Painting Quotes · Page 63

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

— Paul Cezanne

That’s my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.

— Walker Evans

Some of us have the good fortune of some type of natural gift, whether it's playing tennis or painting or writing.

— Roger Housden

Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting should begin by cutting out his own tongue

— Henri Matisse

I'm doing the shows. The stage is my canvas; I'll put whatever up there for the visible eye.

— MF Doom

Whenever I see a Frans Hals I feel like painting, but when I see a Rembrandt I feel like giving up!

— Max Liebermann

The 'renewed' mind is the canvas on which the Spirit of God can paint.

— Bill Johnson

Painting seems an old man's business. After a certain time you're out of it, and you just paint masterpieces.

— Alex Katz

If I was painting a picture, I wouldn't want to take a picture of a single paint stroke. I'd rather show people…

— Josh Trank

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of…

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

You have to like everything that you're painting. Maybe on a narrative level it seems harsh... but I like everything in all…

— John Currin

I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.

— John Updike

The '90s weren't my finest years artistically. I wrote some good songs in there, but in terms of my vision of getting…

— Rodney Crowell

When I look back on the townscapes now, they do seem to me to recall certain images of the destruction of Dresden…

— Gerhard Richter

Really, I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression…

— Frida Kahlo

“Unveil the shade of your soul through the paint brush of your life. Let the colors run true, let the canvas be…

— Shady Grace

At bed-time I went into my room and put out the light. I didn't get undressed. I lay on my bed and…

— Jeanette Winterson

The great French Impressionist painter Renoir, right at the end of his very long life, said to a friend, "I am just…

— Roger Housden

“Each of us, I think, adopts a comfortable and familiar era or place in which to plant ourselves; and from then on,…

— Daniel D. Victor

I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself.…

— A. S. Byatt

I conceive of the film as a modern art form particularly interesting to the sense of sight. Painting has its own peculiar…

— Hans Richter

He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If…

— James Joyce

“What is the use of beauty in woman? Provided a woman is physically well made and capable of bearing children, she will…

— Théophile Gautier

There isn't an amount of money you could offer me to do reality TV. I would rather get my job back on…

— Dave Gahan

That's why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness.

— Corita Kent

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

— Honore de Balzac

You will never see a portrait of my love, for miracles are never seen.

— Steve Lawrence

My sin as a painter is that I just want to paint anything I want to paint - and repaint.

— Wayne Thiebaud

I love my dog. Actually, the best portrait I did was of my dog.

— Patrick Demarchelier

Most of my contemporary grant-getters are now doing something other than painting.

— Robert Genn

You have to give in to what the paint says... You have to do what it's telling you to do.

— Milton Resnick

“Claude Monet was the incomparable painter of bright daylight...Monet was the painter of light.”

— Christoph Heinrich

Van Gogh was asked how he created such beautiful paintings. He said I dream my paintings and then I paint my dreams.

— Bob Proctor

The painter's obsession with his subject is all that he needs to drive him to work.

— Lucian Freud

“To live is to paint, it is to create; but while we are painting, we are being painted, being created as well!”

— Mehmet Murat ildan

I'd have loved to be a painter, but I'm very mercurial, so it wouldn't have worked.

— Taylor Russell

I believe that painting should come through the avenues of meditation rather than the canals of action.

— Mark Tobey

Brush and ink are only servants of thoughts and emotion. They should follow your emotion and change with the emotion.

— Wu Guanzhong

Every top player has his own style, just as every painter has his own personal signature.

— Vladimir Kramnik

To dye oneself with paints in order to have a rosier or a paler complexion is a lying counterfeit.

— Saint Augustine