Painting Quotes

Style in painting is the same as in writing a power over materials, whether words or colours, by which conceptions or sentiments are conveyed.

Sir Joshua Reynolds

Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a pene- trating statement, which can be described in a very simple term - selectivity.

Berenice Abbott

Before I start painting I have a slightly ambiguous feeling: happiness is a special excitement because unhappiness is always possible a moment later. That’s like life: it is so precious because death is always beckoning.

Francis Bacon

Color harmony is just one type of relationship found in a painting. It comes from the nuances of the light, like the atmosphere connecting everything in the subject.

Aleksander Titovets

A painting is a symbol for the universe. Inside it, each piece relates to the other. Each piece is only answerable to the rest of that little world. So, probably in the total universe, there is that kind of total harmony, but we get only little tastes of it.

Corita Kent

If I had been around when Rubens was painting, I would have been revered as a fabulous model. Kate Moss? Well, she would have been the paintbrush.

Dawn French

The explanation of the propensity of the English people to portrait painting is to be found in their relish for a Fact. Let a man do the grandest things, fight the greatest battles, or be distinguished by the most brilliant personal heroism, yet the English people would prefer his portrait to a painting of the great deed. The likeness they can judge of; his existence is a Fact. But the truth of the picture of his deeds they cannot judge of, for they have no imagination.

Benjamin Haydon

Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not a landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments?

John Constable

Atheists don't hate fairies, leprechauns, or unicorns because they don't exist. It is impossible to hate something that doesn't exist. Atheists like the painting experts hated the painter hate God because He does exist.

Ray Comfort

Painting, in fact, is nothing else much than a tree, a man, or any other object, reflected in the water. The distinction between sculpture and painting, is as great as between the shadow and the substance.

Benvenuto Cellini

I have had no formal training in painting: I gave up Art A level because I was sick of drawing peppers.

Derren Victor Brown

Under his (Marc Chagall, ed.) sole impulse metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting.

Andr Breton

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it.

Jean-Luc Godard

Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all.

Stanley Horowitz

Laying out grounds may be considered a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting

William Wordsworth