Top 1200 Paint Quotes & Sayings

Sometimes I seem to be two people. One who does not paint and one who does. The one who does not paint assumes that the one who does can paint anything. The one who is the painter sometimes finds it difficult to live up to that faith.

I learned to paint at home from my mom. She was a very good teacher, but with spray paint, I taught myself. Spray paint is impossible. They say it takes a decade to really learn spray paint and be good with it. I've been at it about ten years now and am now really just getting good and confident with it.

If I were a painter, I would paint beautiful bodies - I would paint nipples, and I would paint Bibles. Am I going to say, 'I'm not going to paint this woman's neck because people will think I just want to lick on necks?' Please! That's not what art is about.

The most horrible question students ask: 'How do you paint copper?' 'How do you paint flesh or glass?' You paint everything the same way: Right color, right value, in right spot. There are no prescriptions.

Someone has asked me to paint Biblical pictures, and I say no, I'll not paint something that we know nothing about, might just as well paint something that will happen two thousand years hence.

My work is not about paint. It's about paint at the service of something else. It is not about gooey, chest-beating, macho '50s abstraction that allows paint to sit up on the surface as subject matter about paint.

Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.

It's not what you paint. It's how you paint it. You don't have to paint elaborate things. Paint simple things as beautifully as you can.

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

I don't paint so that people will understand me, I paint to show what a particular scene looks like.

I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

I enjoy painting. I don't know if I'm good at it, but I paint. I paint very quickly.

Give paint a chance to show itself entirely as paint.

It takes two to paint. One to paint, the other to stand by with an axe to kill him before he spoils it.

I paint on the ground. I paint with sticks, with big paint cans, and whatever else falls in it. Basically, what I'm doing is capturing unbridled emotion and putting it on canvas. It's like capturing lightning in a bottle.

I used to paint a lot of oil and now I paint more mixed-media stuff.

If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldn't have to paint at all.

You can't just stick with one thing. You have to let your natural style come through, and paint what you naturally like to paint.

There comes a point when the paint doesn't feel like paint. I don't know why. Some mysterious thing happens. I think you have all experienced it... What counts is that the paint should really disappear, otherwise it's craft.

I see less and less... I need to avoid lateral light, which darkens my colors. Nevertheless, I always paint at the times of day most propitious for me, as long as my paint tubes and brushes are not mixed up... I will paint almost blind, as Beethoven composed completely deaf.

There is never a question of what to paint but only how to paint.

You can never judge a paint hue by the liquid color in the paint pot. You must apply it to a wall, wait for the paint to dry, then decide.

Life in itself is an empty canvas; it becomes whatsoever you paint on it. You can paint misery, you can paint bliss. This freedom is your glory.

What you do when you paint, you take a brush full of paint, get paint on the picture, and you have faith.

I would say - and paint doesn't peel unless it's acrylic paint, so maybe it is acrylic paint that they're using, not oil paint. So let me say yes, it would be acrylic house paint, which, when it dries, peels very nicely. So let's go with that.

As long as you can change paint, you don't change. For you to change - for paint to do something to you - paint must stay constant.

I like watercolours. I like acrylic paint... a little bit. I like house paint. I like oil-based paint, and I love oil paint. I love the smell of turpentine and I like that world of oil paint very, very, very much.

You cannot paint the exterior of your house. You have to take the paint chip down to show the paint-chip Nazis.

My thing is about following the accidental, more than trying to paint an accurate bowl of apples. I enjoy most following the paint. It leads me somewhere else. I think I enjoy just letting the magic unfold and letting the spirit of the paint tell me where we're going.

Paint what you feel. Paint what you see. Paint what is real to you.

I think we're in an age where artists really have an incredible range of materials at their command now. They can use almost anything from household items - Jackson Pollock used house paint - to, you know, advanced computer systems, to good old oil paint and acrylic paint.

The way I paint, the scale of the information in the images which I want to paint demand space.

I said, I don't want to paint things like Picasso's women and Matisse's odalisques lying on couches with pillows. I don't want to paint people. I want to paint something I have never seen before. I don't want to make what I'm looking at. I want the fragments.

The word 'abstract' comes from the light tower of the philosophers. One of their spotlights that they have particularly focused on 'Art'. [Abstraction was] not so much what you could paint but rather what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that subject matter came into existence as something you ought not have.

If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldnt have to paint at all.

I don't know why I paint what I paint. I think it comes out - it's kind of my subconscious or something.

Do not try to paint the grandiose thing. Paint the commonplace so that it will be distinguished.

I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.

Most people think I paint fast. I paint very slowly.

There are words to paint the misery of love, but none to paint its happiness.

Painters love paint itself: so much that they spend years trying to get paint to behave the way they want it to.

There are so many good ones to paint and if you paint as well as you really can and keep out of all other things and do that, it is the true thing.

I paint in oils, I paint in acrylics. I paint figurative and landscape portraits. It's all in my own kind of style. I'm self-taught.

The old, sad art colors are gone. Now I paint bright colors. I paint paintings which are happy, where children are laughing and playing with animals. I paint paradise on Earth. I still paint sadness sometimes, but there is sadness in the world, too.

I don't paint over my paintings with black paint. I paint black paintings. It isn't because I'm sad, just as I didn't paint red paintings yesterday because I was happy. Nor will I paint yellow paintings tomorrow because I'm jealous.

Painting allows me to use other portions of my brain pleasurably. Irony plays no part in what or how I paint. I paint the particular subject matter not to make polemical points but because I am interested in the human imprint on the landscape. I paint the landscape of my time and place with the stuff in it.

Once, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm. Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner intended to paint. What he intended to paint was a representation of the storm. One's language is frequently imprecise in that manner, I have discovered.

If you've never mixed paint, you aren't going to be able to paint properly.

If you're a painter, paint. But you don't have to put Jesus in every picture. Paint well, and if you paint well enough, they might ask you why you do that.

Paint with freedom. It gives you more mastery of the nature of paint.

I have a strange need to paint; if I don't paint I cry and get bad headaches.

I know I can not paint a flower, I can not paint the sun on the desert on a bright summer morning but maybe in terms of paint colour I can convey to you my experience of the flower or the experience that makes the flower of significance to me at that particular time.

There's nothing more superficial to do than to paint a beautiful woman. The most beautiful portraits in art were of ugly women. If you paint Brigitte Bardot, it's a disaster. Sunsets, you have to stay away from sunsets. You paint a sunset, you are in great danger.

No small dabs of colour - you want plenty of paint to paint with.

Painters paint outdoors, or in rooms full of people; they paint their lovers, alone, naked; they paint and eat; they paint and listen to the radio. It is a soothing way of doing your job.

I love paint. I like watercolours. I like acrylic paint... a little bit. I like house paint. I like oil-based paint, and I love oil paint. I love the smell of turpentine and I like that world of oil paint very, very, very much.

I can't paint the way they want me to paint and they know that too.

When you paint Spring, do not paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots - just paint Spring.

For an Impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject, but to realize sensations.