Painting Quotes

A painting is like a man. If you can live without it, then there isn't much point in having it.

Very quickly a painting is turned into a facsimile of itself when one becomes so familiar with with it that one recognizes it without looking at it.

I stopped painting in 1990 at the peak of my success just to deny people my beautiful paintings, and I did it out of spite.

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.

You don't need a framework. You need a painting, not a frame.

There's this inherent screenplay structure that everyone seems to be stuck on, this three-act thing. It doesn't really interest me. To me, it's kind of like saying, 'Well, when you do a painting, you always need to have sky here, the person here and the ground here.' Well, you don't.

And I think a painting has such a limited life anyway.

I felt the need to get back to painting and I thought the best way was to start drawing, so I enrolled in a life drawing class. I soon discovered that people made very interesting subjects and I am still surprised that I had never discovered it before.

People were very affected by the war. But it didn't mean you stopped painting unless you were called into the Army; then you just couldn't paint. But otherwise one continued.

Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.

Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that.

For example, in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents - as an element - the greatest difficulty in manipulation.

It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it.

In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?

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.

It was a huge challenge to learn digital painting well enough so that computers don't pop into mind when one sees one.

But I was in awe of the painters; I mean I was new in New York, and I thought the painting that was going on here was just unbelievable.

Lovers of painting and lovers of music are people who openly display their preference like a delectable ailment that isolates them and makes them proud.

Painting self-portraits without clothes on has also given me some publicity.

I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness.

Around 1980, I went back to painting with a vengeance.

You can't work in the movies. Movies are all about lighting. Very few filmmakers will concentrate on the story. You get very little rehearsal time, so anything you do onscreen is a kind of speed painting.

I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.

I didn't know what to expect from a famous movie star; maybe that he'd be sort of stuck-up, you know. But not Gary Cooper. He horsed around so much... that I had a hard time painting him.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness.

You cannot possibly invent painting all by yourself.

I always feel attacked when I'm asked about my painting.

On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.

The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.