PAINTING QUOTES

quotations about painting

Painting quote

Life is a great big canvas, throw all the paint you can on it.

DANNY KAYE

attributed, Say It Right: A Guide to Effective Oral Business Presentations


The best color to paint with is love.

JAROD KINTZ

This Book Is Not For Sale


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

ALEXANDER ELIOT

Sight and Insight

Tags: Alexander Eliot


Painting doesn't mean just describing, it's a state of spirit.

CARYL CHURCHILL

Mad Forest

Tags: Caryl Churchill


If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.

VINCENT VAN GOGH

attributed, The Ultimate Book of Quotations

Tags: Vincent van Gogh


I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.

VINCENT VAN GOGH

attributed, Marry Your Muse: Making a Lasting Commitment to Your Creativity

Tags: Vincent van Gogh


I don't paint what I look at, but what looks at me.

FRANÇOISE GILOT

"Artist Françoise Gilot, on life with and after Picasso", CBS News, August 20, 2017


With hue like that when some great painter dips
His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

The Revolt of Islam

Tags: Percy Bysshe Shelley


The good painter has two principal things to depict: man and the purpose of his mind. The first is easy, the second is difficult, since he must do it by the gestures and movements of the limbs, and this is to be learnt from the dumb, who more than all other men excel in it.

LEONARDO DA VINCI

Thoughts on Art and Life

Tags: Leonardo da Vinci


I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.

FRIDA KAHLO

"Mexican Autobiography", Time Magazine, April 27, 1953


Painting with all its technicalities, difficulties, and peculiar ends, is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.

JOHN RUSKIN

attributed, Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Tags: John Ruskin


Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed; contemplating it, everyone can create a story at the will of his imagination and--with a single glance--have his soul invaded by the most profound recollections; no effort of memory, everything is summed up in one instant. A complete art which sums up all the others and completes them. Like music, it acts on the soul through the intermediary of the senses: harmonious colors correspond to the harmonies of sound. But in painting a unity is obtained which is not possible in music, where the accords follow one another, so that the judgment experiences a continuous fatigue if it wants to reunite the end with the beginning. The ear is actually a sense inferior to the eye. The hearing can only grasp a single sound at a time, whereas the sight takes in everything and simultaneously simplifies it at will.

PAUL GAUGUIN

Notes Synthetiques

Tags: Paul Gauguin


Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.

PABLO PICASSO

attributed, "War and Peace", Jean Cocteau's Journals

Tags: Pablo Picasso


I've been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas, I just think about it.

STEVEN WRIGHT

stand-up routine

Tags: Steven Wright


PAINTING, n. The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

AMBROSE BIERCE

The Devil's Dictionary

Tags: Ambrose Bierce


Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.

PABLO PICASSO

attributed, A Year of Painting: Exercises for Expressive Painting

Tags: Pablo Picasso


I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.

W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

The Painted Veil

Tags: W. Somerset Maugham


Painting is silent poetry.

SIMONIDES OF CEOS

attributed, Plutarch's Essays

Tags: Simonides of Ceos


The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerises some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves.

VINCENT VAN GOGH

letter to Theo van Gogh, October 1884

Tags: Vincent van Gogh


Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

OSCAR WILDE

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Tags: Oscar Wilde