Painting Quotes - Page 29

Only my current situation has enabled me to accomplish the expensive task of demonstrating that the preferred sustenance of painting is painting.

I often wonder whether I would have done as well in painting.

I enjoy painting. I don't know if I'm good at it, but I paint. I paint very quickly.

You just pray that something is going to hit you like lightning. Like a movie, a book, or a photograph, a painting, something that you can riff on it and learn more about it and explore it, and just go on a journey with it. So lots of times when I choose a theme, I'll also incorporate other things that I'm doing at that period.

My instinct about painting says, 'if you don't think about it, it's right.' As soon as you have to decide and choose, it's wrong. And the more you decide about, the more wrong it gets.

God, I've frozen my ass off painting snow scenes!

At its edges, a painting makes its surrender to reality. The ways in which it can do so are endlessly revealing, as infinite as the potential forms of painting itself.

The edge in modern painting is charged with neurosis; it meets a world that no longer confirms it but which is hostile or at best indifferent.

Here, reality is not subordinated to painting, indeed painting seems the handmaid of reality, though we feel it tending towards a procedure which, while not at the mercy of appearances, is not yet in conflict with them.

It's more this instinct to get in trouble, and then get myself out of trouble. That's what painting is for me.

There is a kinship between music and painting - with the same words used to describe both, as when a musical composition is said to have color and a painting to have rhythm.

It's a privilege, you know, to paint and it takes up a lot of time and it means there's a lot of things you don't do. But still, with me, painting was more than a profession, it was also an obsession. I had to paint.

Painting dissolves the forms at its command ... it melts them into color.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

I want the people looking at my work to feel a sense of all the possibilities of painting, and, through that, in life as a whole. When that happens, I feel I've accomplished something useful.

Painting is the same kind of problem as unfolding a long, sustained interlocked argument... It is a proposition commanded by a single unity of conception.

Don't put needless expense into painting a head! Don't try to match tints! Rose and pearly colours blend into each other so that no one can unite them if painted separately. Keep the impression of your subject as one thing!

I kept.. ..returning to the (ancient Roman) wall paintings with their veiled melancholy and elegant plasticity.

Just as no great painting has ever been created by a committee, no great vision has ever emerged from the herd.

I don't know if I can convey the postman as I feel him... Unfortunately he cannot pose, and a painting demands an intelligent model.

The value of a work of art cannot ultimately turn on the more or less of its subservience to ideology; for painting can be grandly subservient to the half-truths of the moment, doggedly servile, and yet be no less intense.

The visible is how we orient ourselves. It remains our principal source of information about the world. Painting reminds us of what is absent. What we don't see anymore.

No matter what medium I'm using, or what subject I'm painting, I do retain a fairly set approach to painting.

I was hoping to do an impressionist painting, but I wanted a good likeness and I wanted to create a feeling of the lady as a person, as a human being rather than as a figurehead for the monarchy and a pomp-and-circumstance sort of formal portrait. I wanted more of a relaxed portrait.

Who among us has not gazed thoughtfully and patiently at a painting of Jackson Pollock and thought "What a piece of crap?"