PAINTING QUOTES II
quotations about painting
The Painter who seeks popularity in Art closes the door upon his own genius.
WASHINGTON ALLSTON
Lectures on Art and Poems
Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.
ORHAN PAMUK
My Name is Red
If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.
GRANDMA MOSES
My Life's History
The question so often asked of modern painting, "What is it?", contains more than the dull skepticism of the man who is not going to have the wool pulled over his eyes. It speaks of a fundamental placement in relation to the work, that of a voyager in the world coming upon a strange object. The reader reconstitutes the work by his active participation, by approaching the object, tapping it, shaking it, holding it to his ear to hear the roaring within. It is characteristic of the object that it does not declare itself all at once, in a rush of pleasant naïveté.
DONALD BARTHELME
"After Joyce"
The principle of painting is also to make a choice. "Even genius," writes Delacroix, ruminating on his art, "is only the gift of generalizing and choosing." The painter isolates his subject, which is the first way of unifying it. Landscapes flee, vanish from the memory, or destroy one another. That is why the landscape painter or the painter of still life isolates in space and time things that normally change with the light, get lost in an infinite perspective, or disappear under the impact of other values.
ALBERT CAMUS
The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt
Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.
BALTHUS
attributed, Art that Changed the World
My first paintings were of my dreams. They were more real to me than the reality I was living in--I didn't like my reality. I remember waking up, and the memory of my dreams was so strong that I would write them down, and then I would paint them, in just two very particular colors, a deep green and a night blue. Never anything else.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
Walk Through Walls: A Memoir
Once, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm. Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner intended to paint. What he intended to paint was a representation of the storm.
DAVID MARKSON
Wittgenstein's Mistress
I wanted to paint a picture some day that people would stand before and forget that it was made of paint. I wanted it to creep into them like a bar of music and mushroom there like a soft bullet.
O. HENRY
"Masters of Arts", The Complete Works of O. Henry
In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
JOHN BERGER
Ways of Seeing
Painting is something that takes place among the colors ... one has to leave them alone completely, so that they can settle the matter among themselves. Their intercourse: this is the whole of painting. Whoever meddles, arranges, injects his human deliberation, his wit, his advocacy, his intellectual agility in any way, is already disturbing and clouding their activity.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
letter to his wife, October 21, 1907
If a painting of a tree was only the exact representation of the original, so that it looked just like the tree, there would be no reason for making it; we might as well look at the tree itself. But the painting, if it is of the right sort, gives something that neither a photograph nor a view of the tree conveys. It emphasizes something of character, quality, individuality. We are not lost in looking at thorns and defects; we catch a vision of the grandeur and beauty of a king of the forest.
CALVIN COOLIDGE
speech, January 17, 1925
There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.
CHARLES DICKENS
Nicholas Nickleby
Good painters imitated nature while bad ones vomited it.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
"The Glass Graduate", Exemplary Stories
He had always followed his routine, but now he had difficulty painting, even in moments of solitude. He would spend these moments looking at the sky. He had always been distracted and absorbed, but now he became a dreamer. He would think about painting, about his vocation, instead of painting. "I love to paint," he still said to himself, and the hand holding the paintbrush would hang at his side as he listened to a distant radio.
ALBERT CAMUS
Exile and the Kingdom
Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents takes place.
JOHN BERGER
A Fortunate Man
Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.
JOHN BERGER
Keeping a Rendezvous
If it is the love of that which your work represents -- if, being a landscape painter, it is love of hills and trees that moves you -- if, being a figure painter, it is love of human beauty, and human soul that moves you -- if, being a flower or animal painter, it is love, and wonder, and delight in petal and in limb that move you, then the Spirit is upon you, and the earth is yours, and the fullness thereof.
JOHN RUSKIN
attributed, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations
A generation ago it was the fashion to declare that we should not look for any meaning in a picture, we should be content with its "significant form." An artist was praised for painting his mother as if she had been a piece of cheese. But the human mind is strangely recalcitrant to such theories. It persists in taking an interest in the "subject" of a picture.
JAMES LAVER
Models and Muses
It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.
ALBERT CAMUS
attributed, Words of Wisdom: Albert Camus