Painting Quotes

Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting

Edmund Burke

There is more similarity in the marketing challenge of selling a precious painting by Degas and a frosted mug of root beer than you ever thought possible.

A. Alfred Taubman

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.

Paul Gauguin

History is not a work of philosophy, it is a painting; it is necessary to combine narration with the representation of the subject, that is, it is necessary simultaneously to design and to paint; it is necessary to give to men the language and the sentiments of their times, not to regard the past in the light of our own opinion.

Chateaubriand

It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themselves. And even external nature, with her climates, her tides, and her equinoctial storms, cannot, after Van Goghs stay upon earth, maintain the same gravitation.

Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud

A lot of people think that scuttling around stencilling images onto buildings in the middle of the night is the action of a sad, frustrated individual who can't get attention or recognition any other way. They might be right, but I've done gallery shows and, if you've been hitting on people with all sorts of images in all sorts of places, they're a real step backwards, painting the streets means becoming an actual part of the city. It's not a spectator sport.

Banksy

T.V. has made going to the theatre seem pointless, photography has pretty much killed painting but graffiti has remained gloriously unspoilt by progress.

Banksy

I'd been painting rats for three years before someone said "that's a clever anagram of art" and I had to pretend I'd known that all along.

Banksy

In the evening I study a fair (for his later painting Luna park in Paris, he made in 1900, ed.) if you could see the pomp and luxury of the merry-go-round and the stands and booths. Everything is decorated in Baroque-style, all gold and silver; there are mirrors, fabrics, and electric lightning. By night the whole thing is fantastic and rowdy. First of all I shall make a small picture and some drawings for illustrations.

Giacomo Balla

It is the mysterious that I love in painting. It is the stillness and the silence. I want my pictures to take effect very slowly, to obsess and to haunt.

William Baziotes

I can not evolve any concrete theory about painting.

William Baziotes

As for the subject matter in my painting.. ..it is very often an incidental thing in the background, elusive and unclear, that really stirred me.

William Baziotes

I consider my painting finished when my eyes goes to a particular spot on the canvas. But if I put the picture away about thirty feet on the wall and the movements keep returning to me and the eye seems to be responding to something living, then it is finished.

William Baziotes

I allow myself to be guided by the work which is in the process of being born, I have confidence in it (automatic painting). I do not think about it. The forms arrive pleasant, or strange, hostile, inexplicable, mute, or drowsy. They are born from themselves. It seems to me as if all I do is move my hands.

Jean Arp

A painting or sculpture not modelled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone... (but) it is an incomplete art which privileges the intellect to the detriment of the senses... (art must be like, ed.) fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant or a child in its mothers womb.

Jean Arp