Painting Quotes - Page 4

• Usually I am on a work for a long stretch, until a moment arrives when the air of the arbitrary vanishes, and the paint falls into positions that feel destined.

  Philip Guston

  Fall, Air, Long

  Philip Guston, Clark Coolidge (2011). “Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations”, p.10, Univ of California Press

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• The paintings are like prayers, relating to wishing for something beyond everyday life.

  Susan Rothenberg

  Prayer, Everyday, Wish

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• Good painting is like good cooking; it can be tasted, but not explained.

  Maurice de Vlaminck

  Cooking, Good Cook

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• A poem is like a painting.

  Horace

  Ars Poetica l. 361

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• In figure painting, the type of all painting, I have endeavoured to set forth that the principal if not sole source of life enchantments are Tactile Values, Movement and Space Composition.

  Bernard Berenson

  Space, Enchantment, Movement

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• Painting with all its technicalities, difficulties, and peculiar ends, is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.

  John Ruskin

  Peculiar, Noble, Language

  John Ruskin, Louisa Caroline Tuthill (1872). “The True and the Beautiful in Nature, Art, Morals, and Religion, Selected from the Works of John Ruskin”, p.242

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• Oh! I must somehow manage to do a figure in a few strokes.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Figures, Strokes, Manage

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• To be a painter now is to be part of a very small, endangered species.

  Howard Hodgkin

  Painter, Endangered Species, Species

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• If you call painting dumb poetry, the painter may call poetry blind painting.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Dumb, May, Blind

  Leonardo Da Vinci, General Press (2016). “The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci”, p.226, GENERAL PRESS

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• Painting dissolves the forms at its command ... it melts them into color.

  Alexander Eliot

  Color, Form, Command

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• The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Portraits, Mixtures, Caricatures

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• Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about what I paint, really.

  Balthus

  Art, Language, Knows

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• Abstraction is an esoteric language.

  Eric Fischl

  Esoteric, Language, Abstraction

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• Painting is traditional but for me that doesn't mean the academy. I felt a need to paint; I love painting. It was something natural - as is listening to music or playing an instrument for some people. For this reason I searched for themes of my era and my generation. Photography offered this, so I chose it as a medium for painting.

  Gerhard Richter

  Photography, Mean, People

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

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• There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk.

  Charles Dickens

  Art, Pain, Two

  Nicholas Nickleby ch. 10 (1839)

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• Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.

  Pablo Picasso

  Art, Men, Perception

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• A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.

  Lord Byron

  School, Men, Two

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• Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

  Salvador Dali

  Tattoo, Art, Personality

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• I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

  Salvador Dali

  Art, Portraits, Doe

  Quoted in Esar A Treasury of Humorous Quotations (1951).

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• I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Beautiful, Dream, Scary

  Vincent van Gogh (1987). “Vincent Van Gogh, 1853-1890: Vision and Reality”, Gloucester

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• A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Art, Museums, World

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• Sunlight is painting.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Pain, Sunlight

  Nathaniel Hawthorne (1986). “Portable Hawthorne”, Outlet

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• The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen.

  Paul Klee

  Art, History, Should

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• Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint.

  Pablo Picasso

  Pain, Artist, Color

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• The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.

  Voltaire

  Eye, Color, May

  Voltaire (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of Voltaire (Illustrated)”, p.3307, Delphi Classics

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