Best Paint Quotes

The technology keeps moving forward, which makes it easier for the artists to tell their stories and paint the pictures they want.

Get scared. It will do you good. Smoke a bit, stare blankly at some ceilings, beat your head against some walls, refuse to see some people, paint and write. Get scared some more. Allow your little mind to do nothing but function. Stay inside, go out – I don’t care what you’ll do; but stay scared as hell. You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.

Paint the essential character of things.

I paint what I think, not what I see.

Naturally, there are times when every woman likes to be flattered… to feel she is the most important thing in someone’s world. Only a man can paint this picture.

I paint what I see and not what others like to see.

A man can be an artist… in anything, food, whatever. It depends on how good he is at it. Creasey’s art is death. He’s about to paint his masterpiece.

Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.

I started studying as an artist, but I got fed up with the fact that you can paint terrible pictures and if you explain them in an erudite way it’s called great art. I thought this was rubbish.

It is no use painting the foot of the tree white, the strength of the bark cries out from beneath the paint.

I wanted to paint nothing. I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing, and the soup can was it.

… painting a picture is like fighting a battle; and trying to paint a picture is, I suppose, like trying to fight a battle. It is, if anything, more exciting than fighting it successfully. But the principle is the same.

I do not presume to explain how to paint, but only how to get enjoyment.

Do not turn the superior eye of critical passivity upon these efforts …. We must not be ambitious. We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paint-box.

Just to paint is great fun … Try it if you have not done so – before you die.

I was good friends with Frank Sinatra, I heard Steve Kaufman painting his portrait, so I asked Steve to paint my portrait.

Being a broadcaster, man, you just sort of paint from a blank canvas, in a way.

If we want to make meaning, we need to make art. Cook, write, draw, doodle, paint, scrapbook, take pictures, collage, knit, rebuild an engine, sculpt, dance, decorate, act, sing – it doesn’t matter. As long as we’re creating, we’re cultivating meaning.

Because Ivy [Wilkes] is just starting out as an artist, I wanted to focus on [Georgia] O’Keeffe’s experiences when she was just starting out. I suspect there is a difference between being an unknown artist and being a celebrated artist. When nobody knows your work, nobody except you really cares whether or not you paint.

Wanna move out the hood and defeat that cancer
I ask how she stay on her feet like dancers
How she keep on adding paint to a life-size canvas.

I want the shuffles and echoes, and a certain mysteriousness… It’s so bloody hard to paint.

I paint people, not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be.

When I start to paint, it is real agony. I get nervous. The day before, I am already working up to it. Then I get to the studio and, once the image starts to emerge and come together, pleasure kicks in. And then you can see things that no other person can see.

I think I’ll paint roads
on my front room walls
to convince myself
that I’m going places

As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does

Calum offered to paint my nails but I said no because he always uses the wrong shade of purple.

I always want to be growing in my craft. Any artist should – whether you paint, whether you do music or film – always grow and study.

I want paint to work as flesh… my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them … As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does.

You can only learn to paint by drawing, for drawing is a way of reserving a place for color in advance.

I was always doing paintings. I actually started painting with oil paints when I was four years old. Not crayons, not pencils and that kid of stuff. I’d paint birds. Anything that moved, stuff like that.

People are tempted to politicize the fact that I paint black figures, and the complexity of this is an essential part of the work. But my starting point is always the language of painting itself and how that relates to the subject matter.

One could go on for ever as to whether the paint should be thick or thin, whether to paint the woman or the square, hard-edge or soft, but after a while such questions become a bore. They are merely problems in aesthetics, having only to do with the outer man.

A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.

The motivation to paint seems more pure, or at least more personal, when the artist is doing it for herself.

Last year when my grandma fell and broke her hip she couldn’t paint her toenails anymore. So my grandpa started doing it for her, even after he fell and broke his hip, too. For me, that’s love.