Painter Quotes

“Use your blood to paint. Keep painting until you faint. Keep painting until you die.”
― Yoko Ono

“You too know that all my eyes see, all I touch with myself, from any distance, is Diego. The caress of fabrics, the color of colors, the wires, the nerves, the pencils, the leaves, the dust, the cells, the war and the sun, everything experienced in the minutes of the non-clocks and the non-calendars and the empty non-glances, is him.”
― Frida Kahlo, The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait

“At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Impression — I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it … and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.”
― Claude Monet

“I am obsessed with the process of creation.”
― Zdzilsaw Beksinski, The Fantastic Art of Beksinski

“A painter is someone who wipes the windowpane between the world and us with light, with a rag made of light, soaked in silence.”
― Christian Bobin

“I haven't the slightest idea what art is, but to be a painter is something of which you have to prove.”
― Wayne Thiebaud

“Every good painter paints what he is.”
― Jackson Pollock

“I love to draw—pencil, ink pen—I love art. When I go on tour and visit museums in Holland, Germany or England—you know those huge paintings?—I’m just amazed. You don’t think a painter could do something like that. I can look at a piece of sculpture or a painting and totally lose myself in it.”
― Michael Jackson

“Finally, when someone asked [Pollack] how he knew when a painting was finished, he replied, “How do you know when you’ve finished making love?”
― Ross Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia 1910-1960

“When I golf, I use just enough strokes to create a masterpiece, like I'm a painter. The score I post up would look great on a museum wall.”
― Jarod Kintz, To be good at golf you must go full koala bear

“Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement: for transfiguration, not for the sake of play. It is the quest of our self that drives us along the eternal and never-ending journey we must all make.”
― Max Beckmann

“You can't break my heart
and call the lines you write on art.”
― Laura Chouette

“Kicking an art addiction is a heck of a lot harder than going sober.”
― Sol Luckman, Musings from a Small Island: Everything under the Sun

“They degrade the classics into authorities. They used them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms. They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist...

When they say that a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new. when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

“Ah! ah! I am a lover first, and then a painter.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“The thing was gone in an instant, crashing through the underbrush, but it wasn’t alone.

Others just like it, though not as large, bounded off through the trees.

Standing there, marveling at the speed and grace of the beasts, Andrew had felt a blinding urge to run off with them.”
― Vincent H. O'Neil, Lovecraftiana: The Magazine of Eldritch Horror

“Once I have entered this land, all the beauty in the world becomes a part of my being. Without even touching a canvas, I become a first-class painter.”
― Catherine Meurisse, La jeune femme et la mer

“A Churchyard In Summertime by Stewart Stafford

O, to stand in a quiet country churchyard,
The graveyard bending in summer zephyrs,
Chlorophyll light beneath swaying poplars,
Rook song in twilight's nocturne.

Oblivious hues spread upon canvas,
Beside the somnambulant swanning river,
Miasmas of midges at the water's edge,
In the crosshairs of a painter's thumb.

Then the sun rolls away over the horizon,
A veil draws across the long day's play,
A churn supper collection of basket and easel,
Recollections in the slumbering night.

© Stewart Stafford, 2021. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“A creative does not conform or apologize.”
― Rob Liano

“The soft voice of a piccolo glided through
the airy expanse of a small, brightly furnished
room. A tall painter, dark locks falling across her face, moved her brush fervently in a wave of inspiration—and yet her ardor seemed
simultaneously as calm as the ripples of the lake that she depicted.”
― Gina Marinello-Sweeney, Peter

“The painting was a dark line of trees behind rows of gorgeous pink lilies, the sun shining on the grass. Behind the branches, a blackness contrasted against the sunny field. Eerie eyes peered out from behind tree trunks. They were so imperceptible that I almost wouldn't have noticed them had they not been pointed out to me. It struck me as odd, considering the realist nature of the other paintings.
Devin moved, and the gentle scent of his woodsy cologne brushed my nose. He stepped back and motioned to another painting. From this view point, the paintings took on fantastical elements. Wings, ears, eyes, all hidden as though Dubois himself were seeing them only from the corner of his vision.”
― Sabrina Blackburry, Dirty Lying Faeries

“The painter must be ready to paint.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“Maybe art’s just a mode of escapism, but I’ll take that. It’s certainly a lot cheaper (not to mention safer) than heroin. You can smack me up with art any day.”
― Sol Luckman, Musings from a Small Island: Everything under the Sun

“Inks don’t forget. But with enough coaxing, occasionally they can be persuaded to forgive.”
― Sol Luckman, Musings from a Small Island: Everything under the Sun

“God is a dancer. He is not a creator in the sense of a painter; he is a creator in the sense of a dancer.”
― Osho, Nirvana

“Rupshi Mitra is a neuroscientist and artist who enjoys spending time outside of her professional life creating art. Rupshi Mitra spent about five years as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University.”
― Rupshi Mitra

“What she wanted was technique. She wanted to paint like a Renaissance old master. She wanted to know what color Titian tinted his canvas before he started working on it. She wanted to know what colors Caravaggio mixed to make his lights. She wanted to know exactly which pigments Rubens utilized to achieve those juicy fleshy tones, what brown Rembrandt used in his shadows, what combination of oils and resins went into Vermeer's painting medium. She wanted someone to show her how to make Raphael's line and Michelangelo's muscle masses. She wanted to know what made a good composition, and what made a bad one. She wanted to know.”
― Helen Maryles Shankman, The Color of Light

“Culture represents the most important exchange currency of a civilization!”
― Mihai Ionescu

“Ich glaube nicht, dass es jemals einen Mann gegeben hat, der eine Frau als gleichwertig behandelt hat, und das ist alles, was ich mir je gewünscht hätte.”
― Berthe Morisot