Quotes on Painting

My instinct about painting says, 'if you don't think about it, it's right.' As soon as you have to decide and choose, it's wrong. And the more you decide about, the more wrong it gets.

I have never seen either angels or goddesses, so I am not interested in painting them.

I remember being handed a score composed by Mozart at the age of eleven. What could I say? I felt like de Kooning, who was asked to comment on a certain abstract painting, and answered in the negative. He was then told it was the work of a celebrated monkey. 'That's different. For a monkey, it's terrific'.

What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.

I am only interested in painting the actual person, in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong.

Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?

I think I am beginning to learn something about painting.

I just like art. I get pure pleasure from it. I have a lot of wonderful paintings, and every time I look at them I see something different.

Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become.

The artist finds a greater pleasure in painting than in having completed the picture.

Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness.

Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.

The earth doesn’t care where death occurs. ...It’s the artist, by coming in and writing about it or painting it or taking a photograph of it, that makes the earth powerful and creates death’s memory. Because the land will not remember by itself, but the artist will.

Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.

It looked like an old painting, but real - everything achingly idyllic in the morning light - and I thought about how wonderfully strange it would be to live in a place where almost everything had been built by the dead.

The white paintings came first; my silent piece came later.

Pawns not only create the sketch for the whole painting, they are also the soil, the foundation, of any position

Sculpture is made by taking away, while painting is made by adding.

Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it, Picasso did it with Cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new paintings again.

Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented

When words such as painting and sculpture are used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent acceptance of this tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist who would be reluctant to make art that goes beyond the limitations.