wall, Fun

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think there has to be an interesting transformative process between your perception of reality and making the paintings. If you are just trying to render what you see you are not entering into a transformative process. And that's what makes a good painting: the process of transforming and the willingness to leave reality behind.

  Susan Rothenberg

  Reality, Thinking, Interesting

  13 Copy quote

• Most of my painting is done sitting in a chair with a book. I'd say it's 80 per cent sitting and reading, 10 per cent eating and ten per cent painting.

  Susan Rothenberg

  Book, Reading, Sitting

  18 Copy quote

• Until the late 1970s there'd either be only black or white in the paintings or if there were colours it would be a small amount, not a large area, and with the color separated from other colors by black or white (which is formula for Damien Hirst's successful dot paintings, incidentally).

  Matthew Collings

  Successful, Color, White

  8 Copy quote

• Without rules you can't have anything, but you don't want to just be pedantic or obsessive. The painting is finished when it's working. The overall balance is right. Balance shouldn't be confused with design. There has to be restless jostle and aggression and a bit of dynamism, not just pat-ness or settled-ness or immediate pleasing-ness.

  Matthew Collings

  Confused, Design, Balance

  7 Copy quote

• What makes someone an artist? I don't think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren't artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artist who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances.

  Seth Godin

  Art, Communication, Thinking

  21 Copy quote

• The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process - a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made - constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes - but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken.

  John Szarkowski

  Photography, Attitude, Taken

  10 Copy quote

• The process is only a means to an end-creating the painting I want. It doesn't mean anything itself. It's only a way of creating a result.

  Jackson Pollock

  Mean, Creating, Want

  4 Copy quote

• My paint is like a rocket, which describes its own space. I try to make the impossible possible. What is happening I cannot foresee, it is a surprise. Painting, like passion, is an emotion full of truth and rings a living sound, like the roar coming from the lion's breast. To paint is to destroy what preceded. I never try to make a painting, but a chunk of life. It is a scream; it is a night; it is like a child; it is a tiger behind bars.

  Karel Appel

  Children, Passion, Night

  "Karel Appel's excerpt", c. 1953.

  27 Copy quote

  Show source

• Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say.

  Henri Matisse

  Dream, Art, Mean

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

  26 Copy quote

  Show source

• For one thing, I want gesture-any kind of gesture, all kinds of gesture-gentle or brutal, joyous or tragic; the gesture of space soaring, sinking, streaming, whirling; the gestures of light flowing or spurting through color. I see everything as possessing or possessed by gesture. I've often thought of my paintings as having an axis around which everything revolves.

  Elaine de Kooning

  Color, Space, Light

  8 Copy quote

• The Minimalists are idealist. They want to minimise themselves in favour of the ideal. But I just can't. You see, my paintings are not cool. ... I'm very careful not to have ideas, because they're inaccurate.

  Agnes Martin

  Ideas, Favour, Want

  4 Copy quote

• Not everything in life can or should be explained. Part of every painting should be incomplete...to be completed in the mind of the viewer.

  Russell Chatham

  Mind, Should, Incomplete

  7 Copy quote