Paintings Quotes

In our own time it has been seen... that simple children, roughly brought up in the wilderness, have begun to draw by themselves, impelled by their own natural genius, instructed solely by the example of these beautiful paintings and sculptures of Nature.

The best way to begin is to say: Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. And now let us have a look at his paintings.

In my earlier paintings, I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active.

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.

All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they're about dead people. Paintings you don't think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I'm looking at something dead.

And I started with this: I have not painted at all my childhood. In fact, I never painted. But I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything.

If I hung one of my paintings next to someone else's, I knew mine would kind of pop off the wall.

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.

Now almost every artist outside of New York is connected with some school or some museum school, and even in New York the majority are. That's an interesting fact when you take the idea of making money, making a living selling paintings. Only a dozen or two painters do that.

If I had money, I would like to get an old building, have music performances, do lithographs, have shows of paintings, and do those things that I'm interested in doing.

I also paint and enjoy acrylic medium; some of my close friends have paintings I did for them.

That's why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness.

You don't need a uniform color: We used a mixture of brick red, browns and grays, and then threw in seashells, branches and various types of rock, so our walls ended up looking like cave paintings!

My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.

Who's going to ask a painter to see a diploma? They'd say, 'Can I see your paintings?', wouldn't they?

I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings.

I am inspired by life, past experiences, what's to come, women around me, art, colors, paintings, and emotions.

Franz Kline, who became known for his black and white paintings, did a whole series of gorgeous landscapes and wonderful portraits that may still hang in Greenwich Village.

I like eating out. I like buying beautiful paintings and being surrounded by beautiful things. I have to finance that life. I can barely afford a pension scheme because I don't make enough money.

All the fingerprint paintings are done without a grid.

I have friends come over and we read plays out loud and I make paintings and I just do things all the time just so I don't ever feel like I'm sitting around.

Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science.

I had always loved expressionist painting, like every European. In fact I admired it all the more because these were precisely the paintings despised by my father's generation.

I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.

'Playboy' made the good life a reality for me and made it the subject matter of my paintings - not affluence and luxury as such, but joie de vivre itself.

People are predominant in my paintings. Although they are not obvious, you can feel their presence.

But I hang on to books. I love them. I even think they're very nice decor in a room - far better than paintings... That's not quite true!

I've just finished my 20th book this past year and I'm working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I'll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I'm an artist too.

The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.

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