Best Painter Quotes

Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?

Everyone in their life has his own particular way of expressing life’s purpose – the lawyer his eloquence, the painter his palette, and the man of letters his pen from which the quick words of his story flow. I have my bicycle.

Picasso is a painter, so am I; Picasso is Spanish, so am I; Picasso is a communist, neither am I.

I painted. I wanted to be a painter. I sang.

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.

No one can be a painter unless he cares for painting above all else.

Nursing is an art: and if it is to be made an art, it requires an exclusive devotion as hard a preparation as any painter’s or sculptor’s work; for what is the having to do with dead canvas or dead marble, compared with having to do with the living body, the temple of God’s spirit? It is one of the Fine Arts: I had almost said, the finest of Fine Arts.

Artist – musicians, painters, writers, poets, always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life.

The painter wanders and loiters contentedly from place to place, always on the lookout for some brilliant butterfly of a picture which can be caught and carried safely home.

The painter strives and competes with nature.

The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the works of others as his standard.

The painter must be solitary. For if you are alone you are completely yourself, but if you are accompanied by a single companion, you are only half yourself.

The painter’s mind is a copy of the divine mind, since it operates freely in creating the many kinds of animals, plants, fruits, landscapes, countrysides, ruins, and awe-inspiring places.

It reflects no great honor on a painter to be able to execute only one thing well — such as a head, an academy figure, or draperies, animals, landscapes, or the like — in other words, confining himself to some particular object of study. This is so because there is scarcely a person so devoid of genius as to fail of success if he applies himself earnestly to one branch of study and practices it continually.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

The painter or draftsman ought to be solitary, in order that the well-being of the body not sap the vigour of the mind.

The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.

If you call painting dumb poetry, the painter may call poetry blind painting.

Make your faces so that they do not all have the same expression, as one sees with most painters, but give them different expression, according to age, complexion, and good or bad character.

O painter skilled in anatomy, beware lest the undue prominence of the bones, sinews and muscles cause you to become a wooden painter from the desire to make your nude figures reveal all.

Men and words are ready made, and you, O Painter, if you do not know how to make your figures move, are like an orator who knows not how to use his words.

O painter, take care lest the greed for gain prove a stronger incentive than renown in art, for to gain this renown is a far greater thing than is the renown of riches.

The painter who draws merely by practice and by eye, without any reason, is like a mirror which copies every thing placed in front of it without being conscious of their existence.

The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement

The painter makes real to others his innermost feelings about all that he cares for. A secret becomes known to everyone who views the picture through the intensity with which it is felt.

I hope to be a producer, a musician, a painter, a photographer – I’m going to push myself to do as many things as I can and see where it goes.

The painter’s obsession with his subject is all that he needs to drive him to work.

Painters of paintings, writers of books, never could tell the half.

It wasn’t that I wanted to be an artist. But when I took my first drawing class with the painter Doug Ohlson, I could never finish a drawing.

The process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than is the picture. The process in fact is habit-forming

I draw all the time. Drawing is my backbone. I don’t think a painter has to be able to draw, I just think that if you draw, you better draw well.

A painter’s tastes must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what it is suitable for him to do in art.

I know if I did that [career as painter] all the time I would get tired of it.

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean the bastards aren’t out to get you. … Painters of paintings, writers of books, never could tell the half. In each scenario, you can depend on the end where the lovers agree. Where’s my Lothario? Where does he roam, with his dome Vaselined as can be?

I did take one drawing class in school, but for this book I spent a lot of time talking to painters and asking them silly questions.