Quotes
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“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.” – Leonardo da Vinci
“In drawing, one must look for or suspect that there is more than is casually seen.” – George Bridgman
“If you understand a painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.” – Salvador Dalí
“A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.” – Edgar Degas
“Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.” – Pablo Picasso
“Creativity is painting the canvas with colors, doing what you do with what you have, knowing the limits and moving beyond.” – Anand Patwa
“The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to.” – Frida Kahlo
“Drawing is like making an expressive gesture, with the advantage of permanence.” – Henri Matisse
“Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do.” – Edgar Degas
“Painting must be fertile. It must give birth to a world… it must fertilize the imagination.” – Joan Miro
“My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.” – Agnes Martin
“If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.” – Edward Hopper
“All you need to paint is a few tools, a little instruction, and a vision in your mind.” – Bob Ross
“Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.” – John Constable
“I would like to paint the way a bird sings.” – Claude Monet
“Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.” – Henry Ward Beecher
“Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.” – Jackson Pollock
“Life is a painting, and you are the artist. You have on your palette all the colors in the spectrum – the same ones available to Michaelangelo and DaVinci.” – Paul J. Meyer
“You need the dark in order to show the light.” – Bob Ross
“The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerises some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves.” – Vincent van Gogh
“A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.” – Leonardo da Vinci
“The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.” – Jackson Pollock
“When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.” – Berthe Morisot
“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.” – Georgia O’Keeffe
“A simple line painted with the brush can lead to freedom and happiness.” – Joan Miro
“The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.” – Joan Miro
“Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.” – Henry Ward Beecher
“Drawing things makes them seem more real and makes me feel more alive. It also makes me pin down and remember things landscapes, season, weather, occasions, incidents, people that would otherwise have melted from my memory.” – David Gentleman
“Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see – to see correctly – and that means a good deal more than merely looking with the eye.” – Kimon Nicolaides
“If the world could remain within a frame like a painting on the wall, I think we’d see the beauty then and stand staring in awe. ” – Connor Oberst
“Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.” – Philip Guston
“It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color – not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.” – Henri Matisse
“A painting is never finished – it simply stops in interesting places.” – Paul Gardner
“You can’t learn techniques and then try to become a painter. Techniques are a result.Jackson Pollock” –
“Life, like a good painting, needs balance, a harmonious arrangement to avoid being chaotic, a mess, a failure.” – Iain Pear
“Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.” – Keith Haring
“I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.” – Vincent van Gogh
“The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the works of others as his standard.” – Leonardo da Vinci
“It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover, to your surprise, that you have rendered something in its true character.” – Camille Pissarro
“If it weren’t for painting, I wouldn’t live; I couldn’t bear the extra strain of things.” – Winston Churchill
“The holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it.” – Banksy
“It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well-painted. This is the essence of academicism.” – Mark Rothko
“To my mind a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful and pretty. There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is, without creating still more of them.” – Pierre-Auguste Renoir
“When you want to make the main color pure and bright, don’t just keep adding bright colors on it. Just make the colors around the spot darker and dull. It will give the scene dramatical effects. I think the life is the same.” – Hiroko Sakai
“How you draw is a reflection of how you feel about the world. You’re not capturing it, you’re interpreting it.” – Juliette Aristides
“I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.” – Vincent van Gogh
“For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh.” – Georges Rouault
“Good painting is like good cooking; it can be tasted, but not explained. ” – Maurice de Vlaminck
“I don’t paint things. I only paint the difference between things.” – Henri Matisse
“It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color – not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.” – Henri Matisse
“Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself.” – John Berger
“My business is to paint what I see, not what I know is there.” – J.M.W. Turner
“Painting something that defies the law of the land is good. Painting something that defies the law of the land and the law of gravity at the same time is ideal.” – Bansky
“Painting is a source of endless pleasure, but also of great anguish.” – Balthus
“Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That’s the thing about painting, photography, cinema. ” – David Lynch
“Every painting is a voyage into a sacred harbour.” – Giotto di Bondone
“Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.” – Gustave Courbet
“Painting something that defies the law of the land is good. Painting something that defies the law of the land and the law of gravity at the same time is ideal.” – Bansky
“Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible. ” – Balthus
“If I paint something, I don’t want to have to explain what it is.” – Bob Ross
“There is no blue without yellow and without orange.” – Vincent van Gogh
“Painting from nature is not copying the object, it’s realising one’s sensations.” – Paul Cézanne
“Painter, paint!” – Salvador Dalí
“I love to look at art, I love to look at paintings, and I almost feel like the experience isn’t complete until I’ve made something of my own.” – Cecily Brown
“Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.” – Edgar Degas
“Sometimes painting is just prayerful movement. And that is enough.” – Carrie Schmitt
“In our life there is a single color, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.” – Marc Chagall
“When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing.” – Jackson Pollock
“If you hear a voice within you saying, ”You are not a painter,” then by all means paint… and that voice will be silenced.” – Vincent van Gogh
“The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.” – Leonardo da Vinci
“A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.” – Elaine de Kooning
“The emotions are sometimes so strong that I work without knowing it. The strokes come like speech.” – Vincent van Gogh
“Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.” – Philip Guston
“Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.” – Orhan Pamuk
“Painting has as much to do with evolving consciousness as training the eye.” – Glenn Haybittle
“Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.” – Pablo Picasso
“A painting is complete when it has the shadows of a god.” – Rembrandt
“Through a painting we can see the whole world.” – Hans Hofmann
“Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.” – David Hockney
“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.” – Pablo Picasso
“Painting is a language of its own. You cannot interpret one form of expression with another form of expression.” – Marcel Duchamp
“Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.” – Claude Monet
“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.” – Oscar Wilde
“I’m never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.” – Claude Monet
“Sketching is almost everything. It is the painter’s identity, his style, his conviction, and then colour is just a gift to the drawing.” – Fernando Botero
“I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.” – Frida Kahlo
“I’m not performing miracles, I’m using up and wasting a lot of paint.” – Claude Monet
“One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil.” – Balthus
“There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.” – Henri Matisse
“Drawing is not what one sees, but what one can make others see.” – Edgar Degas