Quotes on Paint

The view of life I communicate in my pictures excludes the sordid and ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be.

Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint.

If there were only one truth, you couldn't paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.

The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.

I paint not the things I see but the feelings they arouse in me.

There is never a question of what to paint but only how to paint.

Every paint-stroke takes you farther and farther away from your initial concept. And you have to be thankful for that.

I don't resent being a female painter. I don't exploit it. I paint.

Most people think I paint fast. I paint very slowly.

The artist must paint as he would speak. I don’t want people to speculate what I mean, I want them to understand.

The man who can see all gray, and red, and purples in a peach, will paint the peach rightly round, and rightly altogether. But the man who has only studied its roundness may not see its purples and grays, and if he does not will never get it to look like a peach; so that great power over color is always a sign of large general art-intellect.

Work at the same time on sky, water, branches, ground, keeping everything going on an equal basis... Don't be afraid of putting on colour... Paint generously and unhesitatingly, for it is best not to lose the first impression.

If you paint the leaf on a tree without using a model, your imagination will only supply you with a few leaves; but Nature offers you millions, all on the same tree. No two leaves are exactly the same. The artist who paints only what is in his mind must very soon repeat himself.

The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.

I am just beginning to understand what it is to paint. A painter should have two lives, one in which to learn, and one in which to practice his art.

If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldnt have to paint at all.

I paint and sculpt to get a grip on reality... to protect myself.

If a man knows the law, find out, though he live in a pine shanty, and resort to him. And if a man can pipe or sing, so as to wrap the imprisoned soul in an elysium; or can paint a landscape, and convey into souls and ochres all the enchantments of Spring or Autumn; or can liberate and intoxicate all people who hear him with delicious songs and verses; it is certain that the secret cannot be kept; the first witness tells it to a second, and men go by fives and tens and fifties to his doors.

I try to paint what I have found and not what I look for. In art, intentions are of little importance.

It takes 25 years to learn to draw, one hour to learn to paint.