Quotes about painting

„I can't live where I want to, I can't go where I want to go, I can't do what I want to, I can't even say what I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.“

—  Georgia O'Keeffe American artist 1887 - 1986

„Music comes first; lyrics are secondary. Most of my lyrics are contradictions. I'll write a few sincere lines, and then I'll have to make fun of [them]. I don't like to make it too obvious, because if it is too obvious, it gets really stale. You shouldn't be in people's faces 100% all the time. We don't mean to be really cryptic or mysterious, but I just think that lyrics that are different and weird and spacey paint a nice picture. It's just the way I like art.“

—  Kurt Cobain American musician and artist 1967 - 1994

Date unknown, but appears on Live! Tonight! Sold Out!!.
Interviews (1989-1994), Video

„Modern paintings are like women, you'll never enjoy them if you try to understand them. “

—  Freddie Mercury British singer, songwriter and record producer 1946 - 1991

„I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race…If there be a God, I think that what he would like me to do is paint as much of the map of Africa British Red as possible…“

—  Cecil Rhodes British businessman, mining magnate and politician in South Africa 1853 - 1902

[The Story of Africa, http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/specials/1624_story_of_africa/page26.shtml, BBC World Service, 2009-06-13]

„I'm not performing miracles, I'm using up and wasting a lot of paint…“

—  Claude Monet French impressionist painter 1840 - 1926

„If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.“

—  Edward Hopper prominent American realist painter and printmaker 1882 - 1967

„The first encounter with Otto Mueller's paintings was in Berlin, at the showing of the 'Rejects of the Berlin Secession'. which took place at the Galerie Macht in the spring of 1910. And we met him personally the very same day in his studio on Mommsenstrasse. This meeting was significant for all of us and occurred at a fruitful moment; and, as a matter of course, he belonged to Die Brücke community from then on.“

—  Erich Heckel German artist 1883 - 1970

a later recall of Heckel; as quoted in Expressionism, a German intuition, 1905-1920, Neugroschel, Joachim; Vogt, Paul; Keller, Horst; Urban, Martin; Dube, Wolf Dieter; (transl. Joachim Neugroschel); publisher: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1980, p. 93

„Everything we look at disperses and vanishes. doesn't it? Nature is always the same, and yet its appearance is always changing... Painting must give us the flavour of nature’s eternity. Everything, you understand. So I join together nature's straying hands.... From all sides, here there and everywhere, I select colours, tones and shades; I set them down, I bring them together.... They make lines, they become objects – rocks, trees – without my thinking about them.... But if there is the slightest distraction, the slightest hitch, above all if I interpret too much one day, if I'm carried away today by a theory which contradicts yesterday's, if I think while I'm painting, if I meddle, then woosh!, everything goes to pieces.“

—  Paul Cézanne French painter 1839 - 1906

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, p. 148, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif'

„Paintings are memories. Memories of the painter who painted them. Memories that can be shared as well. Paintings are things to remember things by.“

—  James Rosenquist American artist 1933 - 2017

Quoted in Brian Sherwin, "Art Space Talk: James Rosenquist," http://www.myartspace.com/blog/2008/04/art-space-talk-james-rosenquist.html myartspace.com (2008-04-04)

„I dare not think of the sun-drenched beaches and the stormy skies, and of the joy of painting them in the sea breezes.“

—  Eugène Boudin French painter 1824 - 1898

Quote in a letter, from Paris 14 June 1869, to family-friend Ferdinand Martin; as cited by Colin B. Bailey in The Annenberg Collection: Masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-impressionism, publisher, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2009, p. 7
Boudin felt himself detained in the big city Paris and longed fort the beach
1850s - 1870s

„Everything that is painted directly and on the spot always has strength, a power, and a vivacity of touch one cannot recover in the studio... Three strokes of the brush in front of nature are worth more than two days of work at the easel“

—  Eugène Boudin French painter 1824 - 1898

in the studio
Quote from Boudin's sketchbook; as quoted in Boudin at Trouville, by Vivien Hamilton, exh. Catalogue, London John Murray Ltd., 1992, p. 16
undated quotes

„I have gone back to some things that can't possibly be done: water, with weeds waving at the bottom. It is a wonderful sight, but it drives one to crazy to try to paint it. But that is the kind of thing I am always a tackling.“

—  Claude Monet French impressionist painter 1840 - 1926

Quote in Monet's letter to art-critic and his friend Gustave Geffroy, 22 June 1890; as cited in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 129
1890 - 1900

„I want to paint the way a bird sings.“

—  Claude Monet French impressionist painter 1840 - 1926

Variant: I would like to paint the way a bird sings.
Source: Monet By Himself

„If the world really looks like that I will paint no more!“

—  Claude Monet French impressionist painter 1840 - 1926

„A ship is always referred to as "she" because it costs so much to keep her in paint and powder.“

—  Chester W. Nimitz United States Navy fleet admiral 1885 - 1966

Remarks to the Society of Sponsors, U.S. Navy, 13 February 1940

„I wanted to paint a picture,
in indelible print, across
the canvass of my heart.“

—  Suman Pokhrel Nepali poet, lyricist, playwright, translator and artist 1967

<span class="plainlinks"> The Tajmahal and my Love http://www.best-poems.net/love_poems/the_taj_mahal_amp_my_love.html/</span>
From Poetry

„We don't make mistakes; we just have happy accidents. And that's when you really experience the joy of painting.“

—  Bob Ross American painter, art instructor, and television host 1942 - 1995

Bob Ross: Beauty Is Everywhere. Collection 1: Ep. 8 "Wintertime Blues"; The Joy of Painting Season 20: Episode 3 Bob Ross: Winter in Pastel.

„I have never seen an angel. Show me an angel, and I'll paint one.“

—  Gustave Courbet French painter 1819 - 1877

Courbet, c 1860's, later quoted by Vincent van Gogh in a letter to brother Theo (July, 1885); in The letters of Vincent van Gogh, ed. Ronal de Leeuw - Penguin, New York, 1996, p. 302
1860s

„I make what it pleases me to make.... I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason. I intuitively paint flags.“

—  Jasper Johns American artist 1930

Quote of Jasper Johns, as cited in Trend to the Anti-Art: Targets and Flags, Newsweek 51 no. 13, March 1958, p. 96
1950s