Absence Quote by John Berger

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

— John Berger

There are absences, but there are also presences. It's about how painting can evolve its own abstractions. I didn't know the painting was going…

— Nigel Cooke

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

— Balthus

Painting can feign reality without having seen it.

— Roland Barthes

Painting is possessed of divine power, for not only does it make the absent present, but also makes the dead almost alive.

— Leon Battista Alberti

I no longer worry whether a painting is about something or not. I am only concerned with the expectation, from a flat surface, of…

— William Scott

A painting is above all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants…

— Edgar Degas

No painting can exist without the tension of what it figures and what it concretely consists of. The pleasure of what it could mean…

— Marlene Dumas

In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on…

— Siri Hustvedt

The visible is how we orient ourselves. It remains our principal source of information about the world. Painting reminds us of what is absent.…

— Squeak Carnwath

A painting without something disturbing in it – what's that?.

— Georges Braque

A fragile painting left without a scenery

— Anonymous