Painting Quotes - Page 19

In the end, the gesture of painting becomes almost meditative, like a ritual.

Read in order to write, but paint in order to paint.

Painting is very interesting.

Picasso's always been such a huge influence that I thought when I started the cartoon paintings that I was getting away from Picasso, and even my cartoons of Picasso were done almost to rid myself of his influence.

I always have a good reason for taking something out but I never have one for putting something in. And I don't want to, because that means that the picture is being painted predigested.

My problem painting from my life was I found that you can't paint dirt without romanticising it.

Every great painting is left incomplete at the point where its completion is obvious.

There are times when I have started a work with an end in mind, but then, for one reason or another, as my picture unfolded, it emphatically suggested another direction... I always accept the risk and go for it. I'm convinced that at such times my painting is wiser than I am.

I want painting to be difficult to do.

There is a larger frame to the painting than the one that bounds our life's events.

Painting transports me into another dimension which, quite literally, refreshes parts of the soul which other activities can't reach.

I've known painters who never did any good work because instead of painting their models they seduced them.

What is seen and called the picture is what remains - an evidence. Even as one travels in painting toward a state of 'unfreedom' where only certain things can happen, unaccountably the unknown and free must appear.

So when I'm playing, I'm sort of painting a feeling in the air.

Picasso didn't stop painting when he was 41 years old because he felt he wasn't relevant, but he kept going and the painting he made before he died are now worth 40 million dollars.

Polyphonic painting is superior to music in that there, the time element becomes a spatial element. The notion of simultaneity stands out even more richly.

But I owe something to Vincent, and that is, in the consciousness of having been useful to him, the confirmation of my own original ideas about painting. And also, at difficult moments, the remembrance that one finds others unhappier than oneself.

In painting one must search rather for suggestion than for description, as is done in music.

We didn't want to sign the painting itself, that would have interfered with the composition. And even later, for that reason or for another, I sometimes marked my canvases on the back. If you don't see my signature and the date, madam, it's because the frame is hiding it.

Color in painting lures the eyes as verses do in poetry.

Painting and illustration cannot be mixed—one cannot merge from one into the other.

Soul is as necessary in a painting as body.

If you start painting yourself into a corner, life starts shutting down. There is always hopefully a next.

Poetry is superior to painting in the presentation of words, and painting is superior to poetry in the presentation of facts. For this reason I judge painting to be superior to poetry.

Whenever I buy a painting, someone invariably says, "Oh, what a great investment." And I hate that reaction. To me, it's a matter of love and not an exchange of equity.