Painting Quotes - Page 39

There are certain times when a painting accelerates beyond you, and you have to try and understand and catch up with it.

If I keep coming back to a painting and there's a little something that bothers me, I know I'm not going to get away with it. I'm going to have to fix it, change it, whatever it is, to something that I'm comfortable with, that doesn't make me itch when I look at it.

I'm the expert when it comes to my paintings. I think all great painters have to have that confidence in what they are seeking and when they're getting there.

It took me a long time to stop thinking that someone else knew what a great painting was. I was never sure.

I'd rather create a miniature painting than a Taj Mahal of a book.

I painted myself out of my painting.

Your painting is a measure of your mind.

I grew up doing some landscaping and painting houses and that kind of thing.

The costumes in museums are often not exhibited well. They look dead. It is much better to look at a painting by Bronzino than to go look at a Renaissance costume.

All paintings are abstract ideas, not representations of a true reality.

By merely increasing or decreasing the amount of contrast in any area we can move the observer through the painting.

Think of the centre of interest in a painting as you would read it in a novel or see it in a movie. The crisis or climax is that point when you simply can't put the book down or wouldn't dare leave the movie, for whatever reason.

I decided I needed something that I could feel as passionate about as acting, and something in which I could completely lose myself. I started painting, and I'm still doing it.

When we begin to lift the veils of censorship and repression in painting, a great deal of energy is unleashed.

You have to act and this is something that happened in abstract expressionism too, it was a discovery particularly in De Kooning's paintings, great paintings. There's a lot of speed in his work and the speed produces things that only speed can produce.

Sometimes you look at a painting and certain parts are so beautiful. You say, "Wow, this is fantastic," but 10 minutes later you most likely have to kill it. Every painting wants to live. You want to build and bring this type of painting to the climax. When it's at the highest point, you want more. And then if you want more, you might destroy it. So you take a chance.

There's a difference between craft and painting. Craft, your job is to make it exactly the same every time. Painting is the opposite, but in painting there is some craftsmanship, which is called technique. But technique is spontaneous. That's the treasure, the most important part. You are in it.

I hope to actually get back to painting someday... soon. I sort of transitioned into cartooning from painting.

The horizon is more than a convention of landscape painting, less than truth.

Dutch painting: daily life is enough.

Everything in painting is about relationship, so I judge each area by its relationship to the surrounding areas.

Sometimes working on one painting will help solve a problem in another painting.

Around 1980, I went back to painting with a vengeance.

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

The vast amount of time it takes to make my paintings is very challenging. I have so many exciting ideas I would love to bring to a final painting, but my time-consuming technique limits the number of ideas that get to become a painting.