Quotes on Painting

Destroying a tropical rainforest for profit is like burning all the paintings of the Louvre to cook dinner.

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

If you were to go, and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You'd see Jesus on the cross, and you'd see a dude get stabbed in the neck, and you'd see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.

An artist must forget painting when he paints. That's the only way he will do original work.

As a teenager I started painting and playing guitar...Music has been my playmate, my lover, and my crying towel...This song ("Until It's Time for You To Go") popped into my head while I was falling in love with someone I knew couldn't stay with me. The words are about honesty and freedom inside the heart.

I certainly consider a great appreciation of painting to be the best indication of a most perfect mind.

Macduff: What three things does drink especially provoke? Porter: Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine.

I was interested in ideas, not merely visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind.

People who wouldn't think of taking a sieve to the well to draw water fail to see the folly in taking a camera to make a painting.

Thirst will parch your tongue and your body will waste through lack of sleep ere you can describe in words that which painting instantly sets before the eye.

Drawing includes three and a half quarters of the content of painting... Drawing contains everything, except the hue

To the question, ‘Is the cinema an art?’ my answer is, ‘what does it matter?’... You can make films or you can cultivate a garden. Both have as much claim to being called an art as a poem by Verlaine or a painting by Delacroix… Art is ‘making.’ The art of poetry is the art of making poetry. The art of love is the art of making love... My father never talked to me about art. He could not bear the word.

It is no use painting the foot of the tree white, the strength of the bark cries out from beneath the paint.

In a book, you can describe a scene and have any song you want playing on the radio and have any painting you want hanging on the wall. That was really freeing to me when I was writing 'Ready Player One.' I could throw in everything that I love.

The painter makes real to others his innermost feelings about all that he cares for. A secret becomes known to everyone who views the picture through the intensity with which it is felt.

I can't change the fact that my paintings don't sell. But the time will come when people will recognize that they are worth more than the value of the paints used in the picture.

I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

The secret to so many artists living so long is that every painting is a new adventure. So, you see, they're always looking ahead to something new and exciting. The secret is not to look back.

I'm irresponsible to my career in order to paint. Because painting is obsessive. I forget to eat. I forget to sleep.

Color is one of the great things in the world that makes life worth living to me and as I have come to think of painting it is my efforts to create an equivalent with paint color for the world, life as I see it.