Painter Quotes

The painter should paint not only what he has in front of him, but also what he sees inside himself. If he sees nothing within, then he should stop painting what is in front of him.

Youth must go ahead and prosper. These young painters are all very talented people, but they all paint frescoes.

The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen.

Virtue runs before the muse, and defies her skill; she is rapt and doth refuse to wait a painter's will.

The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.

I was actually dumbfounded by how some artists talked to each other. For example, it was a normal night at a bar, nothing very momentous, when in walked a painter. The other painters at the bar had a bit of an attitude about it. One said to him, "You know, I'm tired of that feeling of hot air coming out from behind your work." And I thought, "Well, that's interesting." I didn't know you could even think something like that, let alone say it right to someone's face.

I think I've always been afraid of painting, really. Right from the beginning. All my paintings are about painting without a painter. Like a kind of mechanical form of painting. Like finding some imaginary computer painter, or a robot who paints.

Trying to cope with the balance between home life and road life has been a theme in my music since early Red House Painters records.

I am a good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster. The landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. He would not make that use of my figure.

I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

Gardening was something I learned in my youth when I was unhappy. I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

If we don't have a sense of humor, we lack a sense of perspective

I don't paint like a woman is supposed to paint. Thank God, art doesn't bother about things like that.

What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.

Having an experience is taking part in the world. Taking part in the world is really about sharing responsibility.

An editor is like a painter. There is a magic in that.

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!

People are still making paintings. People are still enjoying paintings, looking at paintings. Paintings still have something to tell us. There's a way of being in the world that painting brings to us, that painters bring to the task that we absorb and are able to be in dialogue with. That's something that's part of us.

There have been many poets who have lived at the fifth center of creativity and never gone ahead - many painters, many dancers, many singers who created great art, but never moved to the third eye. And there have been mystics who have remained with the third eye, knowing their own inner beauty; it is so fulfilling that they thought they had arrived. Somebody is needed to tell you that there is still something more ahead; otherwise, in your ignorance, what you will do is almost unpredictable.

Zen brings creativity. And remember, if you want to be one with the creator, you will have to learn some ways of creativity. The only way to be one with the creator is to be in some moment of creativity, when you are lost. The potter is lost in making his pottery; the potter is lost while working on the wheel. The painter is lost while painting. The dancer is lost; there is no dancer, only the dance remains. Those are the peak moments, where you touch God, where God touches you.

Many contemporary painters feel that their landscapes come from within and are brought to the surface and given form as a result of various stimuli. The artist's internal world is waiting to be evoked by whatever means the artist finds most productive, and... this world is just as important as the outer, visible world.

A lot of painters listen to music, I think, while they paint. But I hate to do that. It's a horror. I can't really listen to the music. I'm not really concentrating on it, and I'm not really concentrating on the painting.

Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

My core competency has really informed my painting. The roots of editing stem from classical paintings - classic painters intended to drive your eye from this conflict to that intrigue, ending with a caprice. That is a montage, that is editing. It became a flipbook in later generations.

I guess I consider myself a cartoonist first, though I was "trained" as a painter/printmaker/sculptor. If there's still any resistance to cartooning in the nuts-and-bolts world of acquiring the means of survival, it's probably mostly on the pay scale. If graphic novels are selling really well and are "growing the book market" or whatever it is a businessman would say about them, I don't see it in the remuneration offered by some of the publishers.

When you talk about painters and you talk about painters painting masterpieces, there is no painter who painted only one painting and that was a masterpiece. You have to do a whole bunch of paintings to get to the place of mastering your craft.

The muddy moods of oil paints are the painter's muddy humors, and its brilliant transformations are the painter's unexpected discoveries.

My dad was always such a frustrated artist. He always worked very hard to support his family, doing a bunch of ridiculous jobs. He wanted to be a painter, but then he also wrote science-fiction novels in his spare time. He was always so frustrated having to work to support the family that I was like, I'm never going to do that. I don't want to just be working a menial job to support my family and dreaming of being an artist. We learn from our fathers in that way.

The eye is complicated. It mixes the colors [it sees] for you ... The painter must unmix them and lay them on again shade by shade, and then the eye of the beholder takes over and mixes them again.

Art is long. Life is short. A picture can become for us a highway between a particular thing and a universal feeling.

Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.

On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.

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.

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.

The names of great painters are like passing-bells: in the name of Velasquez you hear sounded the fall of Spain; .in the name of Titian, that of Venice; in the name of Leonardo, that of Milan; in the name of Raphael, that of Rome. And there is profound justice in this, for in proportion to the nobleness of the power is the guilt of its use for purposes vain or vile; and hitherto the greater the art, the more surely has it been used, and used solely, for the decoration of pride or the provoking of sensuality.

The only kind of sublimity which a painter or sculptor should aim at is to express by certain proportions and positions of limbs and features that strength and dignity of mind, and vigor and activity of body, which enables men to conceive and execute great actions.

Color possesses me. I don't have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter.

Watch a French housewife as she makes her way slowly along the loaded stalls... searching for the peak of ripeness and flavor... What you are seeing is a true artist at work, patiently assembling all the materials of her craft, just as the painter squeezes oil colors onto his palette ready to create a masterpiece.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

Drawing is the honesty of the art.

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God.

The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting.

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?

Keep your eye on your inner world and keep away from ads, idiots and movie stars.

It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism.

Shut your eyes, wait, think of nothing. Now, open them ... one sees nothing but a great coloured undulation. What then? An irradiation and glory of colour. This is what a picture should give us ... an abyss in which the eye is lost, a secret germination, a coloured state of grace ... loose conciousness. Descend with the painter into the dim tangled roots of things, and rise again from them in colours, be steeped in the light of them.

One painter ought never to imitate the manner of any other; because in that case he cannot be called the child of nature, but the grandchild. It is always best to have recourse to nature, which is replete with such abundance of objects, than to the productions of other masters, who learnt everything from her.

Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.

Be The Peace You Wish To See In The World!