Oil Painting Quotes

I'd always thought it was gaudy, but standing there watching him beside the gold and glass shrine, I realised that his was a candlelight faith. It didn't work in the clear unforgiving light in London or Scandinavia, where even the dust in the cathedrals showed. But in the warm dimness and the shadows, what would have been tasteless at home made sense. The shrine looked like an oil painting made into real substance. So did he. England's was a reading religion, one it was difficult to understand at the bleak unimpressive first glance, one that needed books to explain itself. But his was images and images, the same as the old stages, in a place where not everyone could read and good light was expensive. ~ Natasha Pulley

Never trust an ugly woman. She's got a grudge against the world,' said Grandma who was no oil painting herself. ~ Richard Peck

I guess a drag queen's like an oil painting: You gotta stand back from it to get the full effect. ~ Harvey Fierstein

I did some pastels and I did other pieces in which there was just basically one color per square, and then they would get bigger and I could get 2 or 3 colors into the square, and ultimately I just started making oil paintings. ~ Chuck Close

Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all. ~ Stanley H. Horowitz

When I became tired of oil painting at one stage, I used collage and this proved to be influential in the design and composition of my later works. ~ Myfanwy Pavelic

Oil-painting is a developed technique. Why go backwards? ~ Edvard Munch

Men who are offenders of street harassment and women who experience street harassment can walk by and feel something about it, because it's out there in the environment where the harassment actually happens. So it's a lot more powerful than an oil painting that's stuck in a gallery or under my bed or in my studio where only a couple of eyes are going to see it, as opposed to it being in an environment where it could possibly effect a change. ~ Tatyana Fazlalizadeh

Publicity images often use sculptures or paintings to lend allure or authority to their own message. Framed oil paintings often hang in shop windows as part of their display.
Any work of art 'quoted' by publicity serves two purposes. Art is a sign of affluence; it belongs to the good life; it is part of the furnishing which the world gives to the rich and the beautiful.
But a work of art also suggests a cultural authority, a form of dignity, even of wisdom, which is superior to any vulgar material interest; an oil painting belongs to the cultural heritage; it is a reminder of what it means to be a cultivated European. And so the quoted work of art (and this is why it is so useful to publicity) says two almost contradictory things at the same time: it denotes wealth and spirituality: it implies that the purchase being proposed is both a luxury and a cultural value. Publicity has in fact understood the tradition of the oil painting more thoroughly than most art historians. It has grasped the implications of the relationship between the work of art and its spectator-owner and with these it tries to persuade and flatter the spectator-buyer.
The continuity, however, between oil painting and publicity goes far deeper than the 'quoting' of specific paintings. Publicity relies to a very large extent on the language of oil painting. It speaks in the same voice about the same things. (P. 129) ~ John Berger

Technology's always changing. There was a time where oil painting was a new technology. That changed painting. ~ Joe Bradley

Oil painting, before anything else, was a celebration of private property. As an art-form it derived from the principle that you are what you have. ~ John Berger

Markets are not just about the steam engine, iron foundries, or today's silicon-chip factories. Markets also supported Shakespeare, Haydn, and the modern book superstore. The rise of oil painting, classical music, and print culture were all part of the same broad social and economic developments, namely the rise of capitalism, modern technology, rule of law, and consumer society. ~ Tyler Cowen

With proper acting, I don't know what I would play - I got sent a script for a play, and it said in the notes that my proposed character was 'hideously fat and ugly'. That made my day. I mean, I do know I am no oil painting. ~ Jo Brand

Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity. ~ John Berger

MR. DOMBEY'S offices were in a court where there was an old-established stall of choice fruit at the corner: where perambulating merchants, of both sexes, offered for sale at any time between the hours of ten and five, slippers, pocket-books, sponges, dogs' collars, and Windsor soap; and sometimes a pointer or an oil painting. ~ Charles Dickens

A story isn't a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It's an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty. ~ Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

When I see how several painters I know here are struggling with their watercolours and paintings so that they can't see a solution anymore, I sometimes think: Friend, the fault is in your drawing. I don't regret for a moment that I did not go in for watercolour and oil painting straight away. I am sure I will catch up if only I struggle on, so that my hand does not waver in drawing and perspective. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

I've been looking at oil paintings from oriental artists lately, and the one artist who's inspired me right now is a man named Hokusai and I've had his book by my bed looking at how he interprets landscapes - mountains and water and flowers and birds. ~ Renee O'Connor

Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented ~ Willem De Kooning

Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large oil painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted. ~ Herman Melville

I sometimes think, Harry, that there are only two eras of any importance in the world's history. The first is the appearance of a new medium for art, and the second is the appearance of a new personality for art also. What the invention of oil-painting was to the Venetians, the face of Antinous was to late Greek sculpture, and the face of Dorian Gray will some day be to me. ~ Oscar Wilde

In classical oil painting, there seemed to be a radical turn to seeing things as the camera sees them, with that technological modification. I began to have a tremendous problem with all of this. ~ Henry Flynt

To paint after nature is to transfer three-dimensional corporeality to a two-dimensional surface. This you can do if you are in good health and not colorblind. Oil paint, canvas, and brush are material and tools. It is possible by expedient distribution of oil paint on canvas to copy natural impressions; under favorable conditions you can do it so accurately that the picture cannot be distinguished from the model. You start, let us say, with a white canvas primed for oil painting and sketch in with charcoal the most discernible lines of the natural form you have chosen. Only the first line may be drawn more or less arbitrarily, all the others must form with the first the angle prescribed by the natural model. By constant comparison of the sketch with the model, the lines can be so adjusted that the lines of the sketch will correspond to those of the model. Lines are now drawn by feeling, the accuracy of the feeling is checked and measured by comparison of the estimated angle of the line with the perpendicular in nature and in the sketch. Then, according to the apparent proportions between the parts of the model, you sketch in the proportions between parts on the canvas, preferably by means of broken lines delimiting these parts. The size of the first part is arbitrary, unless your plan is to represent a part, such as the head, in 'life size.' In that case you measure with a compass an imaginary line running parallel to a plane on the natural object conceived as a plane on the ~ Kurt Schwitters

The media ... is like an oil painting. Close up, it looks like nothing on Earth. Stand back and you get the drift. ~ Bernard Ingham

Do you know what the difference is between Friendship and Love? Friendship is the photograph, Love is the oil painting. ~ Frank Delaney

Eliot did to the word love what the Russians did to the word democracy. If Eliot is going to love everybody, no matter what they are, no matter what they do, then those of us who love particular people for particular reasons had better find ourselves a new word." He looked at an oil painting of his deceased wife. "For instance- I loved her more than I love our garbage collector, which makes me guilty of the most unspeakable of modern crimes: Dis-crim-i-nay-tion. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Like the rest of the house, it was beautifully appointed with shiny European wallpaper, lavender-scented soap and an oil painting over the toilet. Geoff ~ Dan Skinner

An third, some saucy tart once tried to impugn my virtue against an oil painting of him, and in the halls of memory, some things demand context. ~ Casey McQuiston

On one side hung a very large oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal cross-lights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through. - It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale. - It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements. - It's a blasted heath. - It's a Hyperb ~ Herman Melville

When everything looks like a magical oil painting, you know you are in Autumn! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

St. Albert and the LSD Revelation Revolution oil painting by Alex Grey, 2006 color image in the book Net of Being by Alex Grey, 2012 ~ Rhoney Gissen Stanley

I am primarily an oil painter and a studio painter, so originally I was going to do an oil painting. ~ Tatyana Fazlalizadeh

It's not easy to slather your face with oil. It requires a little bit of work to smooth it on and rub it in. You become more familiar with the feel of your own skin and face. ~ Isabel Gillies

Gluttony is the source of all our infirmities and the fountain of all our diseases. As a lamp is choked by a superabundance of oil, and a fire extinguished by excess of fuel, so is the natural health of the body destroyed by intempe diet. ~ Marion LeRoy Burton

You're trying to make your painting too complicated. Paintings get complicated all by themselves. ~ Toni Onley

When a painting is finished, it's like a new born child, and the artist himself must have time for understanding. How then do you expect an amateur to understand that which the artist dos not yet comprehend. ~ Henri Matisse

I came there again another time. And I looked many times again. I was filled with consolation, with my consolation.

The thirty-three abominations were truthful. They were the truth. They were life. The sharp fragments of life, sharp, complete moments. Such are women. They have lovers.

Each of these thirty-three (or how many of them were there?) had painted his mistress. Excellent! I grew used to myself being in their presence.

Thirty-three mistresses! Thirty-three mistresses!

And I was all of them and yet all were not me.

I studied the abomination for a long while: before I modeled for them, as well as afterwards.

I modelled in order to study. This I felt so keenly. It seemed to me that I was learning about life by pieces, by separate pieces, fragments, but every fragment possessed all its own complexity and power.

The abominations began to divide in half. With every day this became clearer. One half became mistresses and the other half queens.

Each of the thirty-three created his mistress or his queen.

("Thirty Three Abominations") ~ Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal

To the left, just past the painting, on the other side of the hall, is the bathroom, the sort of open door that if cameras found it as they passed through the house in a horror movie would trigger a blast of synthesizers. ~ John Darnielle

Nathaniel first stared at the vampiric Moses and then at the bizarre door. Numerous symbols had been carved deep in the surface and instead of square edges, they were rounded. Daniel then drew a dagger from his coat and proceeded to stand directly in front of the door. As he neared it, one could swear that the surface rippled like oil in a vat while he grazed it with the dagger. Quite suddenly, he jammed the blade in the very center of the door up to the very hilt. A high-pitched grunt followed and then a series of mechanical noises and clangs chimed and clicked until the door skid back two inches and descended into the ground. ~ J.D. Estrada

discovered is that I'm an image maker, and I don't care how its made - whether it's through painting or photography or drawing - I just want to create images. ~ James Stanford

It is clear our nation is reliant upon big foreign oil. More and more of our imports come from overseas. ~ George W. Bush

How I wish I were by the sea again.
This slack season the men must be painting
the hulls of the boats or sleeping the noon away.
I would not sleep if I were they. ~ Simeon Dumdum Jr.

To understand the universe, our world, and all life in the world, you have to step out of time, which for living humanity is not an option, because we are a part of this painting, characters within it, able to perceive it only as a continuing series of events, episodes. However, because we are conscious creatures with the gift of reason, we can seek and learn and extrapolate from what we learn, and conceive the truth. ~ Dean Koontz

I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography - that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms. ~ Joel Meyerowitz

The world will soon start to run out of conventionally produced, cheap oil ... . We [will] start to run out of all fossil fuels by the end of this century. ~ David Goodstein

I remember that a couple, both tall and thin, turned away from a painting and peered over as if I might be an ex-lover or a living (and unfinished) painting that had just got news of the painter's death. I know I walked out without looking back and that I walked for a long time until I realized I wasn't crying, but that it was raining and I was soaked. That night I didn't sleep at all. ~ Roberto Bolano

One of the hardest things to do is to paint darkness which nonetheless has light in it. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

I felt the need to get back to painting and I thought the best way was to start drawing, so I enrolled in a life drawing class. I soon discovered that people made very interesting subjects and I am still surprised that I had never discovered it before. ~ Peter Wright

For those who feel it, nothing makes the soul so religious and pure as the endeavor to create something perfect; for God is perfection, and whoever strives after it, is striving after something divine. True painting is only the image of the perfection of God, a shadow of the pencil with which he paints, a melody, a striving after harmony. ~ Michelangelo

The paradigm of the development of natural resource-based industry - meatpacking, lard, timber, iron and coal, grain. Cincinnati's lard processing plants looked a lot like JDR's oil refineries thirty years later. ~ Charles R. Morris

Just as there is a moment when the artist must stop, when the sculpture must be left as it is, the painting untouched - just as a determination not to know serves the maker more than all the resources of clairvoyance - so there must be a minimum of ignorance in order to perfect a life in happiness. Those who lack such a thing must set about acquiring it: unintelligence must be earned. ~ Albert Camus

As we breathe and live, have a conversation, and you look in someone's eyes, and you see a sunset or have an argument or read a book or see a painting or whatever you do, it influences you. And as you live your art, it changes and grows just like you and your soul or whatever you want to call it. For me, it's never-ending, I call it "the organizer of chaos." That's what I do with this and I present it in a way that I dream. So basically, I'm just sharing my dreams with all of you. ~ Jared Leto

I was twenty-eight years old and I'd been around the block enough to know that sooner or later every romance turns into a negotiation. It's a matter of give and take. Give too little and you breed resentments, take too little and you start feeling used. How does a candlelight dinner stack up against changing the oil in her car? Is getting a blowjob worth the same as giving her a back rub? Before long you're both keeping a ledger. Tallying things up. ~ James Whitfield Thomson

There was a four-place table with only three chairs. There were what Reacher's mother had called "touches." Dried flowers, bottles of virgin olive oil that would never be used, antique spoons. Reacher's mother had said such things gave a room personality. Reacher himself had been unsure how anything except a person could have personality. He had been a painfully literal child. But over the years he had come to see what his mother had meant. And Vaughan's kitchen had personality. ~ Lee Child

I think when somebody's painting they don't necessarily ... I'm not illustrating what I know. I'm mapping out, like topographically, some terrain I am satisfied with, how awkward that mark is. ~ Julian Schnabel

I don't how I can describe the quality that is only found in art (be it music, literature, painting, or whatever), this quality, it's just there, and it endures. ~ Gerhard Richter

Pg 679 and he goes slowly to the wall behind the painting and sees its title;
WILLEM LISTENING TO JUDE TELL A STORY, GREENE STREET
... and he feels his breath abandon him ~ Hanya Yanagihara

I'm a storyteller. I love to tell stories about brands. I love to tell stories, period. I like painting pictures through the words, and that's what I do. ~ Gary Vaynerchuk

And I see that his brown eye has a splash of green in it and the green one a splash of brown. Like Cezanne painted them. Impressionist eyes. ~ Jandy Nelson

When I was three or four, I was really good at drawing and painting, and everyone used to say, "You're going to go to art college." I didn't really know what that meant. ~ Noel Fielding

There's one post-Christmas chore I love-writing thank-you letters ... Lots of companies for many reasonable reasons, I guess, have a policy against sending even Christmas cards, never mind things, at Christmastime. But our clan gets a big kick out of opening the Warner-Lambert box containing an assortment of their wares; we argue over which of the boys is to get the Union Oil Co. necktie [and] all the holiday long we play the marvelous Christmas music sent by Goodyear ... None of these things means that Forbes or Forbeses have been had. But all of us like being thought of. ~ Malcolm Forbes

Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation. Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting. But we are very far from reaching that state. We remain incorrigibly verbal creatures who love to explain things, to form opinions, to argue. Put us in front of a picture and we chatter, each in our different way. Proust, when going round an art gallery, liked to comment on who the people in the pictures reminded him of in real life; which might have been a deft way of avoiding the direct aesethetic confrontation. But it is a rare picture that stuns, or argues, us into silence. And if one does, it is only a short time before we want to explain and understand the very silence into which we have been plunged. ~ Julian Barnes

I liked drawing and painting, because the only failure would be to listen to the doubters who wanted me to stop drawing and painting because 'you aren't going to make a living doing that.' I liked looking in art books at the work of painters. ~ Billy Childish

Painting expresses the depth and insight, the spiritual quality of the artist. If art is about life, then, while the depth to which the artist has drunk from the well of life may not guarantee success, it must surely improve the quality of his/her work. ~ Millard Sheets

She [Mrs. Badger] was surrounded in the drawing-room by various objects, indicative of her painting a little, playing the piano a little, playing the guitar a little, playing the harp a little, singing a little, working a little, reading a little, writing poetry a little, and botanizing a little. She was a lady of about fifty, I should think, youthfully dressed, and of a very fine complexion. If I add to the little list of her accomplishments that she rouged a little, I do not mean that there was any harm in it. ~ Charles Dickens

I'm taking a shower."
Oh, God. She was killing him. Making him want to laugh out loud. Where had his sense of self-preservation gone? He didn't feel emotion - that was far too dangerous. He shivered beneath the blankets, suddenly afraid for her. For himself.
"You're still cold. I should have thought to rub you down with some warm oil. Lexi makes it and I use it sometimes when I come in from a dive. It warms you up fast. Can you roll over, because I'm not rubbing your front."
"Why not?"
"If you want a massage, turn over. ~ Christine Feehan

We know that, too often, oil and other hazardous materials are shipped across the country on aging tankers. Too many communities have seen what happens when trains derail and in some cases catch fire. ~ Sherrod Brown

Pretense is the oil that lubricates society. ~ Mary Roberts Rinehart

I communicate my innermost perceptions through art. ~ Arshile Gorky

Painting is a coalescing of experience. ~ Richard Phillips

Monday, when he'd barged in on her because she'd somehow managed to hold up everybody's paychecks, she'd been painting her goddamn fingernails! He'd gotten mad then, but he'd barely begun to yell before her lip had started to tremble and she'd said he couldn't talk to her like that because she had PMS. ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

The curious fact is that biology tells us nothing about desire. And, when you think about it, culture -- novels, movies, opera, and quite a lot of painting -- is about desire, how we manage desire, how we suffer from it, and how it brings us joy when we get things right. A story without desire -- and that means without the insistence of desire -- will be empty, dry, and more or less aimless. That is one reason we read novels, to see how people fall into awkward moral situations and then try to extricate themselves. This is why there is so much anguish in the world: frustrated desire is every bit as miserable as poverty, because desire is no respecter of one's position in life: everyone goes through it. ~ Peter Watson

The Roman Empire invented snacks, right after the aqueducts. Irrigation flowed, food plentiful, people munching between meals in the city-states. They ate these little, sun-dried meaty things, highly distasteful and falling out of favor until olive oil. I just made all that up. The key to life is making shit up. Everyone does it or society would unravel, like, Gee, your hair looks great! Or: God told me you're wrong ~ Tim Dorsey

I had grown up among engineers, and I could remember the engineers of the twenties very well indeed: their open, shining intellects, their free and gentle humor, their agility and breadth of thought, the ease with which they shifted from one engineering field to another, and, for that matter, from technology to social concerns and art. Then, too, they personified good manners and delicacy of taste; well-bred speech that flowed evenly and was free of uncultured words; one of them might play a musical instrument, another dabble in painting; and their faces always bore a spiritual imprint. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things. ~ Pablo Picasso

The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul. ~ Thomas More

When I'm painting them, the whole legend and mythology of apples occurs to me, and so Adam and Eve and the snake and all the rest of it somehow gets into the picture. ~ Mary Pratt

I counterfeited Mark Kostabi's artworks. During the eighties, Mark didn't paint his own paintings. Instead, he had other artists painting them, and he just added his signature. So what I did was to use some of the same painters, and signed his name myself. ~ Andy Behrman

There are things that music can do that language could never do, that painting could never do, or sculpture. Music is capable of going directly to the source of the mystery. It doesn't have to explain it. It can simply celebrate it. ~ Marsha Norman