Painting Quotes

My painting does not come from the easel.

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.

The goal is always to make a nice tableau painting with the voice. The more color I can find, the more shadow I can find - the goal is always to make more nuance and colors.

When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing.

One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters.

I felt I was painting with a Popsicle.

I tried painting for a short time and realized that I was not a child prodigy at painting.

I've never made a movie to make money. I've never made a painting to make money.

Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations.

Painting and music were the only things I worked at industriously and faithfully.

I've been painting and drawing and taking pictures as long as I've been writing music - and I've actually been drawing longer than I've been writing music.

My movement from painting to film was a very conscious one.

We have as many planes of speech as does a painting planes of perspective which create perspective in a phrase. The most important word stands out most vividly defined in the very foreground of the sound plane. Less important words create a series of deeper planes.

A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.

I don't know if it was the whole audience getting stoned out of their minds getting ready for the Floyd thing or what it was, but it was like playing to a painting.

I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.

Painting completed my life.

My painting carries with it the message of pain.

I always feel a bit trapped when a painting goes for millions of pounds and only one person can have it. If you can have that as well as a poster on every student's wall, then you're in a very enviable position. I'd like to do a Damien Hirst for £500 at some point.

I'm just a landscape painter. I look out the window and I see what's going on, and I paint it. While I'm painting it, I also write thoughts about what I see going on out there.

Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is like a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle.

Mostly people are ignorant, what is the language of painting. You know, they're ignorant. It is so difficult to make them aware, but time will teach them.

Well, I don't think anyone now would say that they're painting the state of the culture of America. I think that's too grand and pompous a thing for anybody to claim.

The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.

Writing and Painting are the same for me.