Quotes on Painting

Very quickly a painting is turned into a facsimile of itself when one becomes so familiar with with it that one recognizes it without looking at it.

It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920's is that they they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naivete that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot.

The intellectual attainments of a man who thinks for himself resemble a fine painting, where the light and shade are correct, the tone sustained, the colour perfectly harmonised; it is true to life. On the other hand, the intellectual attainments of the mere man of learning are like a large palette, full of all sorts of colours, which at most are systematically arranged, but devoid of harmony, connection and meaning.

He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.

Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.

A critic in my house sees some paintings. Greatly perturbed, he asks for my drawings. My drawings? Never! They are my letters, my secrets.

I’m just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it recreates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it’s far closer to the miraculous creation of life than, say, a painting or music or even literature. It’s not just an art form; it’s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It’s my way of telling a story.

Gold, silver, jewels, purple garments, houses built of marble, groomed estates, pious paintings, caparisoned steeds, and other things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure; books give delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.

Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting.

People live for love. They kill for love. They die for love. They have songs, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings, myths, legends. It's one of the most powerful brain systems on Earth for both great joy and great sorrow.

The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear... What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away... We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities.

What a strange vanity painting is; it attracts admiration by resembling the original, we do not admire.

Photography, sculpture, and painting were wielded as cultural weapons over the course of generations to substantiate the idea that black people were inherently subordinate beings; they were used to make slavery acceptable and to make black subjugation more palatable.

Science for me is very close to art. Scientific discovery is an irrational act. It's an intuition which turns out to be reality at the end of it-and I see no difference between a scientist developing a marvellous discovery and an artist making a painting.

My painting does not come from the easel.

Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising.

I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality.

All works, no matter what or by whom painted, are nothing but bagatelles and childish trifles... unless they are made and painted from life, and there can be nothing... better than to follow nature.

I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.

Drawing is the artist's most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality.

I am against the line and all its consequences: contours, forms, composition. All paintings of whatever sort, figurative or abstract, seem to me like prison windows in which the lines, precisely are the bars.