Quotes on Painting

I like all paintings. I always look at the paintings, good or bad, in barbershops, furniture stores, provincial hotels. I'm like a drinker who needs wine. As long as it is wine, it doesn't matter which wine.

I like to feel like you can bite my paintings. Not to eat them, to hurt them. I like to feel like I'm painting with my teeth.

I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.

What lives in art and is eternally living, is first of all the painter and then the painting.

Painting is another form of thinking.

Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.

As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language.

When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.

One never knows what one is going to do. One starts a painting and then it becomes something quite different.

Now will never leave. It is always here. Like a clear canvas, it awaits our painting.

I was the first woman to paint cleanly, and that was the basis of my success. From a hundred pictures, mine will always stand out. And so the galleries began to hang my work in their best rooms, always in the middle, because my painting was attractive. It was precise. It was 'finished'.

The proletarian writer is a writer with a purpose; he thinks no more of art for art's sake than a man on a sinking ship thinks of painting a beautiful picture in the cabin; he thinks of getting ashore - and then there will be time enough for art.

My paintings do not have a center, but depend on the same amount of interest throughout.

The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.

When I say artist I mean the man who is building things - creating molding the earth - whether it be the plains of the west - or the iron ore of Penn. It's all a big game of construction - some with a brush - some with a shovel - some choose a pen.

It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

Through her paintings, she breaks all the taboos of the woman's body and of female sexuality.

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

Painting should never look as if it were done with difficulty, however difficult it may actually have been.

Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.