Paintings Quotes

1. "Typically, images or paintings are designated as anamorphic when, in order for the image to appear, a particular line of sight must be adopted. The image only shows up when approached from the angle dictated to the viewer by the image's own set of conditions. In this sense, the viewer must 're-form' their perspective to match the perspective demanded by the image. We are not free to approach the image as we wish; the image is free to assign us a perspective proper to itself... Anamorphosis, then, describes the freedom of the phenomenon to give itself as it wishes and it measures the extent to which this freedom turns the tables on the one to whom it appears. To receive a phenomenon as it wishes to give itself is to yield control and suspend our own timetables and preconditions in order to be faithful to the conditions set by what gives itself."
Author: Adam Miller

2. "My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind."
Author: Agnes Martin

3. "As animals have no idea of the holy or the devil, they have no idea of the beautiful. The opinion held by some scientists that apes could paint, based on the 'paintings' apes had done, proved to be quite wrong. It has been confirmed that apes only imitate man. So- called 'ape art' surely does not exist. On the contrary, the cave men from Cromagnon onward knew how to paint and care. Their drawings have been found in caves of the Sahara, in Spain at Altamira, in Franc at Lascaux, and recently in Poland at Mashicka. Many of these pictures are thought to be more than 30,000 years old. Some time ago, a group of Soviet archeologists discovered a set of musical instruments, made 20,000 years ago, near the town of Chernigov in the Ukraine."
Author: Alija Izetbegovic

4. "Who cares? Kingdoms rise and fall. Just don't burn the paintings in the Louvre, that's all."
Author: Anne Rice

5. "This is why a tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.No, van Gogh was not mad, but his paintings were bursts of Greek fire, atomic bombs, whose angle of vision would have been capable of seriously upsetting the spectral conformity of thebourgeoisie.In comparison with the lucidity of van Gogh, psychiatry is no better than a den of apes who are themselves obsessed and persecuted and who possess nothing to mitigate the most appalling states of anguish and human suffocation but a ridiculous terminology. To a man, this whole gang of pected scoundrels and patented quacks are all erotomaniacs."
Author: Antonin Artaud

6. "I'm passionately involved in life: I love its change, its color, its movement. To be alive, to be able to see, to walk, to have houses, music, paintings - it's all a miracle."
Author: Arthur Rubinstein

7. "I think that the mythology of Van Gogh's life, and the beauty of his paintings, is unstoppable."
Author: Billy Childish

8. "The paintings are transferred from my computer to a disk, and I can hand it to the printer this way; or I can modem the painting to the printer over the phone lines from my house in Hawaii."
Author: Buffy Sainte Marie

9. "Artists often collect. Sometimes compulsively. They hang on to things. They don't want to let go. Like paintings. I don't want to part with them. Some I won't sell at any price. I don't even let people see ‘em. - We don't like change, and we're possesive. Maybe that's why we do it. We want to hang on to things, hang on to the one time. We don't want to let it go; we want to capture it and keep it forever. Or one person. How she was then. At that moment. That's what I want - to stop time, to have that power."
Author: Celia Rees

10. "When I left the Royal College, I decided I would only make paintings that I would want to look at myself, that felt close to my life."
Author: Chris Ofili

11. "All the fingerprint paintings are done without a grid."
Author: Chuck Close

12. "Towles burn. Bathroom inferno! Chanel No. 5, it burns. Oil paintings of racehorses and dead pheasants burn. The reproduction Oriental carpets burn. Evie's bad dried flower arrangements, they're these little tabletop infernos. Too cute! Evie's Katty Kathy doll, it melts, then it burns. Evie's collection of big carnival stuffed animals—Cootie, Poochie, Pam-Pam, Mr. Bunnits, Choochie, Poo Poo and Ringer—it's fun-fur holocaust. Too sweet. Too precious."
Author: Chuck Palahniuk

13. "One newspaper even published one of my nude paintings - the one of me naked from the waste up."
Author: Cleo Moore

14. "That's why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness."
Author: Corita Kent

15. "Shape and color are my two strong things. And by doing this, drawing plants has always led me into my paintings and my sculptures."
Author: Ellsworth Kelly

16. "My reading and studying and retellings of old stories didn't do anything except help me think better. I was at least thoughtful. Too thoughtful, my friends said. And all I thought about was myths and old paintings that made me feel drunk on wine or struck my lightning but didn't matter to most people."
Author: Francesca Lia Block

17. "I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart."
Author: Georgia O'Keeffe

18. "Wingate sighs thoughtfully. "Hard to say. He's not static. He began with almost pure Impressionism, which is dead. Anyone can do it. But the vision was there. Between the fifth and twelfth paintings, he began to evolve something much more fascinating. Are you familiar with the Nabis?"The what?"Nabis. It means 'prophets.' Bonnard, Denis, Vuillard?"What I know about art wouldn't fill a postcard."Don't blame yourself. That's the American educational system. They simply don't teach it. Not unless you beg for it. Not even in university."
Author: Greg Iles

19. "Someday my paintings will be hanging in the Louvre.[Vincent Van Gogh]"
Author: Irving Stone

20. "I had some money, I made the best paintings ever. I was completely reclusive, worked a lot, took a lot of drugs. I was awful to people."
Author: Jean Michel Basquiat

21. "She pondered the arrangements of the paintings on a wall like a writer pondered commas."
Author: Jonathan Franzen

22. "My paintings and comedy have a lot in common. They are both improvisations based on observation."
Author: Jonathan Winters

23. "If I hung one of my paintings next to someone else's, I knew mine would kind of pop off the wall."
Author: Julian Schnabel

24. "There's been too much attention on marketing. Can't we just talk about the paintings?"
Author: Julian Schnabel

25. "My early paintings weren't that good - I was very influenced by Francis Bacon. But there was a kind of intensity there. And however influenced they may have been by other people, even my earliest paintings were recognisably my own."
Author: Julian Schnabel

26. "Oh, but fine isn't everything!' Rachel exclaims and grabs her hands and pulls her into a stepping foxtrot over the paintings, twirling her round. 'Fine is the very definition of mediocrity. It's what's polite. It's what's socially acceptable. We need to live brighter and deeper than just fine, my darling!"
Author: Lauren Beukes

27. "The Puritans removed organs and paintings from churches, but bought them for private use in their homes."
Author: Leland Ryken

28. "Painters of paintings, writers of books, never could tell the half."
Author: Lorenz Hart

29. "Working on 'Raising Hope' is a very hurry-up-and-wait activity, and I just always liked the idea of being as productive as I can be. I write because I don't just want that time to dissolve, where I'm sitting in a trailer staring blankly at the paintings of moccasins that came with the trailer."
Author: Lucas Neff

30. "There was the honour and austerity of money as he walked through art galleries, as he saw around him the collections of oil paintings by dead men, lit so carefully that warmth seemed to emanate from within - and not because their art was loved or understood but because it could be sold and bought for handsome sums."
Author: Lydia Millet

31. "Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'readymades aided' and also works of assemblage."
Author: Marcel Duchamp

32. "I like to draw, produce paintings, do something with my fingers - but I am very normal, down-to-earth person."
Author: Marion Bartoli

33. "Like writing, paintings seem to hint at a topsy-turvy world in which, so to speak, time's arrow moves the other way."
Author: Martin Amis

34. "You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive."
Author: Merce Cunningham

35. "You love because you want to need someone the way you did when you were a child, and have them need you too. You eat well because the intensity of taste reminds you of a need satisfied, a pain relieved. The finest paintings are nothing more than the red head of a flower, nodding in the breeze, when you were two years old; the most exciting film is just the way everything was, back in the days when you stared goggle-eyed at the whirling chaos all around you. All these things do is get the adult to shut up for a while, to open for just a moment a tiny sliding window in the cell deep inside, letting the pallid child peep hungrily out and drink the world in before darkness falls again."
Author: Michael Marshall Smith

36. "... and people who have kids, people with husbands and jobs and mortgages, don't much want to hear about other people's paintings."
Author: Michele Young Stone

37. "I can worship Nature, and that fulfills my need for miracles and beauty. Art gives a spiritual depth to existence -- I can find worlds bigger and deeper than my own in music, paintings, and books. And from my friends and family I receive the highest benediction, emotional contact, and personal affirmation. I can bow before the works of Man, from buildings to babies, and that fulfills my need for wonder. I can believe in the sanctity of Life, and that becomes the Revealed Word, to live my life as I believe it should be, not as I'm told to by self-appointed guides."
Author: Neil Peart

38. "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!"
Author: Norman MacCaig

39. "Worship isn't destructive, Martin. I know that. I don't. I only know it's the core of his life. What else has he got? He can hardly read. He knows no physics or engineering to make to world real for him. No paintings to show him how others have enjoyed it. No music except television jingles. No history except tales from a desperate mother. No friends. Not one kid to give him a joke, or make him know himself more moderately. He's a modern citizen for whom society doesn't exist."
Author: Peter Shaffer

40. "Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:silence of paintings. You language where all languageends. You timestanding vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.Feelings for whom? O you the transformationof feelings into what?--: into audible landscape.You stranger: music. You heart-spacegrown out of us. The deepest space in us,which, rising above us, forces its way out,--holy departure:when the innermost point in us standsoutside, as the most practiced distance, as the otherside of the air:pure,boundless,no longer habitable."
Author: Rainer Maria Rilke

41. "I realize that protest paintings are not exactly in vogue, but I've done many."
Author: Robert Indiana

42. "All still lifes are actually paintings of the world on the sixth day of creation, when God and the world were alone together, without man!"
Author: Robert Musil

43. "People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings."
Author: Salvador Dalí

44. "People who put my paintings on their walls are putting their values on their walls: faith, family, home, a simpler way of living, the beauty of nature, quiet, tranquillity, peace, joy, hope. They beckon you into this world that provides an alternative to your nightly news broadcast."
Author: Thomas Kincade

45. "This would be the stuff of songs and paintings and patterns on skin."
Author: Victoria Collins

46. "What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum."
Author: Vincent Van Gogh

47. "Marina Orlova was hooked on my quote about women not owing men. I scrolled through her posted paintings and recalled a Slovak friend once commenting on a guy wanna-be a great painter, something like this: "Aaano, on bol profesionalnym maljiarom na Slovensku, maloval tam pice a hakove krize po stenach". He meant graffiti, but I hesitate to translate it in detail for it may sound too rough. Another thought is about surreal, sometimes spurious aesthetics mixed with hinted or daring sexuality, which Marina Orlova endorses, deliberately or not, in line of her claimed profession. The posts call to mind The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover or even Titus Andronicus. No wonder, thousands of bozos are attracted to her internet activity because ..., well, the woman is hot."
Author: Vinko Vrbanic

48. "Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception... as film is able to do today... And while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons, this mode of reception gives the masses no means of organizing and regulating their response. Thus, the same public which reacts progressively to a slapstick comedy inevitably displays a backward attitude toward Surrealism."
Author: Walter Benjamin

49. "The oversized chairs are white; the walls, covered with occasional landscape paintings, are white; and the plush carpet is the whitest of all. I'm insanely glad I didn't bring a cup of grape juice with me."
Author: Wendy Mass

50. "How are we going to make painters by lecturing to them? We are going to make questioners, doubters, and talkers. We are going to make painters by painting ourselves, and by showing the paintings of others. By working frankly from our convictions, we are going to make them work frankly from theirs."
Author: William Morris Hunt

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