Quotes on Painting

The craft of painting has virtually disappeared. There is hardly anyone left who really possesses it. For evidence one has only to look at the painters of this century.

Author: Balthus

Painting is a source of endless pleasure, but also of great anguish.

Author: Balthus

I always feel attacked when I'm asked about my painting.

Author: Georg Baselitz

I found I have to stay painting.

Author: Alan Bean

I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.

Author: Max Beckmann

Every painting is a voyage into a sacred harbour.

Author: Giotto Bondone

You cannot possibly invent painting all by yourself.

Author: Pierre Bonnard

A painting that is well composed is half finished.

Author: Pierre Bonnard

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

Author: Albert Camus

Painting is damned difficult - you always think you've got it, but you haven't.

Author: Paul Cezanne

I want to die painting.

Author: Paul Cezanne

I have sworn to die painting.

Author: Paul Cezanne

I don't believe in making pencil sketches and then painting landscape in your studio. You must be right under the sky.

Author: William Chase

I don't know if it was the whole audience getting stoned out of their minds getting ready for the Floyd thing or what it was, but it was like playing to a painting.

Author: Les Claypool

Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.

Author: Gustave Courbet

Every song is like a painting.

Author: Dick Dale

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

Author: Salvador Dali

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.

Author: Edgar Degas

It is this research into pure painting that is the problem at the present moment. I do not know any painters in Paris who are really searching for this ideal world.

Author: Robert Delaunay

I'm very interested to see how this new painting will go - I know I want it big and stark, and as I said, I follow the muse, and that's when it always works perfectly for me.

Author: Jackie DeShannon

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

Author: Charles Dickens

I still take photographs for my own use, personal studies. I do not feel that I can fully express my views through the medium and this is why I have moved towards painting.

Author: John Dyer

I've been trying to pick up painting but it's hard.

Author: George Eads

If I had been around when Rubens was painting, I would have been revered as a fabulous model. Kate Moss? Well, she would have been the paintbrush.

Author: Dawn French

Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.

Author: Philip Guston

Look at any inspired painting. It's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation.

Author: Philip Guston

Painting and writing are solitary arts.

Author: Conrad Hall

Sunlight is painting.

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Well, I've been painting for years. I just started doing a lot more in the last couple.

Author: Robyn Hitchcock

When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else.

Author: Howard Hodgkin

A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.

Author: Howard Hodgkin

Through a painting we can see the whole world.

Author: Hans Hofmann

Well, I have a very simple method of painting.

Author: Edward Hopper

Painting does what we cannot do - it brings a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane.

Author: Chuck Jones

You don't need a framework. You need a painting, not a frame.

Author: Klaus Kinski

If the weather is good I go into the nearby wood - there I am painting a small beech forest (in the sun) with a few conifers mixed in. This takes until 8 'o clock.

Author: Gustav Klimt

But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it.

Author: Roy Lichtenstein

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

Author: Janet Malcolm

Writing and Painting are the same for me.

Author: Peter Malkin

No one can be a painter unless he cares for painting above all else.

Author: Edouard Manet

I felt I was painting with a Popsicle.

Author: Robert Merrill

Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.

Author: Michelangelo

With a painting, you don't have to go back and paint it again.

Author: Joni Mitchell

In a movie, you're raw material, just a hue of some color and the director makes the painting.

Author: Viggo Mortensen

Painting's not important. The important thing is keeping busy.

Author: Grandma Moses

If I hadn't started painting, I would have raised chickens.

Author: Grandma Moses

Around 1980, I went back to painting with a vengeance.

Author: Martin Mull

What is the use of good painting? We want a spell cast upon the optical part of our existence! We seldom really see the world, but when we do, we become as still as a picture.

Author: Robert Musil

Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.

Author: Vladimir Nabokov

Painting is a hobby for me.

Author: Renee O'Connor

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Author: William Phelps

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Author: Pablo Picasso

Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.

Author: Pablo Picasso

When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing.

Author: Jackson Pollock

My painting does not come from the easel.

Author: Jackson Pollock

He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.

Author: Jackson Pollock

I hardly ever stretch the canvas before painting.

Author: Jackson Pollock

I'm not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings.

Author: Robert Rauschenberg

Pollock also... wanted one to be wrapped in the painting.

Author: Robert Rauschenberg

Very quickly a painting is turned into a facsimile of itself when one becomes so familiar with with it that one recognizes it without looking at it.

Author: Robert Rauschenberg

I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.

Author: Robert Rauschenberg

If some student came up and wanted to know where to study painting, you'd want to suggest someplace, but there's no place. I wouldn't know where to send a student to study.

Author: Ad Reinhardt

It wouldn't be right for me to clown around when I'm painting a president.

Author: Norman Rockwell

I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.

Author: John Ruskin

A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.

Author: John Sargent

A painting means as much to you as a string of pearls to an ape.

Author: Paul Scofield

We have as many planes of speech as does a painting planes of perspective which create perspective in a phrase. The most important word stands out most vividly defined in the very foreground of the sound plane. Less important words create a series of deeper planes.

Author: Konstantin Stanislavisky

A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere.

Author: Frank Stella

I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall.

Author: Frank Stella

One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters.

Author: Frank Stella

The dog, the rabbit and the hoop all feature in the painting, and take the place of the orrery.

Author: Kit Williams

Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.

Author: Tom Wolfe

I never know what it's going to look like. Wouldn't be much point in painting if I already knew the outcome. I have a subject in front of me and I start flooding colour and making marks, I don't know, it's improvisation isn't it?

Author: Peter Wright

I have never subscribed to the Dirty Pallet school of painting.

Author: Peter Wright