Painting Quotes - Page 10

The substance of painting is light.

I knew that I must paint not what I saw, but only what was in me, in my soul.

He best can paint them who shall feel them most.

I would never have taken up painting if women did not have breasts.

It is not about painting life, it is about making painting alive.

One must act in painting as in life, directly.

There are things that music can do that language could never do, that painting could never do, or sculpture. Music is capable of going directly to the source of the mystery. It doesn't have to explain it. It can simply celebrate it.

Only when the habit of one's consciousness to see in paintings bits of nature, madonnas and shameless nudes... has disappeared, shall we see a pure painting composition.

I want the paintings to take me or the viewer out somewhere else.

Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon - it is the very heart of painting.

I find I can't get rid of my trashiness as an artist. A lot of my themes in painting, to the extent that there are intentional themes, are meant to bring that conundrum into high relief.

Chris Ofili's suave, stippled, visually tricked-out paintings of the nineties, with their allover fields of shimmering dots and clumps of dung, are like cave paintings of modern life. They crackle with optical cockiness, love, and massive amounts of painterly mojo.

Keep painting your demons.

A painting is life and a painting is death . . . the picture is our own legacy left by tomorrow's dead for tomorrow's living.

Almost everything, if one keeps one's eyes open, is potential material for painting.

Painting is the art of hollowing a surface.

As far as I was concerned, with the early paintings, I liked them, I thought they were pretty good, but I didn't think it was the end of the world. I also thought of it as a kind of structure, a base to build on. So this proves I can do this and that, and they don't collapse, so then what can I do from here? How can I build on it?

Holding together a kind of tension. When you see a painting that's really good that's what it's doing.

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.

Painting can feign reality without having seen it.

My painting is visible images that conceal nothing... they evoke mystery. Mystery means nothing. It is unknowable.

Look at any inspired painting. It's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation.

My skin is an art gallery right, with paintings and crucifixes hoping to save me from all the dangers in the music business

Painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement.

Painting is the aesthetic side of the object but it has never been original, has never been its own goal.