A Quote by Ivan Albright

A painting is life and a painting is death . . . the picture is our own legacy left by tomorrow's dead for tomorrow's living.

Ivan Albright

Quote Topics

Dead Death Left Legacy Life Living Our Own Painting Picture Tomorrow

Quote Author

Ivan Albright
American - Artist
February 20, 1897 - November 18, 1983

I never want to stop painting. I'm 94 now. What's my secret? I just keep thinking about the painting I'm going to do tomorrow.

Pierre Soulages

'Art or anti-art?' was the question I asked when I returned from Munich in 1912 and decided to abandon pure painting or painting for its own sake. I thought of introducing elements alien to painting as the only way out of a pictorial and chromatic dead end.

Marcel Duchamp

When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out.

Frank Stella

The coming and going of birth and death is a painting. Unsurpassed enlightenment is a painting. The entire phenomenal universe and the empty sky are nothing but a painting.

Dogen

Tomorrow may never come to us. We do not live in tomorrow. We cannot find it in any of our title-deeds. The man who owns whole blocks of real estate, and great ships on the sea, does not own a single minute of tomorrow. Tomorrow! It is a mysterious possibility, not yet born. It lies under the seal of midnight-behind the veil of glittering constellations.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

I get so tired of painting. I've been trying to give it up all the time, if we could just make a living out of movies or the newspaper business or something. It's so boring, painting the same picture over and over.

Andy Warhol

When I am in a painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc, because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

Jackson Pollock

You don't have wisdom for tomorrow's problems. But you will tomorrow. You don't have resources for tomorrow's needs. But you will tomorrow. You don't have courage for tomorrow's challenges. But you will when tomorrow comes.

Max Lucado

I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.

Pablo Picasso

Trust in tomorrow...Every day of your life, there's been a tomorrow. I promise you, there'll be a tomorrow. —Alex Morales to Miranda Evans

Susan Beth Pfeffer

All that stuff about flatness - it's this idea that painting is a specialized discipline and that modernist painting increasingly refers to painting and is refining the laws of painting. But who cares about painting? What we care about is that the planet is heating up, species are disappearing, there's war, and there are beautiful girls here in Brooklyn on the avenue and there's food and flowers.

Chris Martin

I'm not particularly interested in painting, per se. I'm interested in a painting that has that mysterious life to it. Anything that doesn't partake of that magic is halfway dead - it returns to its physical elements, it's just paint and canvas.

Caio Fonseca

You have bits of canvas that are unpainted and you have these thick stretcher bars. So you see that a painting is an object; that it's not a window into something - you're not looking at a landscape, you're not looking at a portrait, but you're looking at a painting. It's basically: A painting is a painting is a painting. And it's what Frank Stella said famously: What you see is what you see.

Frank Stella

There are absences, but there are also presences. It's about how painting can evolve its own abstractions. I didn't know the painting was going to be about that, but it has to have that journey; I have to learn something, I have to end up somewhere I didn't expect to be, otherwise, I don't think it's painting.

Nigel Cooke

The painting is always done very much with [the model's] co-operation. The problem with painting a nude, of course, is that it deepens the transaction. You can scrap a painting of someone's face and it imperils the sitter's self-esteem less than scrapping a painting of the whole naked body.