Painting Quotes

A painting is music you can see and music is a painting you can hear.

For me there is no gap between my painting and my so-called 'decorative' work. I never considered the 'minor arts' to be artistically frustrating; on the contrary, it was an extension of my art.

The most interesting painting is one that expresses more of what one thinks than of what one sees

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

The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.

You bring to a painting your own experience.

The act of painting is about one heart telling another heart where he found salvation.

Destroying a tropical rainforest for profit is like burning all the paintings of the Louvre to cook dinner.

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.

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.

Critic asks: 'And what, sir, is the subject matter of that painting?' - 'The subject matter, my dear good fellow, is the light.

It took me twenty years to discover painting: twenty years looking at nature, and above all, going to the Louvre.

My work is about your seeing. There is a rich tradition in painting of work about light, but it is not light -- it is the record of seeing. My material is light, and it is responsive to your seeing.

Painting is no problem. The problem is what to do when you're not painting.

I would advise young artists to paint as they can, as long as they can, without being afraid of painting badly.

More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed.

Dwight is a sad clown. You've seen those paintings of sad clown.

I am good at only two things, and those are gardening and painting.

Someday my paintings will be hanging in the Louvre. [Vincent Van Gogh]

The painter should paint not only what he has in front of him, but also what he sees inside himself. If he sees nothing within, then he should stop painting what is in front of him.

I am painting with the same enthusiasm as a Marseillaise eats bouillabaisse ... I am painting big sunflowers.

If commercialization is putting my art on a shirt so that a kid who can't afford a $30,000 painting can buy one, then I'm all for it.

When you start a painting, it is somewhat outside you. At the conclusion, you seem to move inside the painting.

Painting has been a smiling mistress to many, but she has been a cruel jilt to me; I did not abandon her, she abandoned me.

If I had been around when Rubens was painting, I would have been revered as a fabulous model. Kate Moss? Well, she would have been the paintbrush.