“The View of life I communicate in my pictures excludes the sordid and the ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be.”

—  Norman Rockwell

Somebody once said that I paint the kind of girls your mother would want you to marry.
Norman Rockwell, My Adventures As An Illustrator : An Autobiography (1979), p 24

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The View of life I communicate in my pictures excludes the sordid and the ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be." by Norman Rockwell?
Norman Rockwell photo
Norman Rockwell6
Armatian 1894–1978

Related quotes

Pablo Picasso photo

“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 (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Herschel Browning Chip (1968, p. 271).
1930s, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

William Blake photo

“In my Brain are studies & Chambers fill'd with books & pictures of old, which I wrote & painted in ages of Eternity before my mortal life;”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

The Letters Of William Blake https://archive.org/details/lettersofwilliam002199mbp (1956), p. 50 <br class="br">1790s

“I think that I painted an accurate picture of what life was like for someone like Billy forty years ago. Looking back, maybe I was not as sympathetic as I could have been to some of the adult characters.”

Barry Hines (1939–2016) British author

On A Kestrel for a Knave
Barry Hines Interview: Homecoming Hero

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot photo

“I dream my picture and afterwards I paint my dream.”

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) French landscape painter and printmaker in etching

As translated in Musical Courier Vol. 57, No. 21 (18 November 1908), p. 20; in recent years a nearly identical but ultimately unsourced remark has been attributed to Vincent Van Gogh; the very earliest such attributions yet found date to the 1990s.
As translated in Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning (1918) by Thomas Troward, p. 207
As translated in Gardener's Chronicle of America (1932)
undated
Original: (fr) Je rêve mon tableau, et plus tard je peindrai mon rêve.

O. Henry photo

“I wanted to paint a picture some day that people would stand before and forget that it was made of paint. I wanted it to creep into them like a bar of music and mushroom there like a soft bullet.”

O. Henry (1862–1910) American short story writer

Source: The Complete Works of O. Henry

“I don’t like to belong to one religious community as I don’t want people to feel excluded from asking for my help or learning with me.”

Dawud Wharnsby (1972) Canadian musician

As quoted in "Global citizen", interview in Scouts (July/August 2010), p. 41
Context: I believe the spiritual journey that each of us takes on is a personal one, and I feel religion is a delicate road to be on. I don’t like to belong to one religious community as I don’t want people to feel excluded from asking for my help or learning with me. It’s all about bringing people together to celebrate their various interpretations of scripture. I am a Muslim and I worship in mosques when I am in Pakistan. I also worship in Unitarian churches when I’m in the US. Such spiritual freedom is very important to me.

Mark Rothko photo

“I paint very large pictures. I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them however, - I think it applies to other painters I know -, is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

1950's
Source: Interiors, Vol. 110, no 10, May 1951; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 172

Wassily Kandinsky photo

“I would love to paint a large landscape of Moscow — taking elements from everywhere and combining them into a single picture—weak and strong parts, mixing everything together in the same way as the world is mixed of different elements. It must be like an orchestra... Suddenly I felt that my old dream was closer to coming true. You know that I dreamed of painting a big picture expressing joy, the happiness of life and the universe. Suddenly I feel the harmony of colors and forms that come from this world of joy.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Quote from Kandinsky's letter to Gabriele Münter, June 1916; as cited in lrike Becks-Malorny, Wassily Kandinsky, 1866–1944: The Journey to Abstraction [Cologne: Taschen, 1999], pp. 115, 118
Kandinsky left Münter and Murnau in 1914, because the first World War started and Kandinsky had a Russian nationality
1916 -1920

Arshile Gorky photo

“I don't like that word 'finish'. When something is finished, that means it's dead, doesn't it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting – I just stop working on it for a while. I like painting because it's something I never come to the end of. Sometimes I paint a picture, then I paint it all out. Sometimes I'm working on fifteen or twenty pictures at the same time. I do that because I want to – because I like to change my mind so often. The thing to do is always to keep starting to paint, never finishing painting.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

quote of 1948
1942 - 1948
Source: Movements in art since 1945, Edward Lucie-Smith, Thames and Hudson 1975, p 32

Related topics