126 Oil Painting Quotes

Following is our list of oil painting quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about abstract painting.

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Famous Oil Painting Quotes

Oil-painting is a developed technique. Why go backwards? — Edvard Munch

Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion. — Vincent Van Gogh

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

Sunlight is painting. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen. — Leonardo da Vinci

Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God. - Rembrandt

Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God. — Rembrandt

For painting, I like strong lines, powerful pieces. — Yusaku Maezawa

I am a simple man and I use simple materials: Ivory Black, Vermilion, Prussian Blue, Yellow Ochre, Flake White and no medium. That’s all I’ve ever used in my paintings. — L. S. Lowry

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

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. - Pablo Picasso

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. — Pablo Picasso

All works, no matter what or by whom painted, are nothing but bagatelles and childish trifles... unless they are made and painted from life, and there can be nothing... better than to follow nature. — Caravaggio

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see. — Philip Guston

Real painters understand with a brush in their hand. — Berthe Morisot

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible. — Balthus

If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting. - Peter Shaffer

If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting. — Peter Shaffer

Short Oil Painting Quotes

  • Painting completed my life. — Frida Kahlo
  • The most interesting painting is one that expresses more of what one thinks than of what one sees — Mark Rothko
  • This isn't a watercolor, it's a mural. — Erich Segal
  • Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks. — Plutarch
  • Painting has to get back to its original goal, examining the inner lives of human beings. — Pierre Bonnard
  • Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is. — Jackson Pollock

Oil Painting Image Quotes

Oil painting quote A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.
A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.

Landscape Painting Quotes

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

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

Oil painting quote The world doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do.
The world doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do.

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

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

Oil painting quote I would like to paint the way a bird signs.
I would like to paint the way a bird signs.

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

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

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

Oil painting quote A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.
A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.

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

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

Oil painting quote I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.
I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

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

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

Figure Painting Quotes

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

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 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

Oil painting quote Think that's what attracted me to painting so much. I could create any kind of world that I wanted.
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.

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

Monet's work would have been even greater if he had not abandoned figure-painting. — Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Oil painting quote I paint flowers so they will not die.
I paint flowers so they will not die.

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

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 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

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 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

Oil painting quote Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony, and music inside m
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

Choose only one master - Nature. - Rembrandt

Choose only one master - Nature. — Rembrandt

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

Oil painting quote Paint what you want.
Paint what you want.

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

Painting is about the beauty of space and the power of containment. — Sam Francis

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

Oil And Water Quotes

We never know the worth of water till the well is dry. — Thomas Fuller

If wrestling can be considered an art form, then [Ric Flair] is using oils, and the many others merely water colors. — Ric Flair

Friendship and money: oil and water. — Mario Puzo

Oil painting quote Attitude is the minds paintbrush. It can color any situation.
Attitude is the minds paintbrush. It can color any situation.

The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume. — Tony Hayward

Avoid men who call you Baby, and women who have no friends, and dogs that scratch at their bellies and refuse to lie down at your feet. Wear dark glasses; bathe with lavender oil and cool fresh water. Seek shelter from the sun at noon. — Alice Hoffman

The ocean will take care of this on its own if it was left alone and left out there. It's natural. It's as natural as the ocean water is. — Rush Limbaugh

Oil painting quote Life is a great big canvas, throw all the paint you can on it.
Life is a great big canvas, throw all the paint you can on it.

Pritkin and Mircea mixed like oil and water, only not so well. — Karen Chance

We have a planet that is at risk, where resources don't have a permanent life. We are going to have to make the decision: are we going to survive or are we waiting for our extinction? One day we will wake up and find people are fighting not for oil but water. — Desmond Tutu

You should respect each other and refrain from disputes; you should not, like water and oil, repel each other, but should, like milk and water, mingle together. — Buddha

Water is our most precious resource, but we waste it, just as we waste other resources, including oil and gas. — David Suzuki

Painting And Art Quotes

Bodybuilding is an art, your body is the canvas, weights are your brush and nutrition is your paint. We all have the ability to turn a self portrait into a masterpiece. — Kai Greene

Speak softly, but carry a big can of paint. — Banksy

You can't sit around and wait for somebody to say who you are. You need to write it and paint it and do it — Faith Ringgold

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't. — Jean-Luc Godard

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't. — JeanLuc Godard

You paint the way you have to in order to give. That's life itself, and someone will look and say it is the product of knowing, but it has nothing to do with knowing, it has to do with giving. — Franz Kline

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language. — Steven Pinker

To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Simplify, slow down, be kind. And don't forget to have art in your life - music, paintings, theater, dance, and sunsets. — Eric Carle

Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface. — Donald Judd

People Writing About Oil Painting

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch
quotes on scream

59 750
Read quotes by Vincent Van Gogh

Vincent Van Gogh
quotes on love, art and nature

410 6735
Read quotes by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
quotes on love

699 7457
Read quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne
quotes on nature, love and family

283 1890
Read quotes by Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci
quotes on art, life and truth

591 7849
Read quotes by Rembrandt

Rembrandt
quotes on love, beauty and art

16 450

More 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

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

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

Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity. — John Berger

I guess a drag queen's like an oil painting: You gotta stand back from it to get the full effect. — Harvey Fierstein

Why not spend that time on art: painting, sculpting, charcoal, pastel, oils? Are words or numbers more important than images? Who decides this? Does algebra move you to tears? Can plural possessives express the feelings in your heart? If you don't learn art now, you will never learn to breathe! — Laurie Halse Anderson

A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpentine, oil and fabric. — Robert Rauschenberg

Never trust an ugly woman. She's got a grudge against the world,' said Grandma who was no oil painting herself. — Richard Peck

It's to paint directly on the canvas without any funny business, as it were, and I use almost pure turpentine to start with, adding oil as I go along until the medium becomes pure oil. I use as little oil as I can possibly help, and that's my method. — Edward Hopper

It's not just a boring exercise in pushing oil paint around a canvas. It's a way of opening a threshold to an exciting new world of vision. — Nelson Shanks

Whether a watercolor is inferior to an oil [painting], or whether a drawing, an etching, or a photograph is not as important as either, is inconsequent. To have to despise something in order to respect something else is a sign of impotence. — Paul Strand

I did some pastels and I did other pieces in which there was just basically one color per square, and then they would get bigger and I could get 2 or 3 colors into the square, and ultimately I just started making oil paintings. — Chuck Close

In classical oil painting, there seemed to be a radical turn to seeing things as the camera sees them, with that technological modification. I began to have a tremendous problem with all of this. — Henry Flynt

The business of peace requires more than showing up with paint brushes, foodstuffs and an oil pipeline or two. — Tony Snow

In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man. — John Berger

O sin, how you paint your face! how you flatter us poor mortals on to death! You never appear to the sinner in your true character; you make fair promises, but you never fulfil one; your tongue is smoother than oil, but the poison of asps is under your lip! — Hosea Ballou

To a nonpainter, oil paint is uninteresting and faintly unpleasant. To a painter, it is the life's blood: a substance so utterly entrancing, infuriating, and ravishingly beautiful that it makes it worthwhile to go back into the studio every morning, year after year, for an entire lifetime. — James Elkins

As the decades go by, a painter's life becomes a life lived with oil paint, a story told in the thicknesses of oil. Any history of painting that does not take that obsession seriously is incomplete. — James Elkins

My father had wanted to be a commercial artist. He got as far as being a photographer in the army in World War II, but he was always a Sunday painter. At a certain point, he gave me his oil paints and I messed around with them, having no idea what I was doing. — David Salle

My nervous system is very much weakened - nothing but painting in oil can keep me going. — Paul Cezanne

Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented — Willem de Kooning

Do you know what the difference is between Friendship and Love? Friendship is the photograph, Love is the oil painting. — Frank Delaney

I was always doing paintings. I actually started painting with oil paints when I was four years old. Not crayons, not pencils and that kid of stuff. I'd paint birds. Anything that moved, stuff like that. — Paul Laffoley

The media ... is like an oil painting. Close up, it looks like nothing on Earth. Stand back and you get the drift. — Bernard Ingham

Used to be, conservatives revered the Average American, that Norman Rockwell oil painting of diner food, humble faith, honest toil, and Capraesque virtue. — James Wolcott

The light is really the most important thing, so if you don't have skylights and if you don't have north light, this is like having a natural skylight. Light is the crucial factor. With wet oil paints, you don't want any hot spots or bounce. — Pierre Coupey

I am planning a one-man art show of original Batman oil paintings that I will show in New York City. — Bob Kane

A story isn't a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It's an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty. — Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

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

When I am recording on my own, it's like an oil painting: I can put that on top of that and build up layers. But with the band, it turned out more watercolor: you're leaving white bits of paper exposed, so that nothing is too overworked. — Conor O'Brien

Fiction is not photography, it's oil painting. — Robertson Davies

Prose is a photography, poetry is a painting in oil-colors. — Austin O'Malley

When I was thirteen or fourteen I bought a paintbox with oil paints from money slowly saved up. The feeling I had at the time - or better - the experience of color coming slowly out of the tube - is with me to this day. — Wassily Kandinsky

The wealthiest places in the world are not gold mines, oil fields, diamond mines or banks. The wealthiest place is the cemetery. There lies companies that were never started, masterpieces that were never painted… In the cemetery there is buried the greatest treasure of untapped potential. There is a treasure within you that must come out. Don’t go to the grave with your treasure still within YOU. — Myles Munroe

I painted with acrylic paint, and the reason why I went to oil was mainly because I didn't control it. I was looking for the insecurity of it. I mean, I might have found another reason later, but at that moment, the reason was I was looking for the insecurity. — Albert Oehlen

all his prayers of the past had been simple concrete requests: God, give me a bicycle, a knife with seven blades, a box of oil paints. Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved. — Truman Capote

I do acrylic paint, oil paint, and caustic. Caustic is melted wax. It really depends on the painting, what vibe I'm looking for. That's really what matters. — Autumn de Forest

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