Painter Quotes

Blood is very powerful. While meat is the substance that keeps our living souls in this physical reality, blood keeps our meat alive. Blood is liquid life. When blood escapes our bodies we are alarmed to the very core of our brains. It is life leaking out of us. It is frightening and makes red a profoundly intense color. ~ Mark Ryden

Only the middle distance and what may be called the remoter foreground are strictly human. When we look very near or very far, man either vanishes altogether or loses his primacy. The astronomer looks even further afield than the Sung painter and sees even less of human life. At the other end of the scale the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist pursue the close-up – the cellular close-up, the molecular, the atomic and subatomic. Of that which, at twenty feet, even at arm's length, looked and sounded like a human being no trace remains.
Something analogous happens to the myopic artist and the happy lover. In the nuptial embrace personality is melted down; the individual (it is the recurrent theme of Lawrence's poems and novels) ceases to be himself and becomes a part of the vast impersonal universe.
And so it is with the artist who chooses to use his eyes at the near point. In his work humanity loses its importance, even disappears completely. Instead of men and women playing their fantastic tricks before high heaven, we are asked to consider the lilies, to meditate on the unearthly beauty of 'mere things,' when isolated from their utilitarian context and rendered as they are, in and for themselves. Alternatively (or, at an earlier stage of artistic development, exclusively), the nonhuman world of the near-point is rendered in patterns. These patterns are abstracted for the most part from leaves and flowers – the rose, the lotus, the acanthus, palm, papyrus – an ~ Aldous Huxley

Virgil had read once that Grandma Moses was a primitive painter because she thought snow was white. The writer said if you really looked at it, snow was hardly ever white. It mostly was a gentler version of the color of the sky - blue, gray, orange in the evenings and mornings, often with purple shadows. When he looked, sure enough, the guy was right, and Grandma Moses had her head up her ass. ~ John Sandford

At a few minutes before four, Peeta turns to me again. "Your favorite colour ... it's green?"
"That's right." Then I think of something to add. "And yours is orange."
"Orange?" He seems unconvinced.
"Not bright orange. But soft. Like the sunset," I say. "At least, that's what you told me once."
"Oh." He closes his eyes briefly, maybe trying to conjure up that sunset, then nods his head. "Thank you."
But more words tumble out. "You're a painter. You're a baker. You like to sleep with the windows open. You never take sugar in your tea. And you always double-knot your shoelaces."
Then I dive into my tent before I do something stupid like cry. ~ Suzanne Collins

And fame, for a painter means sales, gains, fortune, riches. And today, as you know, I am celebrated. I am rich. ~ Pablo Picasso

One of my first dreams when I was a child was becoming a painter. ~ Hideo Kojima

I am obsessed with the process of creation. ~ Zdzislaw Beksinski

The painter who is content with the praise of the world for what does not satisfy himself, is not an artist, but an artisan; for though his reward be only praise, his pay is that of a mechanic. ~ Washington Allston

When I was in high school, I was going to be a painter because I had a facility for painting. I could do it, but I didn't have anything to say in that medium. ~ Ellen McLaughlin

It is the work of the Canadian artist to paint or play or write in such a way that life will be enlarged for himself and his fellow man. The painter will look around him ... and finding everything good, will strive to communicate that feeling through a portrayal of the essentials of sunlight, or snow, or tree or tragic cloud, or human face, according to his power and individuality. ~ J. E. H. MacDonald

When you act in a film, you're inevitably surrounded by people you didn't choose, right down to the set painter. I like being able to pick the family I'm waking up to in the morning that's going to make this group effort to tell a story that applies to what's interesting to me at that stage in my life. ~ Sean Penn

Aren't the clouds beautiful? They look like big balls of cotton ... I could just lie here all day, and watch them drift by ... If you use your imagination, you can see lots of things in the cloud formations ... What do you think you see, Linus?"
"Well, those clouds up there look like the map of the British Honduras on the Caribbean ... That cloud up there looks a little like the profile of Thomas Eakins, the famous painter and sculptor ... And that group of clouds over there gives me the impression of the stoning of Stephen ... I can see the apostle Paul standing there to one side ... "
"Uh huh ... That's very good ... What do you see in the clouds, Charlie Brown?"
"Well, I was going to say I saw a ducky and a horsie, but I changed my mind! ~ Charles M. Schulz

What we can see depends heavily on what our culture has trained us to look for. ~ Nell Irvin Painter

The progression of a painter's work ... will be toward clarity; toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer ... to achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood. ~ Mark Rothko

Leanoardo wrote that a painter should begin every canvas wit a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light. Most painters do the opposite, starting with a whitewash and adding the shadows last. But Paul, who knows Leonardo so well you'd thing the old man slept on the bottom bun, understands the value of starting with the shadows. The only things people can ever know about you are the ones you let them see. ~ Ian Caldwell

I've had shows as a painter, as a photographer, I've done shows as a sculptor. I've done a lot of different things and it all comes from experiences that you have in your life, in your creative environment. They all help - I don't even know if they help; maybe they make it worse but they all influence each other, for sure. ~ Norman Reedus

Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, so I need an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn. ~ Leo Tolstoy

If you deny yourself access to the child within because you're too serious, you also block your connection to the divine Light and your feminine self. Every creator who's any good uses their feminine side to create with.. Whether a scientist working on a hunch, a painter working on the interplay of colors, or a musician dealing with the juxtaposition of notes and chords. ~ Stuart Wilde

At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

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

The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens. As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved, it's the citizen who changes things. I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. ~ Jose Saramago

Representational painters: loosen the grip of inflexibility! Abstract painters: tighten your hold on crafting your images! In both types of painting students need to unlearn what one has acquired. ~ Joshua L. Goldberg

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

That painter who has no doubts will achieve little. ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

...It would hardly be a waste of time if sometimes even the most advanced students in the cognitive sciences were to pay a visit to their ancestors. It is frequently claimed in American philosophy departments that, in order to be a philosopher, it is not necessary to revisit the history of philosophy. It is like the claim that one can become a painter without having ever seen a single work by Raphael, or a writer without having ever read the classics. Such things are theoretically possible; but the 'primitive' artist, condemned to an ignorance of the past, is always recognizable as such and rightly labeled as naïf. It is only when we consider past projects revealed as utopian or as failures that we are apprised of the dangers and possibilities for failure for our allegedly new projects. The study of the deeds of our ancestors is thus more than an atiquarian pastime, it is an immunological precaution. ~ Umberto Eco

The first things I did was I was a writer, painter, and photographer, and we grew up very poor, so even though I could get into any college I wanted, there was no way to pay for it. ~ Lori Petty

We do not overidentify with our jobs. We may take pride in our work, we may stay late and come in on weekends, but we recognize that we are not our job descriptions. The amateur, on the other hand, overidentifies with his avocation, his artistic aspiration. He defines himself by it. He is a musician, a painter, a playwright. Resistance loves this. Resistance knows that the amateur composer will never write his symphony because he is overly invested in its success and overterrified of its failure. The amateur takes it so seriously it paralyzes him. ~ Steven Pressfield

When the painter wishes to represent an event, he cannot place before us too great a number of personages; but he cannot employ too few when he wishes to portray an emotion. ~ Joseph Joubert

I was born in Suzhou, a city not very far from Shanghai. It's a very interesting town - there is a long artist's tradition there, especially during the Ming and Ching dynasties, which produced many, many scholars and painters and so forth. That's where my family lived for 600, 700 years. ~ I.M. Pei

Sometimes you read a passage by a great writer, and you know what he says and how he says it will always be, for you, the only possible way it could be. Less often a painter will describe an event in a way that fits into your interpretation of that event so perfectly that it becomes the event itself. ~ Vincent Price

And that is the essence of wisdom - to be in harmony with nature, with the natural rhythm of the universe. And whenever you are in harmony with the natural rhythm of the universe, you are a poet, you are a painter, you are a musician, you are a dancer. ~ Osho

One day, while taking a look at some vistas in Dad's stereopticon, it hit me that I was just this little girl, born in Texas, whose father was a sign painter and who had only just so many years to live. ~ Terrence Malick

The painter is, as to the execution of his work, a mechanic; but as to his conception and spirit and design he is hardly below even the poet. ~ Friedrich Schiller

I remember when you used to have your profession on your passport and I always thought that being a painter was the best one to be, because my heroes were Goya and Francis Bacon. ~ Damien Hirst

And yet, in Raissa, at every moment there is a child in a window who laughs seeing a dog that has jumped on a shed to bite into a piece of polenta dropped by a stonemason who has shouted from the top of the scaffolding, "Darling, let me dip into it," to a young servant-maid who holds up a dish of ragout under the pergola, happy to serve it to the umbrella-maker who is celebrating a successful transaction, a white lace parasol bought to display at the races by a great lady in love with an officer who has smiled at her taking the last jump, happy man, and still happier his horse, flying over the obstacles, seeing a francolin flying in the sky, happy bird freed from its cage by a painter happy at having painted it feather by feather, speckled with red and yellow in the illumination of that page in the volume where the philosopher says: "Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence. ~ Italo Calvino

Most artists, most painters, even composers would want to come back and redo their work. They've got a new perspective on it, they've got more resources, they have better technology, and they can fix or finish the things that were never done. ~ George Lucas

I feel like at the end of the day, as entertaining as movies are, when you're part of them in a way, it's this beautiful art form and that's what it feels like for me. I'm not a painter, but I can express myself visually in a way that allows me to artistically create. ~ Shailene Woodley

That movie we saw tonight really freaked me out."
Her brows rose incredulously. "I'm a ghost, you're a shape-shifter, you live with a cursed vampire, and a zombie movie freaked you out. Honey, I love you, but that's a bold-faced lie. What gives? ~ Kristen Painter

It's not so hard to become the best painter in Canada ... The rest just quits! ~ Paterson Ewen

Berthe Morisot was a painter full of eighteenth-century delicacy and grace; in a word, the last elegant and 'feminine' artists since Fragonard. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Science is a truth that is true no matter what, no matter when and for all time and science as the kind of gospel truth replaces the gospel, which was religion. ~ Nell Irvin Painter

A good painter is to paint two main things, men and the working of man's mind. ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

Oh, I am a lonely painter / I live in a box of paints ... ~ Joni Mitchell

Photography is inherently an analytic discipline. Where a painter starts with a blank canvas and builds a picture, a photographer starts with the messiness of the world and selects a picture. A photographer standing before houses and streets and people and trees and artifacts of a culture imposes an order on the scene - simplifies the jumble by giving it structure. He or she imposes this order by choosing a vantage point, choosing a frame, choosing a moment of exposure, and by selecting a plane of focus. ~ Stephen Shore

I lacked the knowledge of linear perspective needed to get into the art school, so now I whitewash walls and imagine I'm heaven's landscape painter. ~ Bauvard

How may paintings have preserved the image of a divine beauty which in its natural manifestation has been rapidly overtaken by time or death. Thus, the work of the painter is nobler than that of nature, its mistress. ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

Painters were also attorneys, happy storytellers of anecdote, psychologists, botanists, zoologists, archaeologists, engineers, but there were no creative painters. ~ Kazimir Malevich

What has made it work, or what makes certain paintings successful or not, has to do with my being a painter and a thinking, feeling person, more than my sex, color, height, origin. ~ Helen Frankenthaler

She was an enthusiastic painter of oils and watercolors. She was also very generous. I could mess with her paints and brushes all I wanted. On one condition: that I kept my brushes clean. The only art lesson my mother gave me was how to wash my brushes. ~ Barbara Cooney

Right now, scientists are in exactly the same position as Renaissance painters, commissioned to make the portrait the patron wants done, And if they are smart, they'll make sure their work subtly flatters the patron. Not overtly. Subtly. ~ Michael Crichton

A painter may be looking at the world in a way which is very different from everyone else. If he's a craftsman, he can get other people to see the world through his eyes, and so he enlarges our vision, perception, and there's great value in that. ~ Edward De Bono

If the newspapers cut me up so much that I shall not venture before the world again, I have resolved to become a house painter; that would be as easy as anything else, and I should, at any rate, still be an artist! ~ Frederic Chopin

My father was a psychiatrist and a social worker but he was a very talented painter and musician and writer on the side. ~ Tunde Adebimpe

Colour, as the strange and magnificent expression of the inscrutable spectrum of Eternity, is beautiful and important to me as a painter; I use it to enrich the canvas and to probe more deeply into the object. Colour also decided, to a certain extent, my spiritual outlook, but it is subordinated to life, and above all, to the treatment of form. Too much emphasis on colour at the expense of form and space would make a double manifestation of itself on the canvas, and this would verge on craft work. ~ Max Beckmann

There was something written in pencil in the bottom corner, smudged and faded. I leaned in until my nose was almost pressed against the glass. Narnia, it looked like.
I must have stared for a lot longer than it seemed.
A tap on the door had my jumping. "Ella?" A second later. "Um...Ella? You okay in there?"
Alex looked red-faced and startled when I jerked the door open. Even more so when I grabbed his wrist with both of my hands and pulled him into the bathroom. Another time,I might have been equally red-faced. I would definitely have been uncomfortable, even if it wasn't in a bad way. But at the moment,I was too busy in a different part of my head.
I let go of him and pointed to the sketch. "That's a Willing."
"Is it?" He didn't look particularly impressed. More relieved that I hadn't fallen and hit my head or had some similar mishap.
"Edward Willing. You have to know who Edward Willing is."
He peered past me. "Philadelphia painter. Early twentieth century, right? I was in your art history class last year,you know."
I didn't.Not really. "You were?"
"I sat in back.You sat in front. Never saw your face during class,but I remember you arguing with Evers about Dali.I remember. You don't like Dali."
"Not much."
"You like this guy?"
"Yeah." I took a breath. "Yeah.I do. And you have one of his sketches. In your guest bathroom. ~ Melissa Jensen

Little Tony scratched his neck. "Don't forget he besmirched my name, Pop." Huh, how about that? Little Tony not only knew a big word, but had used it correctly. ~ Kristen Painter

Huguette Clark was an artist, a painter and doll collector. ~ Bill Dedman

To be a painter now is to be part of a very small, endangered species. ~ Howard Hodgkin

At one point Trudeau mentioned to me that the National Gallery wanted to buy a masterpiece by the great Italian painter Lotto, and it needed a million dollars from the Treasury Board. "Is that Lotto-Quebec or Lotto-Canada?" I joked, but I got the message, and the National Gallery got the painting. ~ Jean Chretien

Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day. ~ William Butler Yeats

Being a songwriter or a painter you're definitely facing your fears. You're facing your fears because you're speaking your truth; you're speaking from your heart. That's something that's not easy to do, you set yourself up for all sorts of criticism or vulnerability but that's why we do it. ~ Brett Dennen

Bologna is celebrated for producing popes, painters, and sausage. ~ Lord Byron

Not all of us are painters but we are all artists. Each time we fit things together we are creating - whether it is to make a loaf of bread, a child, a day. ~ Corita Kent

Being a painter myself ... whenever I could dispense with architectural precision, I indulged in the picturesque, in which case I sacrificed a few details when necessary in favor of an imposing effect that would give a monument its real character and also preserve the poetic charm that surrounds it. ~ Charles Negre

Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity. I don't see a different purpose for it now. ~ Dorothea Tanning

Before the Conquest all art was of the people, and popular art has never ceased to exist in Mexico. The art called popular is fugitive in character, with less of the impersonal and intellectual characteristics of the schools. It is the work of talent nourished by personal experience and that of the community - rather than being taken from the experiences of painters in other times and other cultures. ~ Manuel Alvarez Bravo

The role of the painter ... is to project that which sees itself in him. ~ Max Ernst

I had spent many years living with a plain piece of canvas just right on my face as a headboard for my bed. As the years passed by, I watched it slowly transforming into a work of art which still lives above my head. And that my friend, is truly living art. ~ Shawn Lukas

Painters understand nature and love it, and teach us to see. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

Pictures are spiritual beings. The soul of the painter lives within them. ~ Emil Nolde

My dream, maybe because of my family, of course, was to be a painter. I chose in one moment the direction of textiles; from textiles I went to fashion. ~ Roberto Cavalli

Because if you walk in a city you're jostled by hundreds of indifferent people with indifferent eyes that look at you as if you weren't there at all. You begin to feel you must be invisible. Hundreds and thousands of eyes, and not one pair really seeing you or caring who you are. I'd rather walk down Beilford High Street and know that everybody was saying, 'There goes the mad painter!' It's better to be mad than invisible." She ~ D.E. Stevenson

When I was quite young, I dreamed of being a painter. ~ James Gray

Your impression of him as a respectable man brings to my mind the work of a painter whose pictures show attractively at a distance but unpleasantly up close."
"I ~ John Bunyan

The poet and the painter are only truly great by the mutual influences of their studies, and the jealousy of glory has only produced an idle contest. ~ Isaac D'Israeli

After a noticeable silence, he'd recently published a book of technically baffling poems, with line breaks so arbitrary and frequent as to be useless, arrhythmic. On the page they look like some of Charles Bukowski's skinny, chatty, muttering-stuttering antiverses. Impossibly, Mark's words make music, the faraway strains of an irresistible jazz. It's plain to any reader, within a few lines - well, go read the poems and see, Marcus Ahearn traffics with the ineffable. He makes the mind of the speaker present, in that here-and-now where the reader actually reads - that place. Such a rare thing. Samuel Beckett. Jean Follain, Ionesco - the composer Billy Strayhorn. Mark calls his process "psychic improvisation" and referred me to the painter Paul Klee; the term was Klee's. "You just get out a pen and a notebook and let your mind go long," he told me. ~ Denis Johnson

To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano. ~ James Whistler

The ability to make somebody feel something: that's art. However you look at it, whether you're an author, a painter, a singer, a rapper, a spoken-word artist - art. ~ Wale

People call me the painter of dancers, but I really wish to capture movement itself. ~ Edgar Degas

The danger, I find, is that you can become too formulaic, like some commissioned portrait painters who develop a methodology. ~ Jamie Wyeth

I'm like the painter with his nose to the canvas, fussing over details. Gazing from a distance, the reader sees the big picture. ~ Steven Saylor

For me, self-esteem-building and confidence-building is the foundation for anything that we do, whether you want to be a writer, a painter, or a entrepreneur. ~ Hill Harper

The painter who draws by practise and judgment of the eye without the use of reason is like the mirror which reproduces within itself all the objects which are set opposite to it without knowledge of the same. ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

There's a phrase, "sitzfleisch", which means just plain sitting on your ass and getting it done. Just showing up for work. My uncle Raphael was a painter, and he used to say, "If the muse is late for work, start without her". You have to be there. You have to be there, and do it, and grind it out, even when it is grinding and you know you're probably going to rewrite all this tomorrow. ~ Peter S. Beagle

Use anger to emotionalize whatever thing you intend to do in life - being a painter, a poet or a photographer ~ Gordon Parks

A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man or woman who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether they be painter or ploughman. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Painters hate having to explain what their work is about. They always say, 'It's whatever you want it to be' - because I think that's their intention, to connect with each person's subconscious, and not to try and dictate. ~ Helen Mirren

A painter who has the feel of breasts and buttocks is saved. ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Death is pitch-dark, but colors are light. To be a painter, one must work with rays of light. ~ Edvard Munch

I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, 'Look.' I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, 'Look again,' which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can't explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you've had that experience, you see differently. ~ James A. Baldwin

A poet is a painter of the soul. ~ Isaac D'Israeli

Painters of paintings, writers of books, never could tell the half. ~ Lorenz Hart

The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquillity . I was a painter before I was a writer and a painter never wants the subject right under his nose; he wants to stand back and study a landscape with half-closed eyes. ~ Isak Dinesen

The painter folded back the heavy curtain, standing in the stream of light breaking through the damp thickness of the room. He paused, still holding the drape in his hand as he considered with suspicion that a world could exist outside the window. ~ Thomas Lloyd Qualls

I wanted to tell you that art is the most harmless activity of mankind. But I suddenly recalled that art was often used for propaganda purposes by totalitarian systems. I wanted to tell you about the extraordinary sensitivity of an artist, but I recalled that Hitler was a painter and Stalin used to write sonnets...
"Each scientific discovery opens doors behind which we are confronted with new closed doors. Art does not solve problems but makes us aware of their existence... ~ Magdalena Abakanowicz

A poet needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a director an army. ~ Orson Welles

As I began painting myself, I
started making connection with
all that was painted around me.

With further immersion into it,
my connection deepened and
I was simply transformed from the
painter to the canvas itself
all observing, all absorbing ~ Rabb Jyot

He was still on his "two Van Goghs" point. He put his hand on the armrest of her chair. He said, "But the second Van Gogh is just a guy named Vincent. Vincent lived for thirty-seven years. Van Gogh only came to life after Vincent died. Same man, two people. ~ Victor LaValle

I have never heard a dancer asking for advice about how to stay focused on her footwork, or a painter complaining about the dull day-to-day task of painting. What task worth doing isn't worth daily effort? Do you think Michelangelo was having fun the whole time he was on his back painting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The power of painter or poet to describe what he calls an ideal thing depends upon its being to him not an ideal but a real thing. No man ever did or ever will work well but either from actual sight or sight of faith. ~ John Ruskin