Quotes about canvas (271 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“You know, a landscape painter's day is delightful. You get up early, at three o'clock in the morning, before sunrise; you go and sit under a tree; you watch and wait. At first there is nothing much to be seen. Nature looks like a whitish canvas with a few broad outlines faintly sketched in; all is misty, everything quivers in the cool dawn breeze. The sky lights up. The sun has not yet burst through the gauze veil that hides the meadow, the little valley, the hill on the horizon... Ah, a first ray of sunshine!”

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

Corot's description of the beginning of a day in Switzerland, Château de Gruyères, 1857; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963
1850s

Nature , Tree , Light , Waiting

“I want to shape the TV screen canvas
as precisely as Leonardo,
as freely as Picasso,
as colorfully as Renoir,
as profoundly as Mondrian,
as violently as Pollock
and as lyrically as Jasper Johns.”

Nam June Paik (1932–2006) American video art pioneer

Paik (1969) Versatile Color TV Synthesizer, Manifesto, cited in: Edith Decker-Phillips. Paik Video, Barrytown, Limited, 1998. p. 154
1960s

“Life is a great big canvas. Throw all the paint you can at it.”

James Patterson book Sam's Letters to Jennifer

Source: Sam's Letters to Jennifer

Cute , Life , Painting

“This world is but canvas to our imaginations.”

Henry David Thoreau A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Variant: The world is but a canvas to the imagination.
Source: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Wednesday

World , Imagination

“The art of avoiding extremes is an art that is drawn on the canvas of maturity and painted with the abstract strokes of many experiences.”

T.D. Jakes (1957) American bishop

Source: The Lady, Her Lover, and Her Lord

Art , Painting

“A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

Nature , Light

“These palms are driving me crazy; the motifs are extremely difficult to seize, to put on canvas; it's so bushy everywhere, although delightful to the eye... I would like to do orange and lemon trees silhouetted against the blue sea, but cannot find them as I would like.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

in a letter from Bordighera to friends in Paris, Jan. 1884; as cited in: Joslyn Art Museum, ‎Holliday T. Day, ‎Hollister Sturges (1987), Joslyn Art Museum: Paintings and Sculpture from the European and American Collections, p. 100
1870 - 1890

Tree , Sea

“I tell myself that anyone who says he has finished a canvas is terribly arrogant. Finished means complete, perfect, and I toil away without making any progress, searching, fumbling around, without achieving anything much.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

Claude Monet, 1893; as quoted in: David W. Galenson (2009), Painting outside the Lines, p. 49
1890 - 1900

Search , Perfection

“Most Illustrious Lord and My Lord, I received the other day, with due reverence your Lordship's letter, together with the canvas and framing. Having read and noted the contents, I considered them so pretty and ingenious as to require no improvement of any kind; and the more I thought over it the more I became convinced that the greatness of art amongst the ancients was due to the assistance they received from great princes content to leave to the painters the credit and renown derived from their own ingenuity in bespeaking pictures. Can I therefore doubt that, if God enables me to satisfy in any part the wishes of Your Lordship, I shall have all credit for my labour? Yet I shall, after all have done no more than give shape to that which received its spirit — the most essential part — from Your Excellency.”

Titian (1488–1576) Italian painter

In a letter to the Duke Alfonso of Ferrara, From Venice, April 1, 1518; as quoted by J.A.Y. Crowe & G.B. Cavalcaselle in Titian his life and times - With some account ..., publisher John Murray, London, 1877, p. 181-82
1510-1540

God , Art , Reading , Parting

“Almost every evening [in their common early-Cubist years, in Paris], either I went to Braque's studio or Braque came to mine. Each of us had to see what the other had done during the day. We criticized each other's paintings. A canvas wasn't finished unless both of us felt it was.”

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

a remark of Picasso to Françoise Gilot, December 1948
Quote of Picasso, in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 311
Quotes, 1940's

Painting

“I always get into arguments, with people who want to retain the old values in painting — the humanistic values that they always find on the canvas. If you pin them down, they always end up asserting that there is something there besides the paint on the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object. Any painting is an object..”

Frank Stella (1936) American artist

Quotes, 1960 - 1970
Source: LIFE http://books.google.com/books?id=XUoEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA49, Vol. 64, nr. 3, 19 January 1968, p. 49

People , Painting

“One day I had painted a bunch of keys on a canvas, my bunch of keys. I didn't know what to put next to them. I needed something that would be the absolute opposite of a bunch of keys. So when I finished work I went out. I had only walked a few yard when what should I see in a shop windows? A postcard of the Mona Lisa! At once I knew that was what I needed; what could have made a greater contrast to the keys?... Then I also added a can of sardines. It was such a strong contrast.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

on his painting 'La Joconde aux Clés'
Quote from La vie fait de l'Oeuvre de Fernand Léger, Dora Vallier, 'Cahiers d'Art', 2, 1954, p. 153
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1950's

Strong , Painting

“I, Titian of Cadore, having studied painting from childhood upwards, and desirous of fame rather than profit, wish to serve the Doge and Signori, rather than his Highness the Pope and other Signori, who in past days, and even now, have urgently asked to employ me: I am therefore anxious, if it should appear feasible, to paint in the Hall of Council, beginning, if it please their sublimity, with the canvas of 'The Battle' on the side towards the Piazza, which is so difficult that no one as yet has had courage to attempt it…”

Titian (1488–1576) Italian painter

Quote from a petition presented by Titian, and read on the 31st of May, 1513, before the Council of ten of Venice; as quoted by J.A.Y. Crowe & G.B. Cavalcaselle in Titian his life and times - With some account..., publisher John Murray, London, 1877, p. 153-154
The chiefs of the Council on the day in question accepted Titian's offer. Sharp monitions reminded him in 1518, 1522 and 1537 that he should complete 'The Battle', he did not until 1539
1510-1540
Source: http://www.everypainterpaintshimself.com/article/titians_battle_of_cadore_1538-9

Courage , Study , Appearance , Past

“Just to paint a representation or design is not hard, but to express a thought in painting is. Thought is fluid. What you put on canvas is concrete, and it tends to direct the thought. The more you punt on canvas the more you lose control of the thought. I’ve never been able to paint what I set out to paint.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

1941 - 1967
Source: Three Hundred Years of American Painting, Alexander Eliot; New York: Time Inc., 1957, p. 298

Painting

“I didn't want to mask variations; I didn't want to record a path. I wanted to get the paint out of the can and onto the canvas... I tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can.”

Frank Stella (1936) American artist

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, Questions to Stella and Judd' - September 1966, p. 121

Painting

“Life itself, too, is forever turning an infinitely vacant, dispiriting blank side towards man on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. But no matter how vacant and vain, how dead life may appear to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, who knows something, will not be put off so easily.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

1880s, 1884, Letter to Theo (Nuenen, Oct. 1884)
Context: I tell you, if one wants to be active, one must not be afraid of going wrong, one must not be afraid of making mistakes now and then. Many people think that they will become good just by doing no harm - but that's a lie, and you yourself used to call it that. That way lies stagnation, mediocrity.
Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring you in the face like some imbecile. You don't know how paralyzing that is, that stare of a blank canvas is, which says to the painter, You can't do a thing. The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerises some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of 'you can't' once and for all.
Life itself, too, is forever turning an infinitely vacant, dispiriting blank side towards man on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. But no matter how vacant and vain, how dead life may appear to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, who knows something, will not be put off so easily. He wades in and does something and stays with it, in short, he violates, "defiles" - they say. Let them talk, those cold theologians.

Life , Faith , Appearance , Dead

“The world is but a canvas to the imagination.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

World , Imagination

“I love movies that don’t necessarily tell me how I should feel or how I should think but give me this canvas that I can go away and have a conversation with myself and people around me.”

Chloé Zhao (1982) Chinese film director, screenwriter, and film producer

People , Thinking , Love , Feeling

“Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can.
There is never too much colour…”

Stephie Pahlavi Zan

Painting , Life

“One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.”

Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) German historian and philosopher

Source: The Decline of the West, Vol 1: Form and Actuality

Color

“Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.”

Annie Dillard book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Source: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“And if my heart was a canvas, every square inch of it would be painted over with you.”

Cassandra Clare book Lady Midnight

Variant: These pictures are my heart. And if my heart was a canvas, every square inch of it would be painted over with you.
Source: Lady Midnight

For Him , For Boyfriend , Heart , Painting

“Why all these paintings of you? Because I'm an artist, Emma. These pictures are my heart. And if my heart was a canvas, every square inch of it would be painted over with you.”

Cassandra Clare book Lady Midnight

Source: Lady Midnight

Heart , Painting

“Our mind is the canvas on which the artists lay their colour; their pigments are our emotions; their chiaroscuro the light of joy, the shadow of sadness. The masterpiece is of ourselves, as we are of the masterpiece.”

Kakuzo Okakura book The Book of Tea

Source: The Book of Tea

Sadness , Light , Joy

“I didn't remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

Color , Memory , Past

“A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.”

Louis L'Amour (1908–1988) Novelist, short story writer

Source: Education of a Wandering Man (1989), Ch. 10

Women , Men , People , Way

“The laws of physics is the canvas God laid down on which to paint his masterpiece”

Dan Brown book Angels & Demons

Source: Angels & Demons

God , Law , Painting

“How right that the body changed over time, becoming a gallery of scars, a canvas of experience, a testament to life and one's capacity to endure it.”

Janet Fitch (1955) American writer

Life , Change , Time

“With every experience, you alone are painting your own canvas, thought by thought, choice by choice.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

Painting

“I faced the gaudy sunflower on her canvas bag -- it looked hand-painted and at last my eyes fell into hers. I said, 'Thanks for the card.' Her smile put the sunflower to shame. She walked off.”

Jerry Spinelli book Stargirl

Source: Stargirl

Smile , Painting

“The heart is an artist that paints over what profoundly disturbs it, leaving on the canvas a less dark, less sharp version of the truth.”

Dean Koontz book Forever Odd

Source: Forever Odd

Truth , Heart , Painting

“Alec dragged the heavy canvas bag out of the back of the van, dropping it on the sidewalk. "Ready to go." He announced. "Lets kick some demon butt!"
Jace looked at him a little oddly. "You alright?”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

“[ Impressionism was] the beginning of a cult devoted to the material on the canvas – the actual pigment..”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

posthumous

“The individual representation of the object, treated sympathetically or anti-pathetically, is highly necessary and is an enrichment to the world in form. The elimination of the human relationship causes the vacuum which makes all of us suffer in various degrees – an individual alteration of the details of the object represented is necessary in order to display on the canvas the whole physicals reality.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

Source: 1930s, On my Painting (1938), pp. 17-18

World , Reality , Suffering

“Moonlight on canvas, midnight and wine,Two shadows starting to softly combine.
The picture they're painting
Is one of the heart;
And to those who have seen it,
It's a true work of art.Oh, the red strokes,
Passions uncaged;
Thundering moments of tenderness rage.
Oh, the red strokes,
Tempered and strong (Fearlessly drawn),
Burning the night like the dawn.”

Garth Brooks (1962) American country music artist

The Red Strokes, written by Jim Garver, Lisa Sanderson, Jenny Yates, and G. Brooks.
Song lyrics, In Pieces (1993)

Strong , Rage , Passion , Wine

“The observer is a prince who enjoys his incognito everywhere. The lover of life makes the world his family, just as the lover of the fair sex devises his family from all discovered, discoverable and undiscoverable beauties; as the lover of pictures lives in an enchanted society of painted dreams on canvas.”

Charles Baudelaire Le Peintre de la vie moderne

L'observateur est un prince qui jouit partout de son incognito. L'amateur de la vie fait du monde sa famille, comme l'amateur du beau sexe compose sa famille de toutes les beautés trouvées, trouvables et introuvables; comme l'amateur de tableaux vit dans une société enchantée de rêves peints sur toile.
III: "L'artiste, homme du monde, homme des foules et enfant"
Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863)

Life , World , Family , Beauty

“I start off on the canvas and, little by little, it imposes its own solution. But that solution is not easy to find.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

1970's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970 - 1972)

“In that Renaissance (Cellini, Tintoretto, Titian..) there was an explosion of unique truthfulness, a love of painting and form... Then come the Jesuits and everything is formal; everything has to be taught and learned. It required a revolution for nature to be rediscovered; for Delacroix to paint his beach at Etratat, Corot his roman rubble, Gustave Courbet his forest scenes and his waves. And how miserable slow that revolution was, how many stages it had to go through!... These artists had not yet discovered that nature has more to do with depth than with surfaces. I can tell you, you can do things to the surface.... but by going deep you automatically go to the truth. You feel a healthy need to be truthful. You'd rather strip your canvas right down than invent or imagine a detail. You want to know.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), pp. 156-157, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif'

Love , Truth , Feeling , Imagination

“Stuart Davis.... is one of but few, who realized his canvas as a.... two-dimensional surface plane.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

In 'Stuart Davis', Arshile Gorky, in 'Creative Art 9', September 1931, p. 213
1930 - 1941

“One of the reasons I was asked to do the portrait [of president J. F. Kennedy, winter of 1962–63, destined for the Truman Library, Independence, Mo] is that, with luck, I can start and finish a life-size portrait in one sitting (after a couple of preliminary sessions of sketches to determine the pose and familiarize myself with my impression of the sitter). After years of working on my portraits (mostly of friends) for months at a time, I found myself getting bogged down in overly conscientious effort and discovered that by working swiftly I could enter into an almost passive relationship to the canvas and get closer to the essential gesture of the sitter. However, working at top speed this way, I require the absolute immobility of the sitter. This was impossible with President Kennedy because of his extreme restlessness: he read papers, talked on the phone, jotted down notes, crossed and uncrossed his legs, shifted from one arm of the chair to another, always in action at rest. So I had to find a new approach.”

Elaine de Kooning (1918–1989) American painter

n.p.
1950 - 1971, Painting a Portrait of the President', Elaine de Kooning (1964)

Life , Way , Effort , Winter

“It [the Mauve-district in the U. S. ] relates to a theme which appears on-and-off, of pictures that often have one central vast shape, district, or territory; in this case, the shape itself [a square] is a play on the very shape of the canvas”

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist

quote in 1969
Quote from 'The collection', MOMA, online http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=80712
1960s

Quotes , Appearance

“[My own goal is] to be completely empty of ideas at the moment of setting brush to canvas, the head being just as empty as the canvas.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

In a conversation with Pierre Loeb, circa 1946; as quoted on the website of the Jorn Museum 'Articles' by Jorn http://www.museumjorn.dk/en/article_presentation.asp?AjrDcmntId=255,
1940 - 1948, Various sources

Idea

“You put a blob of yellow here, and another at the further edge of the canvas: straight away a rapport is established between them. Colour acts in the way that music does, if you like... There is more sensitivity in technique than in the rest of the picture.”

Georges Braque (1882–1963) French painter and sculptor

Source: 1946 - 1963, Cahiers d'art', 1954, p. 16

Music , Way

“"I almost wish I were not a painter," observed my companion.
"Why so? one would think at such a time you would most exult in your privilege of being able to imitate the various brilliant and delightful touches of nature."
"No; for instead of delivering myself up to the full enjoyment of them as others do, I am always troubling my head about how I could produce the same effect upon canvas; and as that can never be done, it is more vanity and vexation of spirit."”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. IX : A Snake in the Grass; Helen to Gilbert

Nature , Thinking , Time

“If you push it, it feels good; I don’t know what it is. It must have something to do with kinesthesia. I feel now that I am painting I'm not drawing anything, or even representing non-objective art. You know, you can represent abstract art, too, as well as heads figures, nudes. A lot of abstract artists are just representational painters, you know that. And a lot of figurative artists are very abstract. I don't feel as if I'm doing that. I feel more as if I'm shaping something with my hands. I feel as if I've always wanted to get to that state. Like a blind man in a dark room had some clay, what would he make? I end up with 2 or 3 forms on a canvas, but it gets very physical for me. I always thought I am a very spiritual man, not interested in paint, and now I discover myself to be very physical and very involved with matter. I want to be involved with how heavy things are, a balloon, how light things are, things levitating, pushing forms, make me feel as if my hand is pushing in a head, bulges out here and pushes there.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1961 - 1980, transcript of a public forum at Boston university', conducted by Joseph Ablow 1966, pp. 73-75

Art , Feeling , Light , Drawing

“Cleric said he thought Virgil, when he was dying at Brindisi, must have remembered that passage. After he had faced the bitter fact that he was to leave the 'Aeneid' unfinished, and had decreed that the great canvas, crowded with figures of gods and men, should be burned rather than survive him unperfected, then his mind must have gone back to the perfect utterance of the 'Georgics,' where the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to the furrow; and he must have said to himself, with the thankfulness of a good man, 'I was the first to bring the Muse into my country.”

Willa Cather book My Ántonia

Book III, Ch. 2
My Antonia (1918)

Men , God , Perfection , Country

“What a queer thing touch is, the stroke of the brush. In the open air, exposed to wind, to sun, to the curiosity of the people, you work as you can, you feel your canvas anyhow... But when after a time you take up again this study and arrange your brush strokes in the direction of the objects - certainly it is more harmonious and pleasant to look at, and you add whatever you have of serenity and cheerfulness.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, 10 Sept. 1889; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 605), pp. 33-34
1880s, 1889

People , Feeling , Study , Time

“Listen, monsieur Vollard, I worked a lot out of doors at L'Estaque. Except for that there was no other event of importance in my life during the years 1870-71. I divided my time between the field and the studio... Zola closed his letter by urging me to come back to Paris too [in 1872 Cézanne went back to Paris].... but all the same, something told me to go back to Paris. It was too long since I had seen the Louvre. But understand, Monsieur Vollard, I was working at that time on a landscape which was not going well. So I stayed at Aix a little while longer to study on my canvas.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Quote in: Cezanne, by Ambroise Vollard, Dover publications Inc. New York, 1984, p. 32-33
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, 1860s - 1870s

Life , Understanding , Study , Time

“I am glad you encouraged me with the 'Stoke' [his painting 'Stoke-by-Nayland', circa 1835] What say you to a summer morning? July or August, at eight or nine o’clock, after a slight shower during the night, to enhance the dews in the shadowed part of the picture, under 'Hedge row elms and hillocks green.' Then the plough, cart, horse, gate, cows, donkey, &c. are all good paintable material for the foreground, and the size of the canvas sufficient to try one's strength, and keep one at full collar.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Letter to William Purton (6 February 1836), as quoted in Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams, Constable (Tate Gallery Publications, London, 1993), p. 380
1830s

Horse , Summer , Parting , Painting

“Can the philosopher, big with the inspiration of an idea that is to reform mankind, believe that he is to be beckoned from this sensible existence at the very instant when he is mustering his breath to speak the word of light? Should he perish so, the weary ages must pass away—the world's, whose life sand may fall, drop by drop—before another intellect is prepared to develop the truth that might have been uttered then. But history affords many an example where the most precious spirit… has gone hence… The prophet dies, and the man of torpid heart and sluggish brain lives on. The poet leaves his song half sung, or finishes it, beyond the scope of mortal ears… The painter—as Allston did—leaves half his conception on the canvas to sadden us with its imperfect beauty, and goes to picture forth the whole… in the hues of heaven. But rather such incomplete designs of life will be perfected nowhere. This so frequent abortion of man's dearest projects must be taken as proof that the deeds of earth, however etherealized by piety or genius, are without value, except as exercises and manifestations of the spirit.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

"The Artist of the Beautiful" (1844)

Life , Truth , Age , World

“One thing is sure – we have to transform the three-dimensional world of objects into the two-dimensional world of the canvas... To transform three into two dimensions is for me an experience full of magic in which I glimpse for a moment that fourth dimension which my whole being is seeking.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

Source: 1930s, On my Painting (1938), p. 16

World

“As the wind and quarter-sea had mounted the Indomitable, big though she was, had seemed to bound from trough to trough like the lion she followed, sail and spindrift pouring from the bulging canvas like tropical rain.”

Douglas Reeman (1924–2017) British author

For My Country's Freedom, Cap 6 "Cross of St George"

Sea

“I held it imperative to evolve an instrument of thought which would aid in cutting through all cultural opiates, past and present, so that a direct, immediate, and truly free vision could be achieved, and an idea be revealed with clarity. To acquire such an instrument, however… demanded full resolution of the past, and present through it. No shouting about individualism, no capering before an expanse of canvas, no manipulation of academic conceits or technical fetishes can truly liberate..”

Clyfford Still (1904–1980) American artist

Letter to Gordon Smith, January 1, 1959, as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 194
1950s

Idea , Past

“Then the white man hates him [the Native American], and hunts him down like the wild beasts of the forest, and so the red-crayon sketch is rubbed out, and the canvas is ready for a picture of manhood a little more like God's own image.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

"The Pilgrims of Plymouth" http://www.unz.org/Pub/BrainerdCephas-1901v02-00267 (Oration, December 22, 1855), in Cephas Brainerd and Eveline Warner Brainerd (eds), The New England Society Orations: Volume II. New York: The Century Co., 1901, p. 298.

God , Hate

“If the whiteness they pursue is cool and haughty and blank,
history is uncool, reaches out gawkily for affinities, asserts itself boldly,
threatens to mark, to break through and stain the primed white canvas
that is their life.
For, having primed it, they do not know where to start,
how to make a mark. They are alone in the world, a small new
island of whiteness. Or so they think; they do not know, or perhaps
they do not want to know, that the neighbourhood is full of people
like them. Thus they are steeped in its silence.”

Zoë Wicomb (1948) South African author resident in Scotland

Playing in the Light (2006)

Life , People , World , History

“I find it increasingly necessary to express my ideas first in engraving or lithography so that they may develop before I start to paint. Every year my form and expression become more sensitive, and my ideas frequently have to pass through three graphic stages before I can start on the canvas... I can hear you say no, that is impossible because the value of the colors demands quite different treatment from black and white, but it is the inner idea that I try to establish firmly through graphic preparation.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

In a letter to de:Gustav Schiefler, 1924, in Annemarie Dube-Heynig, Kirchner: His Graphic Art, Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1961, p. 96 - note 46
1920's

Color , Idea , Painting

“I dash out to the banks of the river [river the 'Loup', at Cagnes, France] and find myself amongst the rushes and the reeds. I grind some pigment over all this and the wind makes their slender stalks bend and appliqués them with precision and delicacy on to my canvas, which I thus offer to quivering nature: I obtain a vegetal mark. Then it starts to rain; a fine spring rain: I expose my canvas to the rain.... and I have the mark of the rain!”

Yves Klein (1928–1962) French artist

a mark of an atmospheric event.
In 1960; p. 61
1960 -1964, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings"

Spring , Nature

“.. But there is better. Simplicity, being direct. Everything else is just a game, just building castles in the sky... Basically I don't think of anything when I paint. I see colours. I strive with joy to convey them on to my canvas just as I see them. They arrange themselves as they choose, any old way. Sometimes that makes a picture. I'm brainless animal. Very content if I could be just that..”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 158-159, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif'

Way , Game , Thinking , Animals

“Seeking an English equivalent for peinture relative, Fritz Glarner settled on the term 'relational painting' towards the end of 1946, which he applied retrospectively to some of his earlier paintings and all his subsequent works. It was a term that suited the kind of abstract painting he pursued, focused on relating geometric shapes and ground through colour in ways which would make shape and ground alternate to produce what he called 'pumping planes'. While acknowledging the influence of Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), with whom he was closely associated in New York, Glarner replaced the balancing of horizontality and verticality achieved in Mondrian's painting with interlocking rectangles and wedges that expand out towards the edges of the canvas.”

Dore Ashton (1928–2017) art critic

Dore Ashton, "Fritz Glarner," Art International, vol. 7, no. 1, January 1963, p.51; Republished in: National Gallery of Australia, ‎Michael Lloyd, ‎Michael Desmond (1992). European and American Paintings and Sculpturee 1870-1970 in the Australian National Gallery, p. 246

Way , Painting

“For me, the nude body is like a raw material.. another artist might use oil or clay. I love the fact that, en masse, it can be turned into an infinite number of shapes or abstractions, while the setting I choose.. rural, urban, indoors or out.. is like a canvas.”

Spencer Tunick (1967) American photographer

Over 1,700 men and women strip naked in square in Germany.. and not a sun lounger in sight, 2012

Love

“The more I think about colour, the more convinced I become that this reflected half-tint is the principle that must predominate, because it is this that gives the true tone, the tone that constitutes the value, the thing that matters in giving life and character to the object. Light, to which the schools teach us to attach equal importance and which they place on the canvas at the same time as the half-tint and shadow, is really only an accident. Without grasping this principle, one cannot understand true colour, I mean the colour that gives the feeling of thickness and depth and of that essential difference that distinguishes one object from another.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

29 April 1854 (p. 228)
1831 - 1863, Delacroix' 'Journal' (1847 – 1863)

Life , School , Feeling , Understanding

“If the image was sketched onto the canvas and spontaneously drawn, colour would often be restrained and unfree... The most important and the most difficult liberation process we went trough, the one that has distinguished our art, was the freeing of colour, the transition to a painterly spontaneity.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

Statement (c. 1944), on automatic drawing, quoted in Asger Jorn (2002) by Arken Museum of Modern Art, p. 162
1940 - 1948, Various sources

Art

“I have just finished one painting and am already at work on the preliminary drawings for the next one. I must do something in order to get rid of such habits or I won't manage to find time for any vacation. I have had this new painting in my mind since January, and must get it down on canvas.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Quote from his letter to Freundlich, 15 July 15, 1938; as cited in Kandinsky in Paris: 1934-1944 - exhibition catalog, published by The Solomon K. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1985, p. 27
1930 - 1944

Time , Drawing , Painting

“I sincerely rejoice at the acceptance of our new Constitution by nine States. It is a good canvas, on which some strokes only want retouching. What these are, I think are sufficiently manifested by the general voice from north to south, which calls for a bill of rights.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to James Madison (July 31, 1788); reported in Memoir, correspondence, and miscellanies from the papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volumes 1-2 (1829), p. 343
1780s

Thinking , Sincerity

“But you begin to feel as you go on working that unless painting proves its right to exist by being critical and self-judging, it has no reason to exist at all - or is not even possible. The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

1961 - 1980, ARTnews Annual', October 1966

Art , Feeling , Painting

“Before the blank canvas, the unrealized work, completely in the artist’s head, must seem to him equal to the greatest. To say that which has never been said – is the reason for all artistic work. But only outside of the work should the artist worthily get down on his knees before the great artists of the past... Rembrandt in our days would be Rembrandt again, because the work of the master is his self. But in order to be Rembrandt in our days, he would have used new ways that would give a new culture.”

Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938) expressionist painter

Vol. 1: 'My beautiful One, My Unique!', pp. 130-140
1895 - 1905, Lettres à un Inconnu, 1901 – 1905; Museo Communale, Ascona

Way , Past

“My work is in a complete transformation. Lately, in my studio in Amsterdam, 'beings' re-emerge more and more, but I have repainted all the canvases that I have brought with me [from Amsterdam to Paris]. It is matter itself. On the canvas, no discovery, no personal drama, no submission to a rhythm.... freed from 'Victory Boogiewoogie' [title of the last work of Piet Mondrian, 1944], bepop, bepop, we free ourselves from rhythm, we are not there yet, but it is coming... Now I paint stains, bigger stains, colours endlessly reapplied one upon the other, I scrape and I put down new stains of colour unto nothing remains but one great plane, concentrated and linked at the same time, suddenly a vivid red or yellow and the canvas and being merge.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

Quote in a letter of Karel Appel from Paris to Aldo van Eyck, October 1950; as quoted in (MR1-85); Karel Appel, a gesture of colour, Jean-François Lyotard, (original French text of 1992 based upon intensive correspondence with Karel Appel), Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Herman Parret; University Press, Leuven, Belgium, 2009, p. 99

Time , Victory , Painting , Personality

“Each painting has its own way of evolving. One may start with a few color areas on the canvas; another with a myriad of lines, another with a profusion of colors... Once I sense the suggestion I begin to paint intuitively. The suggestion then becomes a phantom that must be caught and made real. As I work, or when the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself.”

William Baziotes (1912–1963) American painter

I Cannot Evolve Any Concrete Theory, William Baziotes, in Possibilities, Vol. I, no. 1, New York, winter 1947-48, p. 2
William Baziotes is referring in this quote to Surrealist automatism originally a surrealist art concept
1940s

Color , Way , Sense , Painting

“Imagine an immense plain.... in the middle, a small Gothic chapel surrounded by trees.... around that a hundred tents made of white canvas.... in open-air kitchens huge pots of boiling soup, incredible ragouts..”

Eugène Boudin (1824–1898) French painter

Quote of Boudin in a letter to his brother, 1857; as cited in the descritption of 'The Pardon of Saint-Anne-La-Palud' by the Met-museum https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/744059]
Boudin described in his typical way the scene of the sacred procession of the Pardon of Saint-Anne-la-Palud, a major religious festival in Brittany, that he witnessed in 1857
1850s - 1870s

Imagination , Tree

“Nature as it is seen and nature as it is felt, the nature that is there.. (he pointed towards the green and blue plain; J. G.) and the nature that is here (he tapped his forehead, J. G.) both of which have to fuse in order to endure, to live that life, half human and half divine, which is the life of art or, if you will.. the life of god. The landscape is reflected, humanized, rationalized within me. I objectivize it, project it, fix it on my canvas..”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 150, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif'

Life , God , Art , Nature

“I am most astonished by what has been written about the [painting] 'Alexander', which is so well done that I must suppose there are not many lovers of art [amatori] at Messina. I am also surprised that Your Lordship [Don Antonio Ruffo] should complain as much about the price as about the canvas, but if Your Lordship wishes to return it as he did the sketch [schizzo] of Homer, I will do another Alexander... If Your Lordship likes the Alexander as is, very well. If he does not want to keep it, six hundred florins remain outstanding. And for the Homer [painting] five hundred florins plus the expenses of canvas, it being understood that everything is at Your Lordship's expense. Having agreed to it, would he kindly send me his desired measurements. Awaiting the response to settle the matter.”

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) Dutch 17th century painter and etcher

Quote of Rembrandt's letter, Nov/Dec. 1662, to buyer Don Antonio Ruffo from Messina, Sicily (location: RD, 1662/12, 509); as quoted in Rembrandt's Eyes, Simon Schama, Alfred A. Knopf, Borzoi Books, NEW YORK 1999, p. 591, & notes 32-36
Rembrant's reaction after complaints of Don Antonio Ruffo, dispatched through the Dutch consul in Messina, Jan van den Broeck, who was on his way to Amsterdam. Once there he was to inform Isaac Just (presumably the intermediary between Rembrandt and the Messina patrician), of the intense dissatisfaction at the work, which Don Ruffo had received. 'The Alexander', he complained, being unacceptably stitched together from four separate pieces, showed seams which were 'too horrible for words.'..g with so many defects.. (Don Ruffo already bought Rembrandt's painting Aristotle with a Bust of Homer c. 1655 and still existing: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rembrandt_-_Aristotle_with_a_Bust_of_Homer_-_WGA19232.jpg, but 'The Alexander' of Rembrandt is lost).
1640 - 1670

Art , Lovers , Painting

“.. you see they hung my painting here [on her show 'Wind', 2009] I did that in the early 1990s. People never really liked them so much back then, they thought they looked more like photographs. Actually, I was doing them when I was still married to Gerhard Richter [till 1993], and it was somehow in relation to what he was doing, you know, these kind of side-to-side gestural abstracts – done like this [gestures as if pulling a squeegee over a surface from one side to the other] like paintings of the 1950s. Mine were called 'Basic Research', they were rubbings of oil paint on canvas – frottages of the floor of my studio. I did quite a few of these. [Gerhard] Richter put one up in his studio for some time... But he found it too hard and then took it out after a while.”

Isa Genzken (1948) German sculptor

2001 - 2010, Out to Lunch with Isa Genzken' (2009)

People , Time , Painting

“The first thing to change in my painting was the color [c. 1908-09]. I forsook natural color for pure color. I had come to feel that the colors of nature cannot be reproduced on canvas. Instinctively I felt that painting had to find a new way to express the beauty of nature.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote of Mondrian about 1905-1910; in 'Mondrian, Essays' ('Plastic art and pure plastic art', 1937 and his other essays, (1941-1943) by Piet Mondrian; Wittenborn-Schultz Inc., New York, 1945, p. 10; as cited in De Stijl 1917-1931 - The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art, by H.L.C. Jaffé http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/jaff001stij01_01/jaff001stij01_01.pdf; J.M. Meulenhoff, Amsterdam 1956, p. 40

Beauty , Color , Way , Feeling

“"High" and "low" are completely arbitrary and artificial distinctions that some bloated assholes invented to make life more complicated. Comics are considered "low", but when Roy Lichtensein comes and picks out one panel of a comic, projects and paints it on a canvas then it's suddenly "high" art? Give me a break. The only thing that I care about in art is quality, intensity. Is a work of art capable of touching and moving me? Does it cause an emotional impact on me? Does it startle, surprise, upset, excite me? Does it make me think? Does it inspire me? Does it stimulate my imagination? Does it change the way I view the world to some degree?”

Gottfried Helnwein (1948) Austrian photographer and painter

Interview by Michal Szyksznian http://www.gottfried-helnwein-interviews.com/interviews/celebritarian.html, celebritarian.pl, 2009

Life , World , Art , Way

“I am an artist. Gardening is my graffiti. A graffiti artist beautifies walls; I beautify parkways and yards. I treat the garden as a piece of cloth and the plants and the trees are the embellishment of that cloth. You’d be surprised what soil can do if you let it be your canvas.”

Ron Finley American fashion designer and urban gardener

Ron Finley at TED2013 (2013)

Tree , Clothes

“I consider my painting finished when my eyes goes to a particular spot on the canvas. But if I put the picture away about thirty feet on the wall and the movements keep returning to me and the eye seems to be responding to something living, then it is finished.”

William Baziotes (1912–1963) American painter

Source: 1950s, Artists' Session at Studio 35, (1950), p. 213

Painting

“Immediately and definitively [after starting a painting] I determine the effect of sunlight, day and shadow, without being concerned with any detail. This enable me to see in the started painting the whole of it, which my mind already saw before I begun to work - I see it appearing on the panel or canvas rather soon and can consider in this way the harmony of the composed objects and colors.”

Barend Cornelis Koekkoek (1803–1862) painter from the Northern Netherlands

(original Dutch, citaat van B.C. Koekkoek:) Ik bepaal dadelijk en voor vast [nadat ik een schilderij begin] het effect van zonlicht, dag en schaduw, zonder mij met eenige uitvoerigheid op te houden. Hierdoor ben ik in staat gesteld, om in mijne aangelegde schilderij een geheel, dat mijn geest reeds vóór dat ik begon te arbeiden zag, binnen korten tijd op het paneel of doek te zien, en over de harmonie de zamengestelde voorwerpen en kleuren te kunnen oordelen..
Source: Herinneringen aan en Mededeelingen van…' (1841), p. 99:

Color , Way , Appearance , Painting

“Contact with other artists has always been of great importance to me. When the artists I know best used to meet.... the talk was mostly of ideas in painting. There was an unconscious collaboration between artists. Whether you agreed or disagreed was of no consequence. It was exciting and you were compelled to paint over your head…. If your painting was criticized adversely, you either imitated someone to give it importance, or you simply suffered and painted harder to make your feelings on canvas convincing... What does happen when artists meet is that we are able to see more clearly the unfolding of character as time goes on.”

William Baziotes (1912–1963) American painter

Quote from Baziotes' text for the symposium 'The Creative process', Art Digest Vol. 28, no 8, 15; January 1954, p. 33
Baziotes is referring here to the many art-debates and exchanges between the New York Abstract Expressionist artists
1950s

Feeling , Idea , Suffering , Time

“As I wanted to suggest a luxuriant and untamed type of nature, a tropical sun that sets aglow everything around it, I was obliged to give my figures a suitable setting.It is indeed the outdoor life — yet intimate at the same time, in the thickets and the shady streams, these women whispering in an immense palace decorated by nature itself, with all the riches that Tahiti has to offer. This is the reason behind all these fabulous colors, this subdued and silent glow."But none of this exists!""Oh yes it does, as an equivalent of the grandeur, the depth, the mystery of Tahiti, when you have to express it on a canvas measuring only one square meter."Very subtle, very knowing in her naïveté is the Tahitian Eve. The riddle hiding in the depth of her childlike eyes is still incommunicable to me.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Source: 1890s - 1910s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), p. 137: Diverse Choses, his notebook (1896 - 1898)

Life , Women , Color , Nature

“There is not a canvas of that time that does not foreshadow the overthrow of the foundations on which the human race thought itself firmly established, where it felt itself secure. At the moment when the Ballets Russes were at their height, when the Neo-Impressionists and Fauves had dispensed with the drawing style of the Renaissance because it could not contain the purity of the colour - these humbly painted, angular, grey, ascetic pictures were, really, an unwelcome sight. It was not any upheaval of a geological nature that they prefigured, but a cataclysm in the human order. No tremor of the earth was registered, but a tremor of the spirit that disturbed the intellect of civilised man, too long the slave of his immobilised senses. At last he was beginning to suspect that something dangerous was approaching.”

Albert Gleizes (1881–1953) French painter

after 1920, The Epic, From immobile form to mobile form (1925)

Nature , Sense , Time , Drawing

“Nor, on the other hand, are there any masculine charms [in Gabriele Münter's work] either: no 'sinewy brushwork', no heaps of paint, 'hurled on to the canvas'. The pictures are painted throughout with a delicately and correctly sensed measure of external strength, with not a trace of feminine or masculine coquetry in the 'making'. We could almost say that they are painted modestly; i. e. that they were inspired, not by a desire for outward display, but by a purely inward compulsion.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Quote of Kandinsky, 1913; in the introduction of an exhibition-catalog 'Neue Künstlervereinigung', Munich; as cited by , in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 120
1910 - 1915

Sense , Painting

“If you saw the first painted color-studies that I made when I came here to Nuenen [1883] - and the present canvas [1885] - side by side - I think you'd see that as far as colour is concerned - things have livened up. I think that the question of the breaking of colours in the relationships of the colours will occupy you too one day. For as an art expert and critic, one must also, it seems to me - be sure of one's ground and have certain convictions. At least for one's own pleasure and to be able to give reasons, and at the same time one must be able to explain it in a few words to others, who sometimes turn to someone like you for enlightenment when they want to know something more about art.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to Theo, from Amsterdam, 30 April 1885, http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let497/letter.html
Vincent refers to his famous painting Eaters' https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Vincent_van_Gogh_-_The_potato_eaters_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg'Potato
1880s, 1885

Pleasure , Art , Color , Question

“When you make a certain sound and look your thing, it makes it all the more impactful to drop that and start with a new thing. So I cut my hair off and lost the hat. It felt only natural to me to tear that canvas down and put a new one up.”

James Bay (1990) British singer-songwriter

[2018-03-28, https://www.femalefirst.co.uk/music/musicnews/james-bays-reinvention-inspired-sheeran-taylor-swift-1136499.html, James Bay's reinvention inspired by Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift, femalefirst.co.uk, 2018-08-25]

Nature , Tear

“.. on the banks of a very picturesque mountain stream that pours out its crystalline water in four or five waterfalls into the Dussel brook... Oh, in this cave, at this crystal flood, I often felt myself so well! Sensations frequently welled up in my bosom at this blessed place that ennoble the soul and make pour out joyful tombs; [they] give the heart impressions that neither greatness or honor can steal from us. An indomitable longing came to me, to learn more and more about these enchanting shades of beautiful and holy nature, and to transfer them on the canvas with my brush.”

Barend Cornelis Koekkoek (1803–1862) painter from the Northern Netherlands

(original Dutch, citaat van B.C. Koekkoek:) ..aan den oever van eenen hoogst schilderachtigen bergstroom die zijn kristallijnen vocht door vier of vijf watervalletjes in de Dusselbeek uitstort.. .Oh, in deze grot, bij dezen kristallen vloed, gevoelde ik mij dikwijls zo wel! Gewaarwordingen, die den ziel veredelen, vreugdentranen uit het oog doen vloeijen, het hart indrukken geven, die grootheid noch eer ons kunnen ontvreemden, welden vaak in dit zalige oord in mijn boezem op. Een ontembare zucht greep mij aan, om die tooverachtige schakeringen der schoone en heilige natuur meer en meer te leren kennen, en die door mijn penseel op het doek over te brengen.
he frequently visited this location along the Düssel stream, as Koekoek's quote illustrates
Source: Herinneringen aan en Mededeelingen van…' (1841), p. 37-38

Beauty , Soul , Mountain , Nature

“I insist on establishing the following dates indicating my prior paternity, [and the discussions that I held]
1884, 'Grande Jatte' study, exhibition of the Independants
1884-1885, 'Grande Jatte' composition
1885, studies at the 'Grande Jatte' and at Grandcamp; I took up again the 'Grande Jatte' composition October 1886. 4 October [18]85 I make Pissarro's acquaintance at Durand-Ruel's.
1886, January or February, a small canvas by Pissarro, divided and pure color, at Clozet's, the dealer on the Rue de Chateaudun.”

Georges Seurat (1859–1891) French painter

Quotes, 1881 - 1890, Letter to Félix Fénéon', June 1890

Color , Study

“The canvas is a battlefield without limits.”

Antonio Saura (1930–1998) Spanish artist

Unsourced

“.. there comes a point when something catches on the canvas, something grips on the canvas. I don’t know what it is, you can put your paint on the surface? Most of the time it looks like paint, and who the hell wants paint on a surface? But there does come a time – you take it off, put it on, goes over here, moves over a foot, as you go closer you start moving in inches not feet, half-inches – 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. That's what I mean by something grips in a canvas. The moment that happens you are then sucked into the whole thing. Like some kind of rhythm.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1961 - 1980, transcript of a public forum at Boston university', conducted by Joseph Ablow 1966, p. 67

Feeling , Hell , Thinking , Time

“The canvas glow'd beyond ev'n Nature warm,
The pregnant quarry teem'd with human form.”

Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) Irish physician and writer

Source: The Traveller (1764), Line 137.

Nature

“Unlike writers or painters, we don't sit down in front of a blank canvas and say, 'How do I start? Where do I start?' We're given the springboard of the text, a plane ticket, told to report to Alabama, and there's a group of people all ready to make a film and it's a marvelous life.”

Albert Finney (1936–2019) English actor

Interview with Paul Fischer at Dark Horizons (2 December 2003).

Life , People

“I ought to respect myself for my friends' sake, and my children's. It is time, at fifty-six, to begin, at least, to know oneself, — and I do know what I am not, and your regard for me has at least awakened me to believe in the possibility that I may yet make some impression with my "light" — my "dews" — my "breezes" — my bloom and freshness, — no one of which qualities has yet been perfected on the canvas of any painter in the world.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Quote from John Constable's letter to C.R. Leslie (March 1833), from The Letters of John Constable, R.A. to C. R. Leslie, R.A. 1826-1837 (Constable & Co., 1931), p. 104
1830s

Children , World , Light , Time

“Beside my own intense, multiple impressions of him, I also had to contend with his 'world image' created by the endless newspaper photographs, TV appearances, caricatures. Realizing this, I began to collect hundreds of photographs torn from newspapers and magazines and never missed an opportunity to draw him when he appeared on TV. These snapshots covered every angle, from above, below, profile, back, standing, sitting, walking, close-up, off in the distance. I particularly liked tiny shots where the features were indistinct yet unmistakable. Covering my walls with my own sketches and these photographs, I worked from canvas to canvas (the smallest 2 feet high, the largest, 11) always striving for a composite image.”

Elaine de Kooning (1918–1989) American painter

n.p.
1950 - 1971, Painting a Portrait of the President', Elaine de Kooning (1964)

World , Appearance , Drawing

“There are so many things to paint in the world – in the cities – so much to see. Does art need to represent this variety and contribute to its proliferation? Can art be that free? The difficulties begin when you understand what it is that the soul will not permit the hand to make. To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting. The canvas you are working on modifies the previous ones in an unending, baffling chain which never seems to finish.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

What sympathy is demanded of the viewer! He is asked to 'see' the future links
1961 - 1980, ARTnews Annual', October 1966

World , Art , Soul , Understanding

“I can't stress enough how important it is, if you are interested at all in painting, to look and to look a great deal at painting. There is no other way to find out about painting. After looking comes imitating. In my own case it was at first largely a technical immersion. How did Kline put down that color? Why did Guston leave the canvas bare at the edges? Why did H. Frankenthaler used unsized canvas. And so on.”

Frank Stella (1936) American artist

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, The Pratt lecture (1960), p. 113

Color , Way , Painting

“It was only in the evenings that I played the violin [c. 1999-1901, to earn his money for living]. During the day I was free to spend my time as I wished. With a few colours in a box, a canvas and a cheap easel under my arm, I would make my way to the Banks of the Seine... I painted to restore my peace of mind, to calm my desires and, above all, to purify myself a little... Make a career of painting. How I would have laughed if someone had talked to me about that! To be a painter is not a profession, no more than being an anarchist or a lover, a race-track rider..”

Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958) French painter

Source: Quotes dated, Dangerous Corner', 1929, p. 66

Money , Peace , Way , Lovers

“I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.”

John Updike book The Centaur

The Centaur (1963)

Truth , Beauty , Hope , Nature

“The oldest girl [his daughter Maro, four and a half years old] did this. She paints like a little bird. And this, the young one [Natasha, two and a half] did. See, she paints on both sides of the canvas. She is more like a passionate plumber. I wish I could paint as freely as they do. There is a gravity of playfulness in their work. If they could only keep it – but they will lose it as they grow older.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

1942 - 1948, A Painter in a Glass House' (1948)

Girl , Bird , Passion , Painting

“As far as the surface is concerned – oil on canvas, conventionally applied – my pictures have little to do with the original photograph. They are totally painting (whatever that may mean). On the other hand, they are so like the photograph that the thing that distinguished the photograph from all other pictures remains intact.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Notes, 1964-65; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: on 'Photo-paintings' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/subjects-2/photo-paintings-12
1960's

Painting

“the little roly-poly Russian-born rebel of the canvas.”

Jani Allan (1952) South African columnist and broadcaster

Description of Vladimir Tretchikoff from her interview with Tretchikoff published in the Just Jani column of the Sunday Times, republished in Face Value by Jani Allan.
Sunday Times

“.. And his painting is like the wind, like a breeze blowing the paint across the canvas, so unreal, so loose and far away from the worldly life.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

Life , Painting

“Artists encounter the landscape they propose to paint — they look at it, observe it from this angle and that. They are, as we say, absorbed in it. Or, in the case of abstract painters, the encounter may be with an idea, an inner vision, that in turn may be led off by the brilliant colors on the palette or the inviting rough whiteness of the canvas.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Ch 2 : The Nature of Creativity, p. 41
The Courage to Create (1975)

Color , Idea , Painting