Painting Quotes

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

We may call painting the grandchild of nature.

If you are representing a white body let it be surrounded by ample space, because as white has no colour of its own, it is tinged and altered in some degree by the colour of the objects surrounding it

Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.

I am living a new and exalted life of late. It steeps me in a sacred rapture to see a portrait develop and take soul under my hand. First, I throw off a study - just a mere study, a few apparently random lines - and to look at it you would hardly ever suspect who it was going to be; even I cannot tell, myself.

Painting isn't a question of sensibility; it's a matter of seizing the power, taking over from nature, not expecting her to supply you with information and good advice.

At one side of the palette there is white, at the other black; and neither is ever used neat.

The first object of the painter is to make a flat plane appear as a body in relief and projecting from that plane

Are we to paint what's on the face, what's inside the face, or what's behind it?

A painting is not thought out in advance. While it is being done, it changes as one’s thoughts change. And when it’s finished, it goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it

A heightened sense of the observation of nature is one of the chief delights that have come to me through trying to paint.

... painting a picture is like fighting a battle; and trying to paint a picture is, I suppose, like trying to fight a battle. It is, if anything, more exciting than fighting it successfully. But the principle is the same.

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

One must act in painting as in life, directly.

Painting is a jeu d'esprit.

Make your faces so that they do not all have the same expression, as one sees with most painters, but give them different expression, according to age, complexion, and good or bad character.

Paintings are but research and experiment. I never do a painting as a work of art. All of them are researches. I search constantly and there is a logical sequence in all this research.

I believe I have had the most trouble with a portrait which I painted in installments - the head on one canvas and the bust on another.

I paint the way someone bites his fingernails; for me, painting is a bad habit because I don't know nor can I do anything else.

I try to paint what I have found and not what I look for. In art, intentions are of little importance.

Painting embraces and contains within itself all the things which nature produces or which results from the fortuitous actions of men... he is but a poor master who makes only a single figure well.

For me painting is a dramatic action in the course of which reality finds itself split apart

Although the poet has as wide a choice of subjects as the painter, his creations fail to afford as much satisfaction to mankind as do paintings... if the poet serves the understanding by way of the ear, the painter does so by the eye, which is the nobler sense.

For those colours which you wish to be beautiful, always first prepare a pure white ground.

Shadows which you see with difficulty, and whose boundaries you cannot define... these you should not represent as finished or sharply defined, for the result would be that your work would seem wooden.

Music cannot be called otherwise than the sister of painting, for she is dependent upon hearing, a sense second to sight, and her harmony is composed of the union of its proportional parts sounded simultaneously, rising and falling in one or more harmonic rhythms.

I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.

Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?

People want Art. And they are given it. But the less Art there is in painting the more painting there is.

Very great charm of shadow and light is to be found in the faces of those who sit in the doors of dark houses. The eye of the spectator sees that part of the face which is in shadow lost in the darkness of the house, and that part of the face which is lit draws its brilliancy from the splendour of the sky. From this intensification of light and shade the face gains greatly in relief and beauty by showing the subtlest shadows in the light part and the subtlest lights in the dark part.

Painting is stronger than me, it makes me do it's bidding.

How painting surpasses all human works by reason of the subtle possibilities which it contains.

One never knows what one is going to do. One starts a painting and then it becomes something quite different.

The merit of painting lies in the exactness of reproduction. Painting is a science and all sciences are based on mathematics. No human inquiry can be a science unless it pursues its path through mathematical exposition and demonstration.

Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language.

Painting is a companion with whom one may walk a great part of life's journey.

Don't get me wrong-painting's all right. But now that we have photography, what's the point?

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

Painting is concerned with the ten things you can see: these are darkness and brightness, substance and color, form and place, remoteness and nearness, movement and rest.

The hand of the painter is incurably mechanical: his technique is incurably artificial... The camera... is so utterly unmechanical.

Men and words are ready made, and you, O Painter, if you do not know how to make your figures move, are like an orator who knows not how to use his words.

Painting is not made to decorate apartments. It's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy. (about Guernica).

Poetry is superior to painting in the presentation of words, and painting is superior to poetry in the presentation of facts. For this reason I judge painting to be superior to poetry.

Only when painting isn't painting can there be an affront to modesty.

Braque always said that the only thing that counts, in painting, is the intention, and it's true. What counts is what one wants to do, and not what one does. That's what's important.

No, painting is not interior decoration. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.

Painting isn't made for the decoration of apartments; it is a weapon to be used offensively and defensively against the enemy.

Perspective is the rein and rudder of painting.

Painting seems to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs. When that has educated the frame to self-possession, to nimbleness,to grace, the steps of the dancing-master are better forgotten; so painting teaches me the splendor of color and the expression of form, and as I see many pictures and higher genius in the art, I see the boundless opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist stands free to choose out of the possible forms.

A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.

Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight; which are: Darkness, Light, Solidity and Colour, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest.

In every photographer there was a painter, a true artist, awaiting expression.

I go for a walk in the forest of Fontainebleau. I get 'green' indigestion. I must get rid of this sensation into a picture. Green rules it. A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions.

While I am working I am not conscious of what I am putting on the canvas.

Painting predicates what man wants to see, and what man ought to see, not what he ordinarily sees.

A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions.

I like all paintings. I always look at the paintings, good or bad, in barbershops, furniture stores, provincial hotels. I'm like a drinker who needs wine. As long as it is wine, it doesn't matter which wine.

If you call painting dumb poetry, the painter may call poetry blind painting.

You can go to the moon or walk under the sea, or anything else you like, but painting remains painting because it eludes such investigation. It remains there like a question. And it alone gives the answer.