Painting Quotes

In our time rhythm is more and more accentuated, not only in art, but in mechanized reality and in the whole of life.

Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

Those who live in the next century will see better.

Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.

...lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and...stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to "walk about" into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?

At each stage I reach a balance, a conclusion. At the next sitting, if I find that there is a weakness in the whole, I make my way back into the picture by means of the weakness — I re-enter through the breach — and I reconceive the whole. Thus everything becomes fluid again.

Painting became everything to me…Through it I made articulate all that I saw and felt, all that went on inside the mind that was housed within my useless body like a prisoner in a cell.

Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and the glory of the climb.

I cannot pretend to feel impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

Creativity is a drug I cannot live without.

Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

The most wonderful magic is watching someone doing a drawing in front of your eyes and that’s why drawing and painting on TV is wonderful – it’s always a total mystery, and the training I have had in fine art, I have been able to use that.

I like to slosh on paint to kill the white of the canvas with a bit of turpentine. Then I start with a blur which looks something like the subject and I gradually refine it.

I can't bear the thought of having everything in an exhibition being the same, I hate it when I go into a gallery and the paintings are all identical, with the same subject but from slightly different angles.

A picture paints a thousand words.

It is easier to paint a dragon than a horse.

How many people on this planet are van Goghs? Imagine an abstract painter who's f*cking nuts, who cuts off his ear, who lives with potato eaters when he could live better. Sells one painting his whole life. Imagine finding a nut like him in the Bronx. Wouldn't be hard.