PAINTING QUOTES III
quotations about painting
If a picture is daubed with many glaring colors, the vulgar eye admires it; whereas he judges very contemptuously of some admirable design sketched out only with a black pencil, though by the hand of Raphael.
ISAAC WATTS
attributed, Day's Collacon
Paint me as I am. If you leave out the scars and wrinkles, I will not pay you a shilling.
OLIVER CROMWELL
remark to the painter Lely, The Social History of Great Britain During the Reigns of the Stuarts
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
Good painters imitated nature while bad ones vomited it.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
"The Glass Graduate", Exemplary Stories
I lacked the knowledge of linear perspective needed to get into the art school, so now I whitewash walls and imagine I'm heaven's landscape painter.
BAUVARD
Some Inspirations for the Overenthusiastic
I visit him a few times downtown
while he paints.
We talk about how he's going to Spain
for the fall semester
and he shows me a painting he did
and points to this one part,
a bridge, and tells me he thought of me
when he painted it.
It is so sad
how knowing something
so small
can make me so happy
SAMANTHA SCHUTZ
I Don't Want to Be Crazy
But who can paint
Like nature? Can Imagination boast,
Amid its gay creation, hues like hers?
JAMES THOMSON
"Spring", The Seasons
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
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
Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.
JACKSON POLLOCK
attributed, Painting After Pollock: Structures of Influence
The first degree of proficiency is, in painting, what grammar is in literature--a general preparation for whatever species of the art the student may afterward choose for his more particular application.
JOSHUA REYNOLDS
A Discourse, delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy on the Distribution of the Prizes, December 11, 1769
The painting is almost the natural man:
For since dishonour traffics with man's nature,
He is but outside; pencill'd figures are
Ev'n such as they give out.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Timon of Athens
A fine work of art -- music, dance, painting, story -- has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.
ROBERT MCKEE
Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting
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
Painting something that defies the law of the land is good. Painting something that defies the law of the land and the law of gravity at the same time is ideal.
BANKSY
Wall and Piece
Painting is by nature a luminous language.
ROBERT DELAUNAY
attributed, Under the Spell of Orpheus: The Persistence of a Myth in Twentieth-century Art
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
Rais'd of themselves, their genuine charms they boast
And those who paint 'em truest praise 'em most.
JOSEPH ADDISON
The Campaign
Painting, when we have allowed for the pleasure of imitation, can only affect simply by the images it presents; and even in painting, a judicious obscurity in some things contributes to the effect of the picture.
EDMUND BURKE
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful
I would rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Johnsonian Miscellanies