Top 1200 Abstract Painting Quotes & Sayings - Page 5

Painters should shut up and paint and when we stop painting we should dance or have sex or get a massage or take a shower and we shouldn't be talking about painting.

Every painting I do is related to the last one: it may be a continuation of a previous painting or it may be a reaction against it.

What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.

I was always interested in drawing and painting. I enrolled in college to study painting. But I didn't have any livelihood when I graduated. My mother died very young, and I didn't have any home, so I had to find a way to earn a living. It seemed to me that photography - to the great disappointment, I have to say, of my painting teacher - could offer that. So I went and did a degree in photography, and then after that I could go out and get paid for work. For portraits, things like that.

I am painting with the same enthusiasm as a Marseillaise eats bouillabaisse ... I am painting big sunflowers.

What's great about it is that painting doesn't move. And so in the 21st century, when we're used to clicking and browsing and having constant choice, painting simply sits there silently and begs you to notice the smallest of detail.

The thing is that the money issue looms so large in art now. And it has absolutely nothing to do with art. If you're painting goes for ten grand or a hundred grand, it doesn't make painting any easier. And it doesn't make the painting any better if it goes for a hundred grand.

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

In its primary aspect, a painting has no more spiritual message than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass. The channels by which all noble and imaginative work in painting should touch the soul are not those of the truths of lives.

Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief, which concordance the abstract statement may possess by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and one-sidedness, and this confession is an essential ingredient of truth.

It's good when someone comes to a book or a movie and interacts with it. It's the difference between an illustration and a painting. An illustration serves a specific purpose, and a painting is something you can immerse yourself in.

For me, preparing the canvas takes longer than painting. The actual painting takes about half an hour.

I have told myself a hundred times that painting - that is, the material thing called a painting - is no more than a pretext, the bridge between the mind of the painter and the mind of the spectator.

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

I trained as a painter, and I still love painting, but eventually I became aware that the physical aspect of painting didn't really suit me. I didn't enjoy working in the medium. It's very messy. I prefer to have it clean, with a nice computer.

Painting and art cannot be taught. You can save time if someone tells you to put blue and yellow together to make green, but the essence of painting is a self-disciplined activity that you have to learn by yourself.

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.

I shall never forget what I saw at the Museum of Modern Art: in a spotless schoolroom, fifty little girls painting away at tables covered with brushes, pots, tubes, bowls, staring into space and sticking out their tongues like the clever animals that ring a bell, tongues lolling and eyes vague. Teachers supervise these young creators of abstract art and slap their wrists if what they paint represents something and dangerously inclines toward realism. The mothers - still at the Picasso stage - are not admitted.

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.

I have to go with what the painting says to me. The painting is always informing me. I'm its servant; it's not mine. I'm doing what it wants.

I am biased towards the belief that every painter must be grounded in strong and faultless drawing skills, and until one has not experimented with all styles of painting and has not comprehended their potentialities one's work is not complete. Even an abstract painter must know how to draw as well as a figurative artist. As for me, drawing has never created any problem, since I know how to draw anatomy correctly if I had to, I understand the function of muscle groups and sculpture.

The merit of painting lies in the exactness of reproduction. Painting is a science and all sciences are based on mathematics. No human inquiry can be a science unless it pursues its path through mathematical exposition and demonstration.

In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?

People believe pictures. It's a photograph that's in your passport, not a painting. Now, George Bernard Shaw said, 'I would exchange every painting of Christ for one snapshot.' That's what the power of photography is.

Combien de gens se font abstraits pour para?tre profonds! La plupart des termes abstraits sont des ombres qui cachent des vides. How many people become abstract in order to appear profound! Most abstract terms are shadows that conceal a void.

With abstract work, I never was quite sure what it was that felt right about the painting, but I did know that I responded to it and I liked whatever it was offering me. That's something that seems to happen as well when I'm writing, where maybe things that don't necessarily make a lot of logical sense are put together, and yet we struggle to make sense of these things somehow. I'm not quite sure why that is; it's something about human nature, I guess.

Well, let's say we acknowledged the School of French Painting - the Paris School of painting as the leading force and vitality of the time. I think that was understood and felt and experienced.

I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere.

Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.

I don't think it's necessary for artists to have any formal training in painting or art history, but I do think it's essential to continually experiment with different subject matter, types of paint and methods of painting.

In my work, I want to create an understanding, not about what a painting looks like but about what a painting says.

A painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting.

I think that painting relates very neatly to inner travel and the exploration of inner worlds. With painting, I always get the impression that you're sort of entering into a shared space.

Painting from life is a completely different monster, which I like. But because I've been painting from photography for so long, I've learned my best moves from photography.

Each movie you do about a real person is like a painting, and you choose certain things in the painting that you want to pull out and you want to show.

I feel like it's almost a Renaissance thing, a painting, a modern version of a painting. I think it's important for Kim [Kardashian] to have her figure. To not show it would be like Adele not singing.

It is an intimately communicative affair between the painter and his painting, a conversation back and forth, the painting telling the painter even as it receives its shape and form.

Painting is so close, so personal, so immediate, and so ordinary... It is the ordinary resurrections that define your painting.

I would never put a sculpture in front of a painting, so that it is difficult to see the painting. I always place each thing so you can see it isolated. You can focus on every individual work.

Technology's always changing. There was a time where oil painting was a new technology. That changed painting.

People are always trying to find the next groovy thing, and it hasn't gone back to painting... I'd like it to go back to painting. I'm sick of all this photography and video. There's so much of it, it's almost annoying.

I do have a dream, a painting, the baths of La Grenouillere for which I've done a few bad rough sketches, but it is a dream. Renoir, who has just spent two months here, also wants to do this painting.

Painting, to me, is a unique experience. Each work is a surprise and has its own personal and intuitive meaning. After brainstorming feelings and memories, each painting evolves freely and independently.

Creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. (Describing his poetic ideal, 1817)

Picasso didn't stop painting when he was 41 years old because he felt he wasn't relevant, but he kept going and the painting he made before he died are now worth 40 million dollars.

Painting for me is like a fabric, all of a piece and uniform, with one set of threads as the representational, esthetic element, and the cross-threads as the technical, architectural, or abstract element. These threads are interdependent and complementary, and if one set is lacking the fabric does not exist. A picture with no representational purpose is to my mind always an incomplete technical exercise, for the only purpose of any picture is to achieve representation.

What constitutes American painting?... things may be in America, but it's what is in the artist that counts. What do we call 'American' outside of painting? Inventiveness, restlessness, speed, change.

When I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.

I fell in love with painting. Painting allows me to see things as I want to and not necessarily as they are, it's an escape, a way to preserve thoughts and memories, a way to create hopes and dreams. - Marina

Photography brought a lot to painting because it forced artists to think about what painting could do that photography couldn't.

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.

There are several kinds of truths, and it is customary to place in the first order mathematical truths, which are, however, only truths of definition. These definitions rest upon simple, but abstract, suppositions, and all truths in this category are only constructed, but abstract, consequences of these definitions ... Physical truths, to the contrary, are in no way arbitrary, and do not depend on us.

I remember one day when Juan Gris told me about a bunch of grapes he had seen in a painting by Picasso. The next day these grapes appeared in a painting by Gris, this time in a bowl; and the day after, the bowl appeared in a painting by Picasso.

Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought. Thus painting, like music, tends to become its own content.

People want Art. And they are given it. But the less Art there is in painting the more painting there is.

For example, in one of my last exhibitions I had a 50-foot massive painting with I think perhaps a hundred thousand hand-painted small flowers. This was the Christ painting [The Dead Christ in the Tomb, 2008] in my Down exhibition [2008]. Now, I simply can't spend eight hours a day painting small, identical flowers. And so I've got a team that allows me to have these grand, sweeping statements.

Could you imagine people eating a painting - if they could introduce a painting into their bodies? It's probably the artist's dream, and we have the opportunity to do so.

The older I get, the more I feel that color is what painting is. Painting is primarily color.

The transition from painter to artist comes when you cross the line of painting what you see to painting what you feel about what you see.

Here, reality is not subordinated to painting, indeed painting seems the handmaid of reality, though we feel it tending towards a procedure which, while not at the mercy of appearances, is not yet in conflict with them.