Quotes on Painter

Every good composition is above all a work of abstraction. All good painters know this. But the painter cannot dispense with subjects altogether without his work suffering impoverishment.

Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.

The effect of sincerity is to give one's work the character of a protest. The painter, being concerned only with conveying his impression, simply seeks to be himself and no one else.

Whether it's a painter finding his way each morning to the easel, or a medical researcher returning daily to the laboratory, the routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more.

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

The painter must enclose himself within his work; he must respond not with words, but with paintings.

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

Monet's garden must be included with his works, because he combined the magic of an adaptation of nature with the work of a painter of light. An extension of the studio into the openair, with color tones lavishly spread out on all sides to exercise the eye with seductive vibrations, from which a feverishly aroused retina expects unquenchable joy.

A well-spent day brings happy sleep.

I'm a much better filmmaker than painter. But studying it did make me visually acute and taught me lessons like being economic: Say something once and you don't have to say it again.

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.

I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass or other foreign matter added.

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter, but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter's imagination.

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?

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.

Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.

And so when studying faces, we do indeed measure them, but as painters, not as surveyors.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.