Kerswill Painting Quotes

Painting is just a tool; it is nothing in itself. What counts is how you do it. ~ Michele Cassou

Above all, he encourages her to paint, nodding with approval at even her most unusual experiments with color, light, rough brushwork [...]. She explains to him that she believes painting should reflect nature and life [...]. He nods, although he adds cautiously that he wouldn't want her to know too much about life - nature is a fine subject, but life is grimmer than she can understand. He thinks it is good for her to have something satisfying to do at home; he loves art himself; he sees her gift and wants her to be happy. He knows the charming Morisots. He has met the Manets, and always remarks that they are a good family, despite Édouard's reputation and his immoral experiments (he paints loose women), which make him perhaps too modern - a shame, given his obvious talent.

In fact, Yves takes her to many galleries. They attend the Salon every year, with nearly a million other people, and listen to the gossip about favorite canvases and those critics disdain. Occasionally they stroll in the museums in the Louvre, where she sees art students copying paintings and sculpture, even an unchaperoned woman here and there (surely Americans). She can't quite bring herself to admire nudes in his presence, certainly not the heroic males; she knows she will never paint from a nude model herself. Her own formal training was in the private studios of an academican, copying from plaster casts with her mother present, before she married. ~ Elizabeth Kostova

A painting or sculpture not modelled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone ... but it is an incomplete art which privileges the intellect to the detriment of the senses. ~ Hans Arp

The reason I play music is to touch people - for selfish reasons, as well. It feels good to make someone else feel something, whether it's a kiss, a painting, good idea or it's a song. ~ Dave Matthews

Its front porch had a beautiful view of the water and invisible screening to keep the jellybugs and stinkmoths at bay. I wove mats for the floors and painted sincere, klutzy seascapes for the walls. Piece by piece I assembled chef-quality cooking equipment, learned how to use it, and achieved a state of domestic competence that would have astounded my long-suffering ex-wife, Joanna. ~ Julian May

Paintings exist in the present tense, yet somehow, because of how it's structured, it can move backwards through time as well. ~ Joe Bradley

The Museum

Two lovers went to the museum and
wandered the
rooms. He saw a painting and stood in front
of it
for too long. It was a few minutes before she
realized he had gotten stuck. He was stuck
looking
at a painting. She stood next to him, looking
at his
face and then the face in the painting. What
do you
see? she asked. I don't know, he said. He didn't know. She was disappointed, then bored. He
was
looking at a face and she was looking at her watch.
This is where everything changed. There was
now
a distance between them. He was looking at
a face
but it might as well have been a cabbage or a sugar beet. Perhaps it was something about
yellow
near pink. He didn't know how to say it.
Years later
he still didn't know how to say it, and she was gone. ~ Richard Siken

Wherever you are in the world, there's always something about the Australian light. There's something about the sharpness of it, something about the clarity of it, something about the colours of Australia. And hopefully, something optimistic about Australian painting too. ~ Ken Done

The Poem About Taking out the Trash

In the vast emptiness of darkness,
Stars are being born and are burning out;
Galaxies expand, into what I have no idea,
And dark matter fills the infinite space
That has no bounds and no limits.
In the middle of all this, I stand
In a single moment and know how small I am.
A group of atoms, the size of nothing in comparison.
I am the observer of the play on a tiny stage.
The onlooker who watches the painting
Of a picture that few stop to see.
The listener of a song where I hear only a fraction
Of a fraction of a note in a song that will be forever sung
And that has been being sung for eternity upon eternity,
Before I knew breath and sound.
I am but dust, stardust, a breath of a life, smoke
Rising into oblivion, here then gone as quickly.
Under all of this, I take out the trash. ~ Eric Overby

If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are. ~ Pablo Picasso

Writing is as much about painting a picture as anything Van Gogh or Picasso ever did. For writers, description is our brush and words become our paint. ~ Beem Weeks

These are my cards on the table. I think you're beautiful. I feel like I'm an idiot with dirt on his face sitting next to someone out of a painting. I think...I think I'm just plain stupid for you. I know that's not exactly sweet talk out of a play. Frankly, I'd kiss your shadow. I'd kiss dirt that had your heel print on it. I like feeling this way. I don't give a damn what you or anyone else thinks...this is how it feels every time I look at you. ~ Scott Lynch

When a painter thinks to disengage from the world outside himself and fantasies unprecedented forms he thinks he will make a painting, he finds in this expression the same effect - I would even say the same picture - that he had unconsciously acquired by his habit to experience reality intensely. ~ Pierre Alechinsky

You cannot just be working in a vast, air-conditioned loft space and think you are going to make a decent painting. Francis Bacon had a special studio built, and he felt completely emasculated in there. I have to be somewhere comfortable. ~ Peter Doig

The best place for this kind of training is Holland where people, convinced of their utter innocence, do not use curtains. After dusk the windows turn into little stages on which actors act out their evenings. Sequences of images bathed in yellow, warm light are the individual acts of the same production entitled 'Life'. Dutch painting. Moving lives. ~ Olga Tokarczuk

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. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Artists are terminally dissatisfied. With life. With love. With their work. You like being tortured, don't you, little Luna? Sadness has a bittersweet aftertaste. Keeps us going." He lit up his joint. "Being an artist is a miserable job. You're pregnant with your work, only to give the baby away. An entire year of careful strokes of a brush, just to have someone else buy the painting. ~ L.J. Shen

You bring to a painting your own experience. ~ Jacob Lawrence

The most difficult thing about painting is the self-discipline. When I finish a job, I give myself a few days, but then I have to discipline myself quite fiercely if I want to do some painting that's worthwhile. Otherwise, you're just doodling. It's much easier when you're just told what you have to do. ~ John Hurt

I tell my workshop students, 'I want you to think of yourselves as artists. Then, when you're writing, you're painting, you're crafting, you're making a design, you're sculpting, you're creating choreography, sound, a sound script.' ~ Juan Felipe Herrera

Why so? one would think at such a time you would most exult in your privilege of being able to imitate the various brilliant and delightful touches of nature. ~ Anne Bronte

The Fine Arts are five in number: Painting, Music, Poetry, Sculpture, and Architecture--whereof the principle branch is Confectionery. ~ Marie-Antoine Careme

A painting is worth a thousand confused art-gallery visitors. ~ Ljupka Cvetanova

Today she feels she is the master of her craft. Today she is free of the grinding tyranny of doubt. The voice that mocks her ambition. The voice that bites and slanders and causes her more heartache than any other voice. Today she is focused, she is exultant. Her every brushstroke like a wake of radiance. Today she can move the paint around the canvas at will. If only painting were like this every day. Without the sudden extinguishing of light, the collapsing of belief, the cursing and flailing, the knots and clenched fists in a world gone suddenly dark. ~ Glenn Haybittle

The difference between this painting and the others the late Rembrandt painted is the difference between seeing and being seen. That is, in this picture he sees himself seeing while also being seen, and no doubt it was only in the Baroque period with its penchant for mirrors within mirrors, the play within the play, staged scenes and a belief in the interdependence of all things, when moreover craftsmanship attained heights witnessed neither before nor since, that such a painting was possible. But it exists in our age, it sees for us. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

And the dark night of flow is an issue that society has not made particularly easy to handle. How many people have stopped playing guitar, writing poetry, or painting watercolors - activities packed with flow triggers - because these are also activities that do not squarely fit into culturally acceptable responsibility categories like "career" or "children"? How many, now grown up and done with childish things, have put away the surfboard, the skateboard, the whatever? How many have made the mistake of conflating the value of the vehicle that leads us to an experience (the surfboard, etc.) with the value of the experience itself (the flow state)? ~ Steven Kotler

I gave up language for a while, and I started painting.And then I only listened to Miles Davis and other instrumental music to see how it felt to be without words. ~ Rosanne Cash

Multiple times he has tried writing his thoughts about Marianne down on paper in an effort to make sense of them. He's moved by a desire to describe in words exactly how she looks and speaks. Her hair and clothing. The copy of Swann's Way she reads at lunchtime in the school cafeteria, with a dark French painting on the cover and a mint-coloured spine. Her long fingers turning the pages. She's not leading the same kind of life as other people. She acts so worldly at times, making him feel ignorant, but then she can be so naive. He wants to understand how her mind works... He writes these things down, long run-on sentences with too many dependent clauses, sometimes connected with breathless semicolons, as if he wants to recreate a precise copy of Marianne in print, as if he can preserve her completely for future review. ~ Sally Rooney

I'm never interested in the painting being a mirror to culture. I think that's really boring. What I'm interested in is painting as an affective space. The place where the hierarchies of the world can be rearranged within the space of a painting. And they can be articulated in different ways. ~ Dana Schutz

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen. ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

My nervous system is very much weakened - nothing but painting in oil can keep me going. ~ Paul Cezanne

We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones. ~ Patti Smith

I'll stick to painting as long as I can. ~ Tom Thomson

So Mo began filling the silence with words. He lured them out of the pages as if they had only been waiting for his voice, words long and short, words sharp and soft, cooing, purring words. They danced through the room, painting stained glass pictures, tickling the skin. Even when Meggie nodded off she could still hear them, although Mo had closed the book long ago. Words that explained the world to her, its dark side and its light side, words that built a wall to keep out bad dreams. And not a single bad dream came over that wall for the rest of the night. ~ Cornelia Funke