Top 678 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Painters

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.

I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.

Writing about art is only useful when it leads to the experience of art.

I feel that the only thing that really matters in art and life is to go against the tidal wave of literalism and literal-mindedness-to insist on and live the life of the imagination.

A creative train of thought is set off by: the unexpected, the unknown, the accidental, the disorderly, the absurd, the impossible.

Art is long. Life is short. A picture can become for us a highway between a particular thing and a universal feeling.

The body of a beautiful woman is not made for love; it is too exquisite.

An artist should know art history. Shock value only lasts so long.

The act, the doing, the taking up of paint and putting it down - the immediate impact upon your psyche or soul that occurs when you do that - has so much danger in it.

Your style is who you are when you’re not trying to be clever or better than you actually are.

Designing is not a profession but an attitude. Design has many connotations. It is the organization of materials and processes in the most productive way, in a harmonious balance of all elements necessary for a certain function. It is the intergration of technological, social, and economical requirements, biological necessities, and the psychological effects of materials, shape, color, volume and space. Thinking in relationships.

Art is a necessity - an essential part of our enlightenment process. We cannot, as a civilized society, regard ourselves as being enlightened without the arts.

All I know is that mine was a completely new theory about art, a new approach that made the pictures appear just like life does.

I can't conceive of anything being more varied and rich and handsome than the planet Earth. And its crowning beauty is the natural world. I want to soak it up, to understand it as well as I can, and to absorb it. And then I'd like to put it together and express it in my paintings. This is the way I want to dedicate my work.

The world somehow is always the same. The only thing that can improve is the individual life. One can live a good life. One can give life a meaning. Either by drinking oneself to death or by painting oneself to death or by loving oneself to death.

It is never difficult to see images – when the principle of the image is embedded in the soul.

It takes 25 years to learn to draw, one hour to learn to paint.

Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see with his eyes... Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into unknown areas.

We must now learn to draw inspiration from the tangible miracles that surround us.

I could not paint at all if I had to paint slowly. Every effect is so transient, it must be rapidly painted.

Life etches itself onto our faces as we grow older, showing our violence, excesses or kindnesses.

Painting is an object, but it's also a voice. I don't see them as objects; I see them as voices.

Each painting has its own way of evolving. When the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself.

I find it so much easier to be creatively free at night. Daytime is for sleeping. Nighttime is the best time for making art. The later at night it gets the further into another world you go.

The ultimate way of Being lies beyond all contradictory pairs of opposites with which our two dimensional thinking mind operates. As soon as we are successful in silencing the restless activity of the thinking mind and give a chance to intuition, the pure all embracing spirit in us will manifest effortlessly.

The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible.

I think of color as being seen in and throughout, not solely on the surface.

A work of art is the trace of a magnificent struggle.

As no two people see the world the same way, all trips from here to there are imaginary; all truth is a tale I am telling myself.

It is the first vision that counts. The artist has only to remain true to his dream and it will possess his work in such a manner that it will resemble the work of no other... for no two visions are alike, and those who reach the heights have all toiled up steep mountains by a different route. To each has been revealed a different panorama.

People mistakenly think that art is about nature, or about an artists feelings about nature. It is instead a path of enlightenment and pleasure, one of many paths, where nature and the artists feelings are merely raw material.

The paintings are like prayers, relating to wishing for something beyond everyday life.

If I paint like a barbarian, it's because we live in a barbarous age

A painter paints the appearance of things, not their objective correctness, in fact he creates new appearances of things.

When I know your soul, I will paint your eyes.

The painter must always seek the essence of things, always represent the essential characteristics and emotions of the person he is painting.

It is what is painted between the outlines that makes the difference between merely competent painting and really meaningful art.

All artists are constantly looking for something and they don't always know what.

Art is the lens through which I experience the world. Art is the medium to present the human condition... love, fear, bewilderment, pleasure, distaste, brotherhood and all the subtleties that we all know.

A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.

I paint because the spirits whisper madly inside my head.

Who speaks of art speaks of poetry. There is not art without a poetic aim. There is a species of emotion particular to painting. There is an effect that results from a certain arrangement of colors, of lights, of shadows. It is this that one calls the music of painting

The principles of my works... are the extinction of expression, permanent covering and contemplative tranquillity... My ideal is the completely dark picture, full of some overwhelming silence.

Photography, like alcohol, should only be allowed to those who can do without it.

When the most learned evolutionists can give neither the how nor the why, the marvels seem to show that adaptation is inexplicable. Yet those who cannot explain it will not admit that it is inexplicable. This is a strange situation, only partly ascribable to the rather unscientific conviction that evidence will be found in the future. It is due to a psychological quirk [in the minds of its advocates].

See the first stroke as a start and everything after that a recovery.

There is a thing about beauty. Beauty is always associated with the male fantasy of what the female body is. I don’t think there is anything wrong with beauty. It’s just what women think is beautiful can be different. And there can be a beauty in individualism. If there is a wart or a scar, this can be beautiful, in a sense, when you paint it.

Artists are often excellent businessmen. They have to be. Otherwise they do not remain artists.

I believe when you bring, say, a plant into a room, everything in that room changes in relation to it. This tension - tension is the only word for it - can be painted.

Drawing at its best is not what your eyes see but what our mind understands.

In antiquity there was only silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men.

Monsters exist because we create them, through war and violence, and distortion, and the way we handle people and so on.

The right use of color can make any composition work.

Brush and ink are only servants of thoughts and emotion. They should follow your emotion and change with the emotion.

The reality comes first, and the symbol comes after. I see these things, and suddenly they become symbolic of life.

The true use of art is, first, to cultivate the artist's own spiritual nature.

The artist is the person who makes life more interesting or beautiful, more understandable or mysterious, or probably, in the best sense, more wonderful.

Doodling serves as a means of keeping the hand or fingers limber, so that they are always ready for serious work.

Don't paint the apple; paint the red.

Good art is born from knowing yourself deeply: Your art cannot hide how much you have discovered about yourself.