Painting Quotes - Page 9

Paintings are not like the Internet. They're not like movies. They're not electronic-friendly. You have to go see them. You have to stand in front of them. That's the great thing about them.

Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.

I begin painting and as I paint the picture begins to assert itself, or suggest itself, under my brush. The form becomes a sign for a woman or a bird as I work... The first stage is free, unconscious... the second stage is carefully calculated.

I work on all parts of my painting at once, improving it very gently until I find that the effect is complete.

The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.

When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing.

I have always been concerned with painting that simultaneously insists on a flat surface and then denies it.

Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things. It is a completely physical language, the words of which consist of all visible objects. An object which is abstract, not visible, non-existent, is not within the realm of painting.

If I hadn't started painting, I would have raised chickens.

Learn to trust yourself. That's very vital. ... Just stand with yourself. Remember, in his lifetime, Van Gogh sold only two paintings. I personally sold even fewer.

I think of [my photographs] as found paintings because I don't crop them, I don't manipulate them or anything. So they're like found objects to me.

Painting is so much more than the materials.

When something is finished, that means it's dead, doesn't it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting - I just stop working on it for a while.

Art is nothing tangible. We cannot call a painting 'art' as the words 'artifact' and 'artificial' imply. The thing made is a work of art made by art, but not itself art. The art remains in the artist and is the knowledge by which things are made.

Painting is more important than art.

The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.

I almost never start with an image. I start with a painting idea, an impulse, usually derived from my own world.

My paintings are not meant to be tasted.

The reason for my painting large canvases is that I want to be intimate and human.

I was interested in ideas, not merely visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind.

That's what all painting is about, it”s space and light occupied by human presences.

I've reached a point in my life where my Truman Show boat has hit the painting.

I remember being handed a score composed by Mozart at the age of eleven. What could I say? I felt like de Kooning, who was asked to comment on a certain abstract painting, and answered in the negative. He was then told it was the work of a celebrated monkey. 'That's different. For a monkey, it's terrific'.

My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impression of nature.

The Prelude to Tristan and Isolde reminds me of the old Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel.