Canvas Quotes - Page 6

Life is a big ol' canvas. And you have every combination of colors to paint with.

It was told in the Bible. A man fell. He bit into knowledge and fell... How do you fall without falling completely? What do you bring as knowledge to a blank canvas? How do you begin?

There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not “decorate” it; she infused it.

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.

Each painting seems to have a very specific size it wants to be. I have even started a painting or two over just because I didn't like the feeling of the particular image at a particular size. The Parlor needed to be large because I wanted it to feel like a full-size room you could step into. Unfortunately for me, I paint the same way on an eight-foot canvas as I do on a five-inch miniature. I still use very tiny brushes and noodle every square inch. It took me nearly a year to paint The Parlor.

I think that writers have natural canvases, and my canvas, even in short stories, often seems to be the scope of a life.

You're not directing an actor toward a thing they can't achieve. Because direction is elusive. When directors hold respect for the various craftsmen and -women who are telling the story, it's the greatest result. I think people do their bravest work when given an elusive canvas.

Creative innovation requires knowing something. You can't just be a monkey throwing paint on a canvas. It's the 10,000-hour rule: You need to know something well enough to make something new.

I really enjoy squeezing out a big lump of paint directly onto the canvas and leaving it; fresh, immediate and sometimes shocking.

He made his colours, built his stretchers, plastered his canvas, painted his pictures, carpentered his frames, and painted them. 'Too bad I can't buy my own pictures,' he murmured aloud. 'Then I'd be completely self-sufficient.'

... a canvas that I have covered is worth more than a blank canvas. My pretensions go no further; that is my right to paint, my reason for painting.

I would say for everyday I build buildings or houses like a bricklayer with canvas and paint.

I feel that I am much freer if I'm on my own, but I'm sure that there are a lot of painters who would perhaps be even more inventive if they had people round them... I find that if I am on my own I can allow the paint to dictate to me. So the images that I'm putting down on the canvas dictate the thing to me and it gradually builds up and comes along.

Painting is the pattern of one's own nervous system being projected on canvas.

The Republicans initially sort of saw George W. Bush as a blank canvas, didn't they? It seems like they interviewed him when he was governor of Texas to see what kind of candidate he could be.

We're trying to do what Miles Davis would have wanted us to do, which is approach it as artists with his life as the canvas.

You have the clean canvas of a whole week before you. Paint well.

Being a broadcaster, man, you just sort of paint from a blank canvas, in a way.

The bigger the canvas, the better I do. I'm not so good at understated, kitchen-sink kinds of parts.

Every canvas that can awaken us more exquisitely and accurately to the infinite and various surface of our experience does that much to sharpen life, and thereby render it more alive.

What I did for my last act as a painter, if you call me a painter, was to photograph the weave of the canvas, and enlarge it and enlarge it until it became like a landscape.