Explore Quotes on Painting

No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.

Sometimes I miss out the morning's painting session and instead study my Japanese books in the open.

Wherever you look there are inspirations, books, literature, paintings, landscapes, everything. Just living is an inspiration.

Some people like to paint trees. I like to paint love. I find it more meaningful than painting trees.

You know, the way art history is taught, often there's nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.

Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.

Painting is a lie. It's the most magic of all media, the most transcendent. It makes space where there is no space.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

It is my dream to create an art which is filled with balance, purity and calmness, freed from a subject matter that is disconcerting or too attention-seeking. In my paintings, I wish to create a spiritual remedy, similar to a comfortable armchair which provides rest from physical expectation for the spiritually working, the businessman as well as the artist.

If you're going to be an artist, all life is your subject. And all your experience is part of your art. A youngster told me recently that he was going to give himself a year to see if he has talent. A year! It takes a lifetime to see if you have it. Painting is total engagement.

No, the thing to do is try to make a painting that will be alive in your own lifetime.

Art is nothing tangible. We cannot call a painting 'art' as the words 'artifact' and 'artificial' imply. The thing made is a work of art made by art, but not itself art. The art remains in the artist and is the knowledge by which things are made.

Man needs music, literature, and painting - all those oases of perfection that make up art - to compensate for the rudeness and materialism of life.

[...] intelligent people only have a certain amount of time (measured in subjective time spent thinking about religion) to become atheists. After a certain point, if you're smart, have spent time thinking about and defending your religion, and still haven't escaped the grip of Dark Side Epistemology, the inside of your mind ends up as an Escher painting.

There were details like clothing, hair styles and the fragile objects that hardly ever survive for the archaeologist-musical instruments, bows and arrows, and body ornaments depicted as they were worn... No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely

Can one have love? If we could, love would need to be a thing, a substance that one can have, own, possess. The truth is, there is no such thing as love. Love is an abstraction, perhaps a goddess or an alien being, although nobody has ever seen this goddess. In reality, there exists only the act of loving. To love is a productive activity. It implies caring for, knowing, responding, affirming, enjoying: the person, the tree, the painting, the idea. It means bringing to life, increasing his/her/its aliveness. It is a process, self-renewing and self increasing.

Has it led you to the conclusion that photography is an art ? Or it is simply a means of recording ? "I'm glad you asked that. I've been wanting to say this for years. Is cooking an art ? Is talking an art ? Is even painting an art ? It is artfulness that makes art, not the medium itself. Of course photography is an art - when it is in the hands of artists."

I was painting sets, working in editorial as an assistant, driving their trucks... lying that I knew how to drive a truck... and doing commercials and documentaries.

Leonardo da Vinci, one of the greatest creative thinkers of all time, strongly recommended the habit of meditation in the dark. He wrote: "For I have found in my own experience that it is of no small benefit, when you lie in bed in the dark, to recall in imagination, one after another, the outlines of the form you have been studying." He often awoke to find his problems solved. Da Vinci would often stand silent and motionless before a painting for hours, without using his brush, as though waiting for spiritual guidance.

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.

And do so, love, yet when they have devised_x000D__x000D_What strainèd touches rhetoric can lend,_x000D__x000D_Thou, truly fair, wert truly sympathized_x000D__x000D_In true plain words by thy true-telling friend;_x000D__x000D_And their gross painting might be better used_x000D__x000D_Where cheeks need blood; in thee it is abused.