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. — Pablo Picasso
The painter thinks in terms of form and color. The goal is not to be concerned with the reconstitution of an anecdotal fact, but with constitution of a pictorial fact. — Georges Braque
One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite - that particular peach is but a detail. — Pablo Picasso
Painting... in which the inner and the outer man are inseparable, transcends technique, transcends subject and moves into the realm of the inevitable. — Lee Krasner
A portrait, to be a work of art, neither must nor may resemble the sitter... one must paint its atmosphere. — Umberto Boccioni
Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion. — Vincent Van Gogh
The most interesting painting is one that expresses more of what one thinks than of what one sees — Mark Rothko
I paint a woman's big rounded buttocks so that I want to reach out and stroke the dimpled flesh. — Peter Paul Rubens
Only the human figure exists; landscape is, and should be, no more than an accessory; the painter exclusively of landscape is nothing but a bore. — Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Nature paints not; In oils, but frescoes the great dome of heaven; With sunsets, and the lovely forms of clouds; And flying vapors. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings — George Tooker
Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see. — Philip Guston
A painter is a choreographer of space. — Barnett Newman
For painting, I like strong lines, powerful pieces. — Yusaku Maezawa
Painting is about the beauty of space and the power of containment. — Sam Francis
Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is. — Jackson Pollock
Figure Painting Image Quotes
Optimist is someone who figures that taking a step backward after a step forward is not a disaster, it's more like a cha-cha.
Figure Drawing Quotes
Survive first. Figure out crayon drawing of destiny later. — Rick Riordan
It is not bright colors but good drawing that makes figures beautiful. — Titian
Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same figures to draw different conclusions. — Evan Esar
A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.
To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures. — Flannery O'Connor
If it hasn’t worked yet… That’s okay! Get back to the drawing board and keep trying until you figure it out. — Russell Brunson
You can't teach charisma. You can draw it out of people if it's there and they haven't quite figured out how to utilize it yet, but it's just one of those things, that's why they call it the "X factor". — Stephanie McMahon
The world doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do.
Painting figures is the hardest, certainly the most taxing genre, and you have to be the most on your game. If you have significant drawing problems, the figure will fall apart and it will read wrong emotionally. — Jacob Collins
When you draw a nude, sketch the whole figure and nicely fit the members to it and to each other. Even though you may only finish one portion of the drawing, just make certain that all the parts hang together, so that the study will be useful to you in the future. — Leonardo da Vinci
When sculpting the human figure in stone it is necessary to draw the whole form out of the content of the head. — Rudolf Steiner
The construction of the human figure, its tremendous variety of balance, of size, of rhythm, all those things make the human form much more difficult to get right in a drawing than anything else. — Henry Moore
Figurative Art Quotes
Your looks are laughable, unphotographable, yet you're my favorite work of art. Is your figure less than Greek, is your mouth a little weak? When you open it to speak, are you smart? — Chet Baker
There's no diploma in the world that declares you as an artist—it's not like becoming a doctor. You can declare yourself an artist and then figure out how to be an artist. — Kara Walker
I did study the art of being a barber because I wanted to figure out what my routine would be. Do you start in the front or back? Top or bottom? Swivel the chair or walk around? What I did discover is there's no such thing as the perfect haircut! — Sean Patrick Thomas
Sometimes, you just need a break. In a beautiful place. Alone. To figure everything out.
The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively - because without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. — Frank Zappa
I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either. — Antoni Tapies
It's just a combination of letters I liked. And when your whole art's based on the lettering you choose, you kinda figure out what ones work together. I just liked the shapes of the k, a, w, s. It has no meaning. — KAWS
I would like to paint the way a bird signs.
Figure skating is a mixture of art and sport. — Katarina Witt
When I was in art school, I thought art was something I would learn how to do, and then I would just do it. At a certain point I realized that it wasn't going to work like that. Basically, I would have to start over every day and figure out what art was going to be. — Bruce Nauman
Geometry is the art of correct reasoning from incorrectly drawn figures. — Henri Poincare
With Gnaw I was thinking about traditional sculpture, about carving. I was also interested in figurative sculpture. I put those two ideas together and decided that rather than describing the body, I would use the body, my body, as a tool for making art. — Janine Antoni
Oil Painting Quotes
I tried different techniques during my career, but I especially fell in love with painting with oil and pallette-knife. Every artwork is the result of long painting process; every canvas is born during the creative search; every painting is full of my inner world. — Leonid Afremov
Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns. — Kurt Vonnegut
Whenever anyone grows tired of the secondhand sort of existence that depends on purchased products, and wants to resume the intimate relationship with nature that man once enjoyed, the kukui-nut stands ready to furnish him with food, flavor, tannin, oil, paint, varnish, medicine, and magic. — Euell Gibbons
If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting. — Peter Shaffer
I wish you would recollect that Painting and Punctuality mix like Oil and Vinegar, and that Genius and regularity are utter Enemies and must be to the end of time. — Thomas Gainsborough
Oil-painting is a developed technique. Why go backwards? — Edvard Munch
I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.
To an artist, a picture is both a sum of ideas and a blurry memory of 'pushing paint,' breathing fumes, dripping oils and wiping brushes, smearing and diluting and mixing. — James Elkins
When I adjust materials of different kinds to one another, I have taken a step in advance of mere oil painting, for in addition to playing off color against color, line against line, form against form, etc., I play off material against material, for example, wood against sackcloth. — Kurt Schwitters
Paint is something that I use with my hands and do all those tactile things. I really don't like oil because you can't get back into it, or you make a mess. It's not my favourite thing - pencil is more my medium than wet paint. — Cy Twombly
Remember crime against property is not real crime. People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access. — Banksy
Abstract Painting Quotes
Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was. — Jackson Pollock
Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential. — Wassily Kandinsky
Abstract is not a style. I simply want to make a surface work. This is just a use of space and form: it's an ambivalence of forms and space. — Joan Mitchell
A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.
I want people to know what it is they're looking at. But at the same time, the closer they get to the painting, it's like going back into childhood. And it's like an abstract piece.. it becomes the landscape of the brush marks rather than just sort of an intellectual landscape. — Jenny Saville
I was a student at Harvard, and that's where I learned about so-called avant-garde music. Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism and painting were well known at this time. — Henry Flynt
The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating. — Jackson Pollock
Say YES and you'll figure it out afterwards.
Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion. — Alexander Calder
Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. — Jackson Pollock
I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall. — Frank Stella
We speak of concrete and not abstract painting because nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a color, a surface. — Theo van Doesburg
Landscape Painting Quotes
Franz Kline, who became known for his black and white paintings, did a whole series of gorgeous landscapes and wonderful portraits that may still hang in Greenwich Village. — David Amram
Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel. — Robert Hughes
REALISM, n. The art of depicting nature as it is seem by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring-worm. — Ambrose Bierce
Think that's what attracted me to painting so much. I could create any kind of world that I wanted. Nothing hurts here, no pain, nobody's unhappy, it's a pleasant place. Everything's nice here.
All gardening is landscape painting. — William Kent
The vivacity and brightness of colors in a landscape will never bear any comparison with a landscape in nature when it is illumined by the sun, unless the painting is placed in such a position that it will receive the same light from the sun as does the landscape. — Leonardo da Vinci
I find the Romantic period extraordinarily interesting. My landscapes have connections with Romanticism: at times I feel a real desire for, an attraction to, this period, and some of my pictures are a homage to Caspar David Friedrich. — Gerhard Richter
I paint flowers so they will not die.
Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments? — John Constable
I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography—that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms. — Joel Meyerowitz
Overall, the anarchy was the most creative of all periods of Japanese culture for in it there appeared the greatest landscape painting, the culmination of the skill of landscape gardening and the arts of flower arrangement, and the No drama. — J. M. Roberts
A painted landscape is always more beautiful than a real one, because there's more there. Everything is more sensual, and one takes refuge in its beauty. — Fernando Botero
Beautiful Paintings Quotes
Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty. — John Ruskin
I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy as long as I can paint. — Frida Kahlo
I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty. — Georgia O'Keeffe
Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony, and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven toward these things with an irresistible momentum.
Describing beauty is almost impossible because we perceive it, rather than describe it. If you look at a Rembrandt painting and start to try and describe what the beauty is you see, your words sound absolutely pathetic. — John Lennox
No matter your wreckage. There will be someone to find you beautiful, despite the cruddy metal. Your ruin is not to be hidden behind paint and canvas. Let them see the cracks. Someone will come to sing into these empty spaces. — Sarah Kay
I once taught art to adults in a night course. I had a woman who painted her back yard, and she said it was the first time she had ever really looked at it. I think everyone sees beauty. Art is a way to respond — Agnes Martin
Like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler's Equation reaches down into the very depths of existence. — Keith Devlin
At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. — Toni Morrison
Three things are needed for success in painting and sculpture: to see beauty when young and accustom oneself to it, to work hard, and to obtain good advice. — Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Things base and vile, holding no quantity, Love can transpose to form and dignity. Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind. Nor hath Love's mind of any judgment taste; Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste. — William Shakespeare
I paint the way I do because I can keep on putting more and more things in - like drama, pain, anger, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas of space. It doesn't matter if it differs from mine, as long as it comes from the painting, which has its own integrity and intensity. — Willem de Kooning
Painting has always been a means of self-expression for me. Therefore, I paint because I have to and need to, not necessarily because I want to. Subconsciously or not, the figures I paint are a reflection of myself and whatever mood I am in at the time, so every painting is in essence a self-portrait. — Lori Earley
I'm not interested in 'abstracting' or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it - drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea. — Willem de Kooning
Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience. — Chuck Close
No painting can exist without the tension of what it figures and what it concretely consists of. The pleasure of what it could mean and the pain of what it's not. — Sayings
I wondered if I would appear on a temple wall painting someday. A blonde Egyptian girl with purple highlights running sideways through the palm trees, screaming "Yikes!" in hieroglyphics as Neith chased after me. The thought of some poor archaeologist trying to figure that out almost lifted my spirits. — Rick Riordan
Monet's work would have been even greater if he had not abandoned figure-painting. — Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
You may name a bronze statue 'Liberty,' or a painted figure in a city hall 'Commerce,' or a marble form in a temple 'Athene' or 'Venus;' but what is really there is only a representation of a single woman. — George Edward Woodberry
Neither is there figurative and non-figurative art. All things appear to us in the shape of forms. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by forms. Well then, think how absurd it would be to think of painting without the imagery of forms. A figure, an object, a circle, are forms; they affect us more or less intensely. — Pablo Picasso
When I go to an art gallery and stand in front of a painting, I don't want someone telling me what I should be seeing or thinking; I want to feel whatever I feel, see whatever I see, and figure out what I figure out. — James Frey
What interests me is all the stuff that goes into abstract and abstract-figurative art. Not the styles, but the stuff that, in various combinations, make the styles: mixing and matching painting methods and ideas. — Ed Askew
A TV show where all of the characters are trying to figure out what's going on, and the suspense of that, fits my [voice] really well. You feel their frustration, anger and fear, and then, when the reveal happens, their sense of dread or horror, or whatever it is, and I like to paint with those colors. — M. Night Shyamalan
They asked me to do a show, and I was planning on showing my figure paintings. But my friends told me I shouldn't - the paintings were good but a little old-fashioned. They said, "Why don't you show the other stuff?" I had also been making rather strange objects, more in the Freudian tradition. — Claes Oldenburg
Just a rock, a dome of snow, the deep blue sky, and a hunk of orange-painted metal from which a shredded American flag cracked in the wind. Nothing more. Except two tiny figures walking together those last few feet to the top of the Earth. — Tom Hornbein
In painting, the most brilliant colors, spread at random and without design, will give far less pleasure than the simplest outline of a figure. — Aristotle
I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge. — Jackson Pollock
Whether it's films or painting or music or writing a book, the greatest experience is being able to express yourself and what you've gone through, trying to figure out a way to make it into something that's artistic that people can connect with. — Rob Reiner
For me, at some point, the idea of struggling through the process was not as interesting as doing tests and executing the painting after I figured out all of its elements and how they were going to work together. — Laura Owens
From the mingled strength of shade and light A new creation rises to my sight, Such heav'nly figures from his pencil flow, So warm with light his blended colors glow. . . . . The glowing portraits, fresh from life, that bring Home to our hearts the truth from which they spring. — Lord Byron
I think there is a total equality for me between painting a literary figure or Kate Moss or my Mum or a dog or a bird. To me, they are all absolutely equal. — Stella Vine
The problem with Matisse is that I can't ever figure out when he's done a good painting or a bad painting because I don't know how to analyse him. I just know that I like the way he put it on and I like his airs and forms. — Susan Rothenberg
I don't make a lot of distinctions between things like landscape or figure painting, because to me the problems are inherently the same - lighting, color, structure, and so on - certainly traditional and ordinary problems. — Wayne Thiebaud
My app is the same juicy paint used by Vincent Van Gogh; my screen is the woven canvas of Titian. Painting by hand, I've come to figure, is a certain kind of love. — Robert Genn
Pseudo-critics prefer to direct their remarks to the artist - Heaven forgive them - but one due rather to a common impression that such an attitude is the correct one, that all paintings should be figuratively mutilated, and that all artists are fair game, or really grateful perhaps for a few tips. — Walter J. Phillips
Everything in nature is formed upon the sphere, the cone and the cylinder. One must learn to paint these simple figures and then one can do all that he may wish. — Paul Cezanne
In figure painting, the type of all painting, I have endeavoured to set forth that the principal if not sole source of life enchantments are Tactile Values, Movement and Space Composition. — Bernard Berenson
Well, something must be done for May, The time is drawing nigh-- To figure in the Catalogue, And woo the public eye. Something I must invent and paint; But oh my wit is not Like one of those kind substantives That answer Who and What? — Thomas Hood
We amuse ourselves painting our prison-walls with bright figures and brilliant landscapes. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
My work is a fusion of personal experiences and influences - moody atmospheres, victorian-inspired couture, and timeless elements all laced with clandestine symbolism. The figures I paint exist in their own esoteric realm and time, and each painting offers a glimpse into their anomalous world. — Lori Earley
To Buddha, the second figure in the painting, life on earth was bitter, filled with attachments and desires that led to suffering. — Benjamin Hoff
Expression for me does not reside in passions glowing in a human face or manifested by violent movement. The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive; the place occupied by my figures, the empty space around them, the proportions, everything has its share. — Henri Matisse
Daumier paints with an enormous capacity for absolute empathy; a complete identification of himself with the figures he paints. He sets forth what it feels like to do something; not what somebody looks like doing it. — David Sylvester
I love movies, don't get me wrong. But I don't go to the cinema. I see movies at the end of the year as a glut from the Academy. I binge-watch all the nominated films. Painting fills that void now. It's oils. It's acrylics. It's figurative, portraits and landscape. — Pierce Brosnan
I want to give my compliments to Australia. Ever since your government paid a few million dollars for a Jackson Pollack painting, I figure that it must be a marvellous country. — Morton Feldman
There is nothing that special to see when looking at me. I'm a painter who paints day in day out, from morning till evening - figure pictures and landscapes, more rarely portraits. — Gustav Klimt
I think I'm just generally more interested in figuration than abstraction. I think that painting abstraction often feels like painting colors to me, whereas portraits always feel like something connected. I like the exchange, the collaborative aspect of sitter and subject for sure. — Hilton Als
There's something immediate about the experience of reading a poem. It makes sense in my own mind, but I'm trying to figure out a way to articulate it... It's like looking at a painting: you're able to take in the totality of the work all at once, and so processing whatever information that painting is giving you is almost secondary to simply apprehending what's in front of you. — Kevin Powers
It's been so much a part of my life the thinking that I go through is crucial. I found that if I don't paint for around a week, I get practically suicidal. It took a long time to figure out why I had these mood swings, and I finally figured out it's because I haven't painted. — Damian Loeb
We're making so many images today and it's unbelievable. I shoot stuff all the time. I try to figure a lot out before I paint. I do a tremendous amount of shooting. — Damian Loeb
Every single painting is different. I'm always trying to figure out what I'm interested in. Usually when I go through and I make the collages or the images for ideas that I want to paint, it's like an Ouija board. Each painting I do is trying to understand what the hell I'm looking at, or want to look at. — Damian Loeb
In fact, I believe to a certain extent a person today who starts with just clay, with no drawing and no painting and no figure drawing, still-life drawing, various things, they miss a great deal. — Warren MacKenzie
I still make paintings and use the figure; it's hard to do and hard to succeed. On some levels, because I am working with black figures and black pigment, it's even harder because I have to be more responsible for the image. I try to be really careful about the presence the figure projects. — Kerry James Marshall
In Conclusion
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