Painting Quotes

‘I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.’ – Vincent Van Gogh

‘Life is a painting, and you are the artist. You have on your palette all the colors in the spectrum – the same ones available to Michaelangelo and DaVinci.’ – Paul J. Meyer

‘Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.’ – Plutarch

‘Painting is by nature a luminous language.’ – Robert Delaunay

‘Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.’ – Pablo Picasso

‘Painting and writing are solitary arts.’ – Conrad Hall

‘Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.’ – Balthus

‘Every song is like a painting.’ – Dick Dale

‘Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do.’ – Edgar Degas

‘Every painting is a voyage into a sacred harbour.’ – Giotto di Bondone

‘Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.’ – Blaise Pascal

‘I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.’ – Jackson Pollock

‘Painting is but another word for feeling.’ – John Constable

‘Cooking is like painting or writing a song. Just as there are only so many notes or colors, there are only so many flavors – it’s how you combine them that sets you apart.’ – Wolfgang Puck

‘Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.’ – Philip Guston

‘A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires.’ – Hedy Lamarr

‘Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one’s sensations.’ – Paul Cezanne

‘Painting calmed the chaos that shook my soul.’ – Niki de St. Phalle

‘Intuition is the key to everything, in painting, filmmaking, business – everything. I think you could have an intellectual ability, but if you can sharpen your intuition, which they say is emotion and intellect joining together, then a knowingness occurs.’ – David Lynch

‘A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery.’ – Mao Zedong

‘Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight; which are: Darkness, Light, Solidity and Colour, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest.’ – Leonardo da Vinci

‘A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.’ – John Singer Sargent

‘I look at music like an art form, so it’s almost like painting for me, you know?’ – Melanie Martinez

‘Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.’ – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

‘Through a painting we can see the whole world.’ – Hans Hofmann

‘Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and… stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to ‘walk about’ into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?’ – Wassily Kandinsky

‘Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.’ – Ad Reinhardt

‘It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.’ – Albert Camus

‘Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.’ – Salvador Dali

‘I have ridiculously bad eyesight, but I have learned to live with an impressionistic view. Life is a Monet painting. I wander around enjoying myopia.’ – Milo Yiannopoulos

‘But, after all, the aim of art is to create space – space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.’ – Frank Stella

‘A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.’ – Abraham Maslow

‘Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward Heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.’ – Walter Gropius

‘Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness.’ – Edvard Munch

‘Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn’t look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.’ – Roy Lichtenstein

‘Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.’ – Jackson Pollock

‘I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist; or I’d draw a big ram’s head, really messy. I’d never win painting contests. I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect Spiderman.’ – Jean-Michel Basquiat

‘I don’t like food that’s too carefully arranged; it makes me think that the chef is spending too much time arranging and not enough time cooking. If I wanted a picture I’d buy a painting.’ – Andy Rooney

‘Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.’ – E. O. Wilson

‘Remember that a painting – before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote – is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.’ – Maurice Denis

‘I’ve never felt particularly ambitious or driven, that’s for sure, although I like to create stuff, whether it’s a little doodle, a drawing, a small painting or a movie or a piece of music, so I suppose I’m driven by that. Everything I’ve done has felt very natural, and it’s happened because it’s happened.’ – Johnny Depp

‘I don’t understand it. Jack will spend any amount of money to buy votes but he balks at investing a thousand dollars in a beautiful painting.’ – Jackie Kennedy

‘The secret to so many artists living so long is that every painting is a new adventure. So, you see, they’re always looking ahead to something new and exciting. The secret is not to look back.’ – Norman Rockwell

‘Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.’ – William Blake

‘Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.’ – Michelangelo

‘Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That’s the thing about painting, photography, cinema.’ – David Lynch

‘Any artist, the work you do, if it’s a painting or if it’s a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else’s life. That’s what’s fun about sharing art.’ – Matthew McConaughey

‘I’m sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don’t think there’s any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock.’ – Howard Stern

‘Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.’ – Ambrose Bierce

‘I dream a lot. I do more painting when I’m not painting. It’s in the subconscious.’ – Andrew Wyeth

‘Do activities you’re passionate about – which make your heart and soul feel perky – including things like working out, cooking, painting, writing, yoga, hiking, walking, swimming, being in nature, being around art, or reading inspiring books.’ – Karen Salmansohn

‘If you do things, whether it’s acting or music or painting, do it without fear – that’s my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there’s nothing to lose.’ – Anthony Hopkins

‘I graduated from college with a 3.92 GPA with a degree in computer programming and a BFA in fine arts and animation. My first job was painting a mural in the Grimaldi’s in Queens.’ – JWoww

‘God comes to us in theater in the way we communicate with each other, whether it be a symphony orchestra, or a wonderful ballet, or a beautiful painting, or a play. It’s a way of expressing our humanity.’ – Julie Harris

‘My style is in the 21st century. If you look at the process, it goes from photography through Photoshop, where certain features are heightened, elements of the photo are diminished. There is no sense of truth when you’re looking at the painting or the photo or that moment when the photo was first taken.’ – Kehinde Wiley

‘The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.’ – Voltaire

‘The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.’ – Jackson Pollock

‘In the ‘Nude Descending a Staircase,’ I wanted to create a static image of movement: movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn’t descending an equally real staircase.’ – Marcel Duchamp

‘The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.’ – Milton Friedman

‘Never invest in anything that eats or needs painting.’ – Billy Rose

‘I love painting so much that nothing else matters.’ – Yayoi Kusama

‘My painting is visible images which conceal nothing… they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question ‘What does that mean’? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.’ – Rene Magritte

‘If the world could remain within a frame like a painting on the wall, I think we’d see the beauty then and stand staring in awe.’ – Conor Oberst

‘Every song has a composer, every book has an author, every car has a maker, every painting has a painter, and every building has a builder. So it isn’t irrational to take this simple logic a little further and say that nature must have had a Maker. It would be irrational to believe that it made itself.’ – Ray Comfort

‘Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.’ – Georges Braque

‘My room is dominated by the huge painting, which is a copy of ‘The Violation’ by the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux. The original was destroyed during the Blitz in 1940, and I commissioned an artist I know, Brigid Marlin, to make a copy from a photograph. I never stop looking at this painting and its mysterious and beautiful women.’ – J. G. Ballard

‘I like building houses, working as a carpenter, painting. You work with your hands to the best of your ability, and at the end of the day, you go home with some satisfaction: ‘I built that!” – Brian Fallon

‘Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.’ – Truman Capote

‘Owning vinyl is like having a beautiful painting hanging in your living room. It’s something you can hold, pore over the lyrics, and immerse yourself in the art work.’ – Steven Wilson

‘I want to be remembered. I want to have a legacy. Van Gogh only sold one painting before he died, which would mean that he wasn’t famous when he was alive. But in 2017, I know who Van Gogh is.’ – J.I.D

‘I had always planned to make a large painting of the early spring, when the first leaves are at the bottom of the trees, and they seem to float in space in a wonderful way. But the arrival of spring can’t be done in one picture.’ – David Hockney

‘If commercialization is putting my art on a shirt so that a kid who can’t afford a $30,000 painting can buy one, then I’m all for it.’ – Keith Haring

‘Once music ceases to be ephemeral – always disappearing – and becomes instead material… it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.’ – Brian Eno

‘Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.’ – George Bernard Shaw

‘It’s a waste of time to think that if you colored a painting red what might have happened if you painted it black.’ – Yoko Ono

‘There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.’ – Jean de la Bruyere

‘Painting is a blind man’s profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.’ – Pablo Picasso

‘I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.’ – Robert Indiana

‘Nothing’s sacred anymore. Those girls and I got so close. They were painting me naked every day for months. It was kind of like going to a really bizarre sleepover. It’s what you guys imagine we do: One naked girl and seven pairs of hands all over her.’ – Jennifer Lawrence

‘Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.’ – Max Ernst

‘My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.’ – Wole Soyinka

‘At the point where I’m trying to force something and it’s not happening, and I’m getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar.’ – Joni Mitchell

‘Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.’ – Chuck Close

‘All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time.’ – Otto Dix

‘I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.’ – Winston Churchill

‘I have this fantasy of my older days, painting or sculpting or making things. I have this fantasy of a bike trip to Chile. I have this fantasy of flying into Morocco. But right now, it’s about getting the work done and getting home to family. I have an adventure every morning, getting up.’ – Brad Pitt

‘I’m a big believer in the emotion of design, and the message that’s sent before somebody begins to read, before they get the rest of the information; what is the emotional response they get to the product, to the story, to the painting – whatever it is.’ – David Carson

‘Good art in general aspires to something, as a good painting aspires to something, almost spiritual or holy.’ – Gerhard Richter

‘You can be creative in anything – in math, science, engineering, philosophy – as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance.’ – Ken Robinson

‘If I hadn’t started painting, I would have raised chickens.’ – Grandma Moses

‘I have a publishing company of books by me and books of others. It drew people to poetry readings and photo exhibitions and painting exhibitions that I’ve been doing for years before that.’ – Viggo Mortensen

‘Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.’ – Camille Paglia

‘Music is a lot more like solving an intricate puzzle with moments of pure, random creative bliss… whereas painting is much more purely random creative bliss with moments of problem solving.’ – Brandon Boyd

‘When I’m painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It’s only after a get acquainted period that I see what I’ve been about. I’ve no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.’ – Jackson Pollock

‘Arts education is a big part of building a 21st century creative mind, and I think that we have let way too many kids lose their way by not drawing in their young minds with music, dance, painting and the other various ways we can express those things we do not have words for.’ – Heather Watts

‘One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters.’ – Frank Stella

‘A painting that doesn’t shock isn’t worth painting.’ – Marcel Duchamp

‘Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire – but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being, he is master.’ – David Josiah Brewer

‘Writing a short story is like painting a picture on the head of a pin. And just getting everything to fit is – sometimes seems impossible. Writing a novel, though, is – has its own challenges of scope. And I think of that as painting a mural, where the challenge is that if you are close enough to work on it, you’re too close to see the whole thing.’ – Rebecca Makkai

‘Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?’ – Sergei Eisenstein

‘When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it – a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand – as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there’s a clash between the two, it’s bad art.’ – Marc Chagall

‘For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh.’ – Georges Rouault

‘I don’t know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere.’ – Philip Guston

‘And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting.’ – Robert Rauschenberg

‘Impressionism; it is the birth of Light in painting.’ – Robert Delaunay

‘Everybody has called Pop Art ‘American’ painting, but it’s actually industrial painting.’ – Roy Lichtenstein

‘Sometimes I miss out the morning’s painting session and instead study my Japanese books in the open.’ – Gustav Klimt

‘No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.’ – Marguerite Duras

‘In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.’ – Brian Eno

‘I think when somebody’s painting they don’t necessarily… I’m not illustrating what I know. I’m mapping out, like topographically, some terrain I am satisfied with, how awkward that mark is.’ – Julian Schnabel

‘Painting completed my life.’ – Frida Kahlo

‘There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk.’ – Charles Dickens

‘I slowly dismantled the act of painting, to consider the possibility that no-thing ever really transcends its immediate environment.’ – Robert Irwin

‘I barely knew I wanted to be an artist. I liked my art classes and painting was fun, I guess, but I didn’t realize that seeing the country was going to inspire me to further explore that… but that’s what it did.’ – Edward Ruscha

‘Well, painting is the one thing I do, that is just me. It’s me and easels, and the pencils. And as long as I don’t drool too much over the canvas, the colors come out pretty good. And it’s a chance to express all that I’ve got inside, that I sometimes keep hidden. And I think that’s why I paint big broad, wide open landscapes.’ – Joni Eareckson Tada

‘Where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong.’ – Harriet Beecher Stowe

‘I’m not going to stop painting just to take orders.’ – David Hockney

‘In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them – unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.’ – Theodore Bikel

‘The ’20s ended in an era of extravagance, sort of like the one we’re in now. There was a big crash, but then the country picked itself up again, and we had some great years. Those were the days when American believed in itself. I was happy and proud to be painting it.’ – Norman Rockwell

‘A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.’ – Howard Hodgkin

‘I didn’t know the term ‘synesthesia’ until I was working on ‘Cruel Summer.’ Halfway into writing that, I really understood that, my entire life, I had been trying to describe this condition of mine: through painting, through this seven-screen Surround Vision film we shot in Qatar, through all these things.’ – Kanye West

‘Silence is a universal language. It’s like music or painting.’ – Michel Hazanavicius

‘Raja Ravi Varma was one of the few Indians who not only understood women but also represented them exquisitely in a single dimension within four frames, infusing each painting with life through the use of color.’ – Suhasini Maniratnam

‘Since Courbet, it’s been believed that painting is addressed to the retina. That was everyone’s error. The retinal shudder! Before, painting had other functions: it could be religious, philosophical, moral… our whole century is completely retinal, except for the Surrealists, who tried to go outside it somewhat.’ – Marcel Duchamp

‘Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together, in a single imaginary being, circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.’ – Francisco Goya

‘Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal.’ – Gustave Courbet

‘No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.’ – Claude Monet

‘It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it’s a painting, and if you can walk around it it’s a sculpture.’ – Tom Stoppard

‘People look at film in a gallery, and if they walk out after two minutes they know they haven’t seen the whole work. But then people look at a painting for two minutes and think they’ve seen it. Certain paintings are made to be consumed fast. But some require a slowed-down time. You have to go back to them.’ – Julie Mehretu

‘You don’t need a framework. You need a painting, not a frame.’ – Klaus Kinski

‘With photography, you’ve captured a moment time – it’s that moment only – and in painting, you play with it; you manipulate how time is presented. It’s about fantasy and illusion and the creation of desire.’ – Mickalene Thomas

‘Sketching is like dancing. It’s process as much as product. You can turn your head off and just sort of dissolve into the now. Doing a giant, super thought-out painting is the opposite of that.’ – Molly Crabapple

‘I’m in deep in everything, every moment of the day. I create the systems and oversee every aspect of the execution. Every mark on a sculpture and every brush-stroke on a painting is in a controlled situation, exactly as they’d be if I’d have done them myself.’ – Jeff Koons

‘I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.’ – Vincent Van Gogh

‘To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.’ – Susan Vreeland

‘If I had been around when Rubens was painting, I would have been revered as a fabulous model. Kate Moss? Well, she would have been the paintbrush.’ – Dawn French

‘I am very much an artist. I like painting and collaging.’ – Kali Uchis

‘I’m a big fan of Edouard Vuillard, so I’d like anything by him – particularly a painting called ‘Madame Hessel on the Sofa.’ His work is realistic without being literal: I can really imagine what Madame Hessel is thinking.’ – Lesley Manville

‘The animation of the canvas is one of the hardest problems of painting.’ – Alfred Sisley

‘I have always wanted to make paintings that are impossible to walk past, paintings that grab and hold your attention. The more you look at them, the more satisfying they become for the viewer. The more time you give to the painting, the more you get back.’ – Cecily Brown

‘From a child, I had an inordinate desire for knowledge and especially music, painting, flowers, and the sciences, Algebra being one of my favorite studies.’ – George Washington Carver

‘On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.’ – Jackson Pollock

‘It’s Frank’s painting on the cover. We were originally going to use a Salvador Dali painting that we got permission from Salvador Dali to use, and Frank found this one, and it really did fit the music much more.’ – Alice Cooper

‘In its primary aspect, a painting has no more spiritual message than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass. The channels by which all noble and imaginative work in painting should touch the soul are not those of the truths of lives.’ – Oscar Wilde

‘I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness.’ – Joan Miro

‘Painting is about the world that we live in. Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them.’ – Kehinde Wiley

‘Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space… but I don’t understand that.’ – Jasper Johns

‘When I make music and I’m talking on records, it’s like I’m painting a picture. In my mind, I’m seeing a film.’ – Rick Ross

‘Color is a passion; painting is a passion.’ – Barbara Januszkiewicz

‘And since geometry is the right foundation of all painting, I have decided to teach its rudiments and principles to all youngsters eager for art.’ – Albrecht Durer

‘One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite – that particular peach is but a detail.’ – Pablo Picasso

‘A painting means as much to you as a string of pearls to an ape.’ – Paul Scofield

‘I think a painting is more like the real world if it’s made out the real world.’ – Robert Rauschenberg

‘It all has to do with art – writing, painting, things I’ve done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry – things that are designed for songs, but they’re always poems first.’ – Jason Newsted

‘Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.’ – Chuck Close

‘Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.’ – Robert Smithson

‘Let us together create the new building of the future, which will be everything in one form: architecture and sculpture and painting.’ – Walter Gropius

‘Marcel, no more painting; go get a job.’ – Marcel Duchamp

‘I always say that improvisation is the utterance of one’s spirit, and it dictates your life experience, and that’s how you find your concepts and your way for painting your musical picture.’ – Dianne Reeves

‘More and more, as I grow older, I find myself looking for inspiration in painting, illustration, videogames, and old movies.’ – Guillermo del Toro

‘I cannot remember a time when I was not interested in both gardening and painting. I must have been born with a trowel in one hand and a paintbrush in the other.’ – Emma Tennant

‘It is no use painting the foot of the tree white, the strength of the bark cries out from beneath the paint.’ – Aime Cesaire

‘In fine arts, when you make a painting, it’s just a painting. But if you make a painting in the entertainment industry, it can be an album cover or a t-shirt or a logo.’ – Andrew W.K.

‘Sometimes people think drawing and painting is mucking about when actually it is a highly skilled activity.’ – Quentin Blake

‘I was the youngest of four kids, and Dad, who had a garden centre before he retired, came from a large Lancashire family. Every one of my uncles had their own business, including a post office, two fish and chip shops and a painting and decorating business.’ – Rick Astley

”Pomegranate,’ started with my imagining a bullet going through the fruit and causing it to bleed. My initial associations were with pomegranates in old masters painting and their Judeo-Christian symbolism.’ – Ori Gersht

‘Good painting is like good cooking; it can be tasted, but not explained.’ – Maurice de Vlaminck

‘Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.’ – Jackson Pollock

‘When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.’ – Brian Eno

‘Whereas painting is a more rarefied art form, with a limited audience, I recognized film as this extraordinary social tool that could reach tremendous numbers of people.’ – Kathryn Bigelow

‘Movie making is not like other art forms, like painting, or writing a novel, because that can be digested or interpreted… It takes two years to make each one of these, and it’s always judged on money.’ – M. Night Shyamalan

‘I had wanted to be a sculptor throughout life, but to do so, I had to stop painting.’ – Fernando Botero

‘All gardening is landscape painting.’ – William Kent

‘When I’m painting the picture, I’m really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don’t get any thrill out of laying it out.’ – Frank Stella

‘Everything I do, whether it’s producing or signing an artist, always starts with the songs. When I’m listening, I’m looking for a balance that you could see in anything. Whether it’s a great painting or a building or a sunset.’ – Rick Rubin

‘In French, there is an old expression, la patte, meaning the artist’s touch, his personal style, his ‘paw’. I wanted to get away from la patte and from all that retinal painting.’ – Marcel Duchamp

‘It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it.’ – Georgia O’Keeffe

‘I will keep painting until I die.’ – Yayoi Kusama

‘I never was very capable of expressing my feelings or emotions in words. I don’t know whether this is the cause why I did it in music and also why I did it in painting. Or vice versa: That I had this way as an outlet. I could renounce expressing something in words.’ – Arnold Schoenberg

‘Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity.’ – Damien Hirst

‘I’m never interested in the painting being a mirror to culture. I think that’s really boring. What I’m interested in is painting as an affective space. The place where the hierarchies of the world can be rearranged within the space of a painting. And they can be articulated in different ways.’ – Dana Schutz

‘Painting is a lonely, mostly solitary act.’ – Anh Do

‘I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly – poetry, literature – this speculative attitude toward life.’ – Rafael Moneo

‘If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.’ – Peter Shaffer

‘Until film is just as easily accessible as a pen or pencil, then it’s not completely an art form. In painting, you can just pick up a piece of chalk, a stick, or whatever. In sculpture, you can get a rock. Writing, you just need a pencil and paper. Film has been a very elitist medium. It costs so much money.’ – Forest Whitaker

‘Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.’ – Steven Pinker

‘I’m still very sure that painting is one of the most basic human capacities, like dancing and singing, that make sense, that stay with us, as something human.’ – Gerhard Richter

‘It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.’ – Jackson Pollock

‘Within one hour of touching the brush to canvas for the first time, my students have a total, complete painting.’ – Bob Ross

‘I believe that painting should come through the avenues of meditation rather than the canals of action.’ – Mark Tobey

‘Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.’ – Pablo Picasso

‘Abstract painting seeks to be a pure pictorial language, and thus attempts to escape the essential impurity of all languages: the recourse to signs or forms that have meanings shared by everyone.’ – Octavio Paz

‘My struggle has been to return painting to the tangible object, which is like returning the personality to touching and feeling the world around it, to offset the tendency to vagueness and abstraction. To remind people of practical activity, to suggest the sense and not to escape from the senses.’ – Claes Oldenburg

‘Sometimes a game comes at just the right moment in your life. ‘Flower’ is beautiful, serene, and a bit of sunshine in a gloomy world. I remember going through a rough spot in my life and turning on ‘Flower’ for a little break in the day. You fly through luscious landscapes collecting petals and painting the world with life.’ – Rob Manuel

‘My process is really quite organic, and starting a painting is one of the best parts for me. I always start in quite a loose and free way. I often put down one ground colour to begin with and then play off that.’ – Cecily Brown

‘The thrill of a photo-realist painter is if you get really close to the painting, it looks just like a photograph. Whereas in my case, if you get close to my paintings, they totally fall apart – so I’m about as far from a photo-realist as it gets.’ – Marilyn Minter

‘Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.’ – Robert Motherwell

‘If it weren’t for painting, I wouldn’t live; I couldn’t bear the extra strain of things.’ – Winston Churchill

‘When I can focus on something like guitar or painting, I do. I started painting people I admire, like Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Nelson Algren, Marlon Brando, Patti Smith, my girl, my kids.’ – Johnny Depp

‘I do remember when it occurred to me the first time, when I got the idea of painting the way I feel at a given moment. I was sitting in a chair and felt it pressing against me. I still have the drawings where I depicted the sensation of sitting.’ – Maria Lassnig

‘If I’m painting, I paint every day. I’ll be up in the studio from 8:00 in the morning to 8:00 at night.’ – John Mellencamp

‘At art school, a teacher said: ‘The best paintings are when you get lost in a piece of work and start painting in a stream of consciousness.’ I wanted to do music, not art, so started writing lyrics that way. The first song I wrote was called ‘Ice Cream and Wafers.’ The next was ‘Holding Back the Years.” – Mick Hucknall

‘I want a painting to be difficult to do. The more obstacles, obstructions, problems – if they don’t overwhelm – the better. I would like to feel that I am involved at any stage of the painting with all its moments, not just this ‘now’ moment where a superficial grace is so available.’ – Richard Diebenkorn

‘When I was in art college, I would be painting, and I would create something on a canvas that was actually quite attractive. But if I got frightened and tried to protect that, that canvas would die.’ – Michael Ironside

‘I always work out of uncertainty but when a painting’s finished it becomes a fixed idea, apparently a final statement. In time though, uncertainty returns… your thought process goes on.’ – Georg Baselitz

‘I’m not painting myself as a down-home, modest guy.’ – Colin Farrell

‘If he sees nothing within, then he should stop painting what is in front of him.’ – Caspar David Friedrich

‘The final test of a painting, theirs, mine, any other, is: does the painter’s emotions come across?’ – Franz Kline

‘Many of the articles printed over the last few months have ended up painting a picture of me that is more than a little distorted.’ – Phil Collins

‘Everybody thinks they know what art should be. But very few of them have the sense that is necessary to experience painting, that is the sense of sight, that sees colors and forms as living reality in the picture.’ – Otto Dix

‘We try to buy from living artists because we love to understand why they are painting or sculpting and get into their minds.’ – Jorge M. Perez

‘Most artists never get a chance to be Picasso, but that doesn’t mean you would stop painting.’ – Teddy Thompson

‘I was always interested in the ocean and also in art. I had to figure out how to put the two together, but painting fish sounded boring.’ – Stephen Hillenburg

‘I started painting graffiti in the classic New York style of big letters and characters but I was never very good at it.’ – Banksy

‘When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing.’ – Jackson Pollock

‘Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.’ – Philip Guston

‘Making something good and saying something brilliant are not two things. When you make your own statement, there is a higher energy level, and you do better painting.’ – Roy Lichtenstein

‘An artist makes a painting, and nobody bugs him or her about it. It’s just you and your painting. To me, that’s the way it should be with film as well.’ – David Lynch

‘The cafes bore me; going downstairs is a nuisance. Painting and sleeping – that’s all there is.’ – Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

‘Painting’s not important. The important thing is keeping busy.’ – Grandma Moses

‘A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.’ – Edmond de Goncourt

‘There have been many, many paintings of Theseus and the Minotaur, as it is one of the more popular myths, so how could I make mine different and new? I decided it would be best to make the most dynamic painting I could. I wanted to capture the moment right before the Minotaur’s horn was snapped.’ – John Rocco

‘My painting carries with it the message of pain.’ – Frida Kahlo

‘I have always been structured. What has changed is the proportions. Now it is eight hours of paperwork and one of painting.’ – Gerhard Richter

‘I do feel like animated films really combine a lot of different of art forms: film-making and writing and drawing and painting – to a certain extent, even sculpting. It’s a wonderful medium to work with as a craftsman because it’s such so rich and so varied and so expressive.’ – John Musker

‘I am really fond of drawing, painting mehendi, so I would draw mehendi on a groom’s hand and earn money.’ – Mrunal Thakur

‘A painting that is well composed is half finished.’ – Pierre Bonnard

‘There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.’ – Mark Rothko

‘A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere.’ – Frank Stella

‘It’s hard to get hot over a painting; there’s no equivalent for teenage obsessiveness. Art obsession is ideology. Ideology can be made sexy, but it’s easier in music.’ – Kim Gordon

‘Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude.’ – Marcel Duchamp

‘I seldom have my stuff up unless I’m testing it. If I’m worrying about a painting, I put it up and see if I detest it quickly or slowly. Otherwise I have things by other artists.’ – Jenny Holzer

‘I’d asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions. Finally one lady friend asked the right question, ‘Well, what do you love most?’ That’s how I started painting money.’ – Andy Warhol

‘Music is my greatest love. It is also my first love. But I love a lot of things, including painting, drawing, writing, designing, and more.’ – Mija

‘So much of the history of painting is the propaganda of self-aggrandizement.’ – Kehinde Wiley

‘I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.’ – John Ruskin

‘I liked sculpting better than painting. You have more freedom in sculpting.’ – Anthony Quinn

‘I love so many different types of music – hard rock, bebop, jazz fusion, R&B. And I’ve loved meeting and painting so many amazing artists like Lionel Richie, Ronnie Wood, Sia, Steven Tyler, Swizz Beatz, Taylor Swift, James Moody, The Fifth Dimension, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock and Michael Jackson. It makes me smile thinking about each one of them.’ – Peter Max

‘I hardly ever stretch the canvas before painting.’ – Jackson Pollock

‘Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.’ – Vincent Van Gogh

‘There’s something always instinctively visually right about nature. There’s no difference, to my eye, between looking at a great painting and looking at nature. Because painting, when it’s great, has the same immutable rightness, unquestioned rightness, about it.’ – Larry Poons

‘I think that there is not really a difference between a ‘Peanuts’ and a beautiful Renaissance painting. There is something very romantic in the ‘Peanuts’ – it’s at the same level of a novel or a Jane Austen story or a beautiful embroidered rose fabric. It is a piece of romanticism.’ – Alessandro Michele

‘During the war, women without nylons drew lines up the backs of their legs to give the illusion of silk stockings. Painting over grey hair with spray-on root touch-up – or even dark eyeshadow – is the Covid-19 equivalent.’ – Susanna Reid

‘Paint is the skin of a painting: it is fiction. In houses, it disguises the plumbing and wiring and studs and nails.’ – Jessica Stockholder

‘I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, ‘the ability to conceive failure as progress.” – Jerry Saltz

‘Painting is damned difficult – you always think you’ve got it, but you haven’t.’ – Paul Cezanne

‘You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things.’ – A. S. Byatt

‘To me, writing and composing are much more like painting, about colors and brushes; I don’t use a computer when I write, and I don’t use a piano. I’m at a desk writing, and it’s very broad strokes and notes as colors on a palette.’ – James Horner

‘Every time I started painting it was like a new experience, but they all came out the same.’ – LeRoy Neiman

‘A painting is a symbol for the universe. Inside it, each piece relates to the other. Each piece is only answerable to the rest of that little world. So, probably in the total universe, there is that kind of total harmony, but we get only little tastes of it.’ – Corita Kent

‘A painting has a lot of advantages over other forms of communication. Unlike a movie, you don’t have to put it into a machine and turn it on. It’s just there every day. It’s not limited by the element of time. It’s a constant part of the home.’ – Thomas Kinkade

‘It was very hard breaking into the film industry in Britain. I had been to art school, and I was painting and doing commercials. And I did some of the very first rock videos.’ – Tony Scott

”Art or anti-art?’ was the question I asked when I returned from Munich in 1912 and decided to abandon pure painting or painting for its own sake. I thought of introducing elements alien to painting as the only way out of a pictorial and chromatic dead end.’ – Marcel Duchamp

‘I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.’ – David Bowie

‘Mount Tamalpais became my house. For Cezanne, Sainte-Victoire was no longer a mountain. It was an absolute. It was painting.’ – Etel Adnan

‘I won a competition in primary school for my painting of Nottingham’s Goose Fair; it was a riot of colour with glitter and sequins.’ – Alice Levine

‘My aim in painting is to create pulsating, luminous, and open surfaces that emanate a mystic light, in accordance with my deepest insight into the experience of life and nature.’ – Hans Hofmann

‘My son taught me a few tricks about card games and Rishona spent time painting with me. She would also make us dalgona coffee at times. These small joys of family life have made me a very happy person.’ – Rituparna Sengupta

‘One must act in painting as in life, directly.’ – Pablo Picasso

‘The reason I play music is to touch people – for selfish reasons, as well. It feels good to make someone else feel something, whether it’s a kiss, a painting, good idea or it’s a song.’ – Dave Matthews

‘I didn’t know what to expect from a famous movie star; maybe that he’d be sort of stuck-up, you know. But not Gary Cooper. He horsed around so much… that I had a hard time painting him.’ – Norman Rockwell

‘If something sticks with me for a long time, it goes into a painting.’ – Glenn Ligon

‘When I have used cartoon images, I’ve used them ironically to raise the question, ‘Why would anyone want to do this with modern painting?” – Roy Lichtenstein

‘Painting… in which the inner and the outer man are inseparable, transcends technique, transcends subject and moves into the realm of the inevitable.’ – Lee Krasner

‘He greatly valued his possessions, chiefly because they were his, and derived genuine pleasure from contemplating a painting, a statuette, a rare lace curtain – no matter what – after he had bought it and placed it among his household gods.’ – Kate Chopin

‘My painting does not come from the easel.’ – Jackson Pollock

‘When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.’ – Paul Cezanne

‘All individual thought is dissolved in universal thought, as all form is dissolved in the universal plastic means of Abstract-Real painting.’ – Piet Mondrian

‘Parks are works of art just as a painting or sculpture is.’ – Thomas Hoving

‘A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.’ – Lord Byron

‘I think a painting should include more experience than simply intended statement.’ – Jasper Johns

‘My hobbies are painting, crafts, and I like golfing.’ – Nancy Kerrigan

‘Nobody really needs a painting. It’s something you kind of create value for in a way that you don’t with a company. It’s an act of collective faith what an object is worth. Maintaining that value system is part of what a dealer does, not just making a transaction but making sure that important art feels important.’ – Larry Gagosian

‘All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.’ – Salman Rushdie

‘I love audio books, and when I paint I’m always listening to a book. I find that my imagination really takes flight in the painting process when I’m listening to audio books.’ – Thomas Kinkade

‘With rare exceptions, I respond most to painting that cuts across grain rather than following it. I think the artist here can get in touch with that grain rather than simply feel its flow. And he really can’t cut right across it anyway.’ – Richard Diebenkorn

‘I started playing piano when I was 6. And I knew that wanted to be involved in that form of expression, whether it was through music, or acting, or dancing, or painting, or writing.’ – Alanis Morissette

‘I do see myself as the heir to a vast, great, rich culture of painting – of art in general – which we have lost, but which places obligations on us.’ – Gerhard Richter

‘If I had a Salvador Dali painting, I would cuddle it to sleep.’ – Mac Miller

‘I’m a secretive bastard. I would never let anybody watch me painting… it would be like somebody watching you have sex – painting is that personal to me.’ – Andrew Wyeth

‘I don’t buy art. I’d rather buy a beautiful location or a beautiful site than buy art. A beautiful home is like owning a beautiful painting, except you can live in it.’ – Mickey Drexler

‘Envision what the end result is supposed to be… what do you want to be when you grow up? Where do you see yourself? Once we identify what the painting on the wall is, it is so much easier to bring in the right colors, canvas and brushes to paint that picture.’ – Fat Joe

‘In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.’ – Edgar Degas

‘Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is like a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle.’ – Balthus

‘Unfortunately, after Sept. 11, there was an outburst in America of intense suffering and patriotism, and the Bush administration was very shrewd and effective in painting anyone who disagreed with the policies as unpatriotic or even traitorous.’ – Jimmy Carter

‘I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way.’ – Sydney Pollack

‘Painting does what we cannot do – it brings a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane.’ – Chuck Jones

‘Lets tell young people the best books are yet to written; the best painting, the best government the best of everything is yet to be done by them.’ – John Erskine

‘Some people like to paint trees. I like to paint love. I find it more meaningful than painting trees.’ – Robert Indiana

‘I never saw a painting that would not be improved by the addition of tropical fish.’ – John Cooper Clarke

‘There’s a ton of stuff in mythology and folklore that is loaded with wonderful creatures that I haven’t drawn yet, but that’s kind of my retirement plan. Theoretically, I won’t be doing comics any longer, and I’ll just be drawing and painting whatever the hell I want. Most of that will be monsters.’ – Mike Mignola

‘I believe that the reason why I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective. There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.’ – Max Beckmann

‘Easel painting means small painting.’ – David Hockney

‘Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things.’ – Gustave Courbet

‘You cannot possibly invent painting all by yourself.’ – Pierre Bonnard

‘I think of a piece, and then people who are competent fabricate it. But lately I’ve started finger painting, which probably should be a joke but isn’t!’ – Jenny Holzer

‘I will give a proof to demonstrate with facts that there are no rules in painting and that oppression or servile obligation of making all study or follow the same path is a great impediment for the young who profess this very difficult art.’ – Francisco Goya

‘The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear… What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away… We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities.’ – Umberto Eco

‘I don’t like painting flowers in my music. I like painting guts and pain.’ – Jonathan Davis

‘Because I’m so busy and because I think of myself as a painter, I desperately guard the time that I have to paint. And sometimes I’m irresponsible to my career in order to paint. Because painting is obsessive. I forget to eat. I forget to sleep.’ – Joni Mitchell

‘As a composer and as a musician I’m a true believer – and this is not to be overly diplomatic – I’m a believer that there’s artistry in everything from a lawn gnome to a desk chair to a symphony to an Andy Warhol painting. There’s art in absolutely everything.’ – Darren Criss

‘You cannot just be working in a vast, air-conditioned loft space and think you are going to make a decent painting. Francis Bacon had a special studio built, and he felt completely emasculated in there. I have to be somewhere comfortable.’ – Peter Doig

‘My love affair with painting is bittersweet.’ – Kehinde Wiley

‘I’m not just painting for painting’s sake. I want to be truthful.’ – Sylvester Stallone

‘Turning one’s novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.’ – Vladimir Nabokov

‘Usually, I am a compulsive person, and I need – sometimes urgently – to paint… Painting is close to poetry, is a kind of poetry expressed visually. It has to be spontaneous, rapid – at least in my case.’ – Etel Adnan

‘Painting bodies with the patterns of Kusama’s hallucinations obliterated their individual selves and returned them to the infinite universe.’ – Yayoi Kusama

‘I believe in painting and I believe in eating too. What can we do? We have to eat, we have to paint, we have to live. Of course, there are different ways to survive. But it’s my best option.’ – Gerhard Richter

‘I think of painting without subject matter as music without words.’ – Kenneth Noland

‘Occasionally, when I get mad at a woman, I’ll do some great, awful painting about her.’ – Jean-Michel Basquiat

‘I’m very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you’re painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.’ – Jackson Pollock

‘Language is much closer to film than painting is.’ – Sergei Eisenstein

‘In abstract painting, I worried about the limited range of possibilities that, as time went on, became increasingly important to me. I wanted to express or deal with differences that an all-over paint and canvas ‘presence’ neutralized.’ – Richard Diebenkorn

‘I have sworn to die painting.’ – Paul Cezanne

‘Not that painting would have been a release. The reason for doing it is the desire to create. I’ve got to do it! I’ve seen that, I can still remember it, I’ve got to paint it.’ – Otto Dix

‘I am so longing to be domestic,, cooking stew, gardening, hopefully having some children, painting, sitting still in one place.’ – Eve Best

‘My sister Radha, who lives in the U.S., has discovered her craft in painting. She is by far the most beautiful among us sisters. If only Radha had been as tall as me, she’d have been the actor in the family.’ – Rekha

‘It wouldn’t be right for me to clown around when I’m painting a president.’ – Norman Rockwell

‘Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent – not with how things are but with how they might be – in short, with design.’ – Herbert A. Simon

‘I was worried in the ’80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall.’ – Frank Stella

‘You don’t hire Kehinde Wiley to have a tame painting.’ – Kehinde Wiley

‘To look out of a car in Scania, you see a painting on the horizontal – one windmill, one tiny farmhouse, acres of beet or grass.’ – Kenneth Branagh

‘My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I’ve taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, ‘The Hornet’s Nest,’ I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.’ – Jimmy Carter

‘Art is important because when people start to forget, art reminds them what happened. Like ‘Guernica.’ People would not remember the tragedy of Guernica today if it were not for that painting.’ – Fernando Botero

‘I am not the kind of director who sits in a chair smoking a cigar talking with a microphone to 10 assistants. I need to move. To touch. To put a painting on a wall. To arrange a set.’ – Federico Fellini

‘Is the Mona Lisa an ‘accurate’ representation of the actual human model for the painting? Who knows? Who cares? It’s a great piece of art. It moves us. It makes us wonder, makes us gape – finally makes us look inward at ourselves.’ – Tim O’Brien

‘I wanted to dress the woman who lives and works, not the woman in a painting.’ – Giorgio Armani

‘If I’m away from painting for a week, I get bored.’ – Jean-Michel Basquiat

‘A painting is like a man. If you can live without it, then there isn’t much point in having it.’ – Lila Acheson Wallace

‘My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impression of nature.’ – Edward Hopper

‘Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.’ – Robert Hughes

‘To the humblest among them, who may be listening to me now, I want to say that the masterpiece to which you are paying historic homage this evening is a painting which he has saved.’ – Andre Malraux

‘If I didn’t start painting, I would have raised chickens.’ – William Lyon Phelps

‘Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.’ – John Berger

‘Photography suits the temper of this age – of active bodies and minds. It is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately.’ – Edward Weston

‘Sunlight is painting.’ – Nathaniel Hawthorne

‘When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.’ – Denis Diderot

‘We have as many planes of speech as does a painting planes of perspective which create perspective in a phrase. The most important word stands out most vividly defined in the very foreground of the sound plane. Less important words create a series of deeper planes.’ – Constantin Stanislavski

‘I never consciously said, ‘I want to be an actor.’ It sounds stupid, but it’s kind of like being a painter or something. You don’t say, ‘From today on I’m going to be a painter.’ It’s not something conscious – you’ve just been painting pictures all your life.’ – Franka Potente

‘In a movie, you’re raw material, just a hue of some color and the director makes the painting.’ – Viggo Mortensen

‘I was not out to paint beautiful pictures; even painting good pictures was not important to me. I wanted only to help the truth burst forth.’ – Alice Duer Miller

‘If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.’ – Janet Malcolm

‘I want to give my compliments to Australia. Ever since your government paid a few million dollars for a Jackson Pollack painting, I figure that it must be a marvellous country.’ – Morton Feldman

‘I have generally found that persons who had studied painting least were the best judges of it.’ – William Hogarth

‘In the middle 1940s… I heard everyone live. Painting, the theater; everything was happening. It was an exciting time when New York was the place to be.’ – Bill Dixon

‘I think people have to choose between living with contradictions or painting themselves into a corner. I have a lot of contradictions.’ – Michelle Shocked

‘When we don’t have information, we go to the simplest outlook, to black and white. But then we have to lie to ourselves. Black is never as black as you’re painting it and white is never as white.’ – Patricia Sun

‘My parents felt that acting was far too insecure. Don’t ask me what made them think that painting would be more secure.’ – John Hurt

‘If they were starting their careers today, Rockwell and Picasso would probably both be painting on black velvet.’ – Brad Holland

‘In America, the only truly popular art form is the movies. Most people consider painting a hobby and literature, schoolwork.’ – Brad Holland

‘You know, the way art history is taught, often there’s nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.’ – Chuck Close

‘Coming to understand a painting or a symphony in an unfamiliar style, to recognize the work of an artist or school, to see or hear in new ways, is as cognitive an achievement as learning to read or write or add.’ – Nelson Goodman

‘I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.’ – Michael Graves

‘I needed an outlet in high school and came across painting. I’ve actually been painting longer than I’ve been acting. A movie is a collaborative effort, and with painting you just have yourself.’ – James Franco

‘The goal is always to make a nice tableau painting with the voice. The more color I can find, the more shadow I can find – the goal is always to make more nuance and colors.’ – Cecilia Bartoli

‘I love painting and music, of course. I don’t know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I’ve certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn’t read it until I was in my late 20s.’ – Kenneth Koch

‘I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it’s not.’ – Kenneth Koch

‘I think you have to control the materials to an extent, but it’s important to let the materials have a kind of power for themselves; like the natural power of gravity, if you are painting on a wall, it makes the paint trickle and it drips; there is no reason to fight that.’ – Keith Haring

‘As the books grew bigger and more ambitious, the situations in question sometimes became political ones, and so it became necessary to start painting in the social background on a scale which eventually became panoramic.’ – Jonathan Coe

‘Overall, the anarchy was the most creative of all periods of Japanese culture for in it there appeared the greatest landscape painting, the culmination of the skill of landscape gardening and the arts of flower arrangement, and the No drama.’ – J. M. Roberts

‘The worlds I paint leave a lot to engage the imagination by hinting at what lies beyond the four edges of the painting. I think getting beyond the four edges of an opportunity or challenge is one of the basic skills you need in business.’ – Thomas Kinkade

‘I’m working on a snow scene right now, and it’s summer. It’s hot, and I will get chilly. I’ll have to turn on the heat. My wife walks in, and it’s 95 degrees in the studio. I know it’s nutty, but it’s a projection you have where you step into the painting.’ – Thomas Kinkade

‘I was a student at Harvard, and that’s where I learned about so-called avant-garde music. Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism and painting were well known at this time.’ – Henry Flynt

‘In classical oil painting, there seemed to be a radical turn to seeing things as the camera sees them, with that technological modification. I began to have a tremendous problem with all of this.’ – Henry Flynt

‘Painting self-portraits without clothes on has also given me some publicity.’ – Cleo Moore

‘On occasion I have drawn as a release from painting. The economy in using paper, pencil, charcoal and crayon can help towards a greater gamble and higher rewards. I also find that drawing can generate ideas more rapidly than painting.’ – William Scott

‘I no longer worry whether a painting is about something or not. I am only concerned with the expectation, from a flat surface, of an illusion.’ – William Scott

‘Every painting I do is related to the last one: it may be a continuation of a previous painting or it may be a reaction against it.’ – William Scott

‘I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality.’ – Barnett Newman

‘I sometimes use a lot of light greens and greys when I feel there is sadness in the painting.’ – Robert Ryan

‘Now painting is different. It’s something recollected in tranquility.’ – Jack Levine

‘I don’t have much of a problem with interruptions. I keep a detailed record of paint and materials as a work on each painting. I can restart exactly where I left off.’ – Mike Thompson

‘I think it is an inborn talent – just luck. Some people can learn languages; some can throw a ball. Most people have something. My talent is drawing and painting.’ – Mike Thompson

‘Without a good cultural policy, without adequate help, we will always have individualists, shooting stars who are rapidly forgotten or who stop painting for a more profitable occupation.’ – Ralph Allen

‘I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes. So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.’ – Ad Reinhardt

‘If some student came up and wanted to know where to study painting, you’d want to suggest someplace, but there’s no place. I wouldn’t know where to send a student to study.’ – Ad Reinhardt

‘I have never subscribed to the Dirty Pallet school of painting.’ – Peter Wright

‘I felt the need to get back to painting and I thought the best way was to start drawing, so I enrolled in a life drawing class. I soon discovered that people made very interesting subjects and I am still surprised that I had never discovered it before.’ – Peter Wright

‘Painting is seen as picture making, the making of an art object, something that can stand on its own.’ – Peter Wright

‘I never know what it’s going to look like. Wouldn’t be much point in painting if I already knew the outcome. I have a subject in front of me and I start flooding colour and making marks, I don’t know, it’s improvisation isn’t it?’ – Peter Wright

‘I’ve been trying to pick up painting but it’s hard.’ – George Eads

‘The dance commonly begins about the middle of the afternoon or later, after sundown. When it begins in the afternoon, there is always an intermission of an hour or two for supper. The preliminary painting and dressing is usually the work of about two hours.’ – James Mooney

‘I found I have to stay painting.’ – Alan Bean

‘But painting can be too lonely… I like being with people too much to have ever made that my life’s work.’ – Marie Windsor

‘I hope to actually get back to painting someday… soon. I sort of transitioned into cartooning from painting.’ – Max Cannon

‘Every milieu has something ridiculous about it – film-making, the music world, painting – because people who take themselves seriously become funny pretty quickly.’ – Rebecca Miller

‘My movement from painting to film was a very conscious one.’ – Kathryn Bigelow

‘I don’t believe in making pencil sketches and then painting landscape in your studio. You must be right under the sky.’ – William Merritt Chase

‘The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.’ – Lawrence Ferlinghetti

‘Well, I’ve been painting for years. I just started doing a lot more in the last couple.’ – Robyn Hitchcock

‘No one blames themselves if they don’t understand a cartoon, as they might with a painting or ‘real’ art; they simply think it’s a bad cartoon.’ – Chris Ware

‘With a painting, you don’t have to go back and paint it again.’ – Joni Mitchell

‘Painting is much more than therapy to me its a way of life.’ – Tony Curtis

‘But where there is no art show, I would still be painting.’ – Tony Curtis

‘Now I’m a painter. That was another opportunity I was able to pursue, I’ve been painting all my life, now it’s become a second career because of my success in the movies.’ – Tony Curtis

‘I still have agents in France, Los Angeles and Amsterdam who call and suggest parts. I’d love to keep on doing both painting and acting until the end of my days.’ – Sylvia Kristel

‘I started formal piano training when I was 4. From there I had little violas, and I had dancing lessons of every sort and description, and painting lessons. I had German. And shorthand.’ – Twyla Tharp

‘I’m just a landscape painter. I look out the window and I see what’s going on, and I paint it. While I’m painting it, I also write thoughts about what I see going on out there.’ – William T. Wiley

‘I’ve been attracted to imagery and occasionally I’ve drawn from it, but I never thought I’d be painting these paintings. I didn’t have any desire to. I didn’t think there was any reason to.’ – William T. Wiley

‘So when I’m playing, I’m sort of painting a feeling in the air.’ – Pharrell Williams

‘The dog, the rabbit and the hoop all feature in the painting, and take the place of the orrery.’ – Kit Williams

‘In the fairy tale the painting represents the here and now. The book is actually divided into five sections, through which the key character, the muse, leads us.’ – Kit Williams

‘I love painting.’ – Heidi Klum

‘And I like the idea of change. Because I don’t see why we should hang a painting on the wall and then just not think of it anymore because it’s there like a piece of furniture.’ – Minoru Yamasaki

‘So about twenty years ago I gave up on painting – and got into terrible debt after buying a load of camera gear!’ – Nigel Dennis

‘Being in the studio is like painting, you know, you can really take your time, and try different things, and kind of go deep into it.’ – Rosanne Cash

‘I tried painting for a short time and realized that I was not a child prodigy at painting.’ – Kim Weston

‘Painting is, I think, inevitably an archaic activity and one that depends on spiritual values.’ – Bridget Riley

‘When the painting is hanging on your wall for a long time, you don’t notice it. You get tired of it, even if it’s a Picasso. When the next generation inherits the painting, they sell it. I don’t want to be sold.’ – Julio Iglesias

‘Milos said, You’re my first choice. From my point of view, that doesn’t pay the rent. I said, Tell me what I have to do next because I’m busy painting my kitchen.’ – F. Murray Abraham

‘Knowing what paint a painter uses or having an understanding of where he was in the history of where he came from doesn’t hurt your appreciation of the painting.’ – Jodie Foster

‘Painting directly from nature is difficult as things do not remain the same; the camera helps to retain the picture in your mind.’ – Theodore Robinson

‘No one can be a painter unless he cares for painting above all else.’ – Edouard Manet

‘Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon – it is the very heart of painting.’ – Josef Albers

‘Some days I would be there at ten in the morning and wouldn’t leave till ten at night, and the others would waltz in for a couple of hours and then leave, because I was doing that painting thing. And they were happy to see that being done.’ – Lindsey Buckingham

‘When I work alone, my process is like painting. With Fleetwood Mac, it’s more like movie making.’ – Lindsey Buckingham

‘I am only interested in painting the actual person, in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong.’ – Lucian Freud

‘Painting is sometimes like those recipes where you do all manner of elaborate things to a duck, and then end up putting it on one side and only using the skin.’ – Lucian Freud

‘When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won’t.’ – Lucian Freud

‘I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.’ – Max Beckmann

‘Painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement.’ – Max Beckmann

‘I believe the reason I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective.’ – Max Beckmann

‘Nature engenders the science of painting.’ – Robert Delaunay

‘It is this research into pure painting that is the problem at the present moment. I do not know any painters in Paris who are really searching for this ideal world.’ – Robert Delaunay

‘Painting is a very difficult thing. It absorbs the whole man, body and soul, thus have I passed blindly many things which belong to real and political life.’ – Max Beckmann

‘I’m very interested to see how this new painting will go – I know I want it big and stark, and as I said, I follow the muse, and that’s when it always works perfectly for me.’ – Jackie DeShannon

‘Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don’t know what to say about what I paint, really.’ – Balthus

‘Painting is a source of endless pleasure, but also of great anguish.’ – Balthus

‘The craft of painting has virtually disappeared. There is hardly anyone left who really possesses it. For evidence one has only to look at the painters of this century.’ – Balthus

‘Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature’s phenomena before it can again become great.’ – Edward Hopper

‘The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.’ – Edward Hopper

‘Well, I have a very simple method of painting.’ – Edward Hopper

‘As I had collaborated with visual artists before whether on installations, on performance pieces, in the context of theatre works and as I had taught for a time in art colleges the idea of writing music in response to painting was not alien.’ – Gavin Bryars

‘Painting is the aesthetic side of the object but it has never been original, has never been its own goal.’ – Kazimir Malevich

‘For example, in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents – as an element – the greatest difficulty in manipulation.’ – Sergei Eisenstein

‘Painting pictures didn’t make me a lot of money. I have to eat.’ – Ralph Bakshi

‘After tea it’s back to painting – a large poplar at dusk with a gathering storm. From time to time instead of this evening painting session I go bowling in one of the neighbouring villages, but not very often.’ – Gustav Klimt

‘If the weather is good I go into the nearby wood – there I am painting a small beech forest (in the sun) with a few conifers mixed in. This takes until 8 ‘o clock.’ – Gustav Klimt

‘When I get my hands on painting materials I don’t give a damn about other people’s painting… every generation must start again afresh.’ – Maurice de Vlaminck

‘But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it.’ – Roy Lichtenstein

‘I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it’s very hard to guess at a size or a color and all the colors around it and what it will really look like.’ – Roy Lichtenstein

‘Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don’t look at it as if it were some kind of oddity.’ – Roy Lichtenstein

‘This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.’ – Fernand Leger

‘The painting develops before my eyes, unfolding its surprises as it progresses. It is this which gives me the sense of complete liberty, and for this reason I am incapable of forming a plan or making a sketch beforehand.’ – Yves Tanguy

‘I have been surrounded by artists and paintings throughout my life. My father Ted Dyer is an artist, and from a very early age I have spent time painting and drawing.’ – John Dyer

‘I still take photographs for my own use, personal studies. I do not feel that I can fully express my views through the medium and this is why I have moved towards painting.’ – John Dyer

‘My father is a well known artist, Ted Dyer, who has been painting for many years. Our work is very different, but growing up surrounded by paintings, paints, easels and art books does have an effect.’ – John Dyer

‘Painting is really good fun, I have always enjoyed it. As long as I paint what I want with the freedom that I enjoy, I never tire.’ – John Dyer

‘The majority of my work is from life. I spend most fine days from May to October painting outside.’ – John Dyer

‘You can’t work in the movies. Movies are all about lighting. Very few filmmakers will concentrate on the story. You get very little rehearsal time, so anything you do onscreen is a kind of speed painting.’ – John Malkovich

‘American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.’ – Diane Wakoski

‘I wanted to make these people real, not like they were in a painting. Like these are people who don’t know they’re in a period movie. Those concerns are incredibly immediate.’ – Neil LaBute

‘I studied all about Gauguin. He was a banker. He was a banker who – he used to paint on Sundays. And one day he hated himself for painting on Sundays.’ – Anthony Quinn

‘I always feel attacked when I’m asked about my painting.’ – Georg Baselitz

‘I had always loved expressionist painting, like every European. In fact I admired it all the more because these were precisely the paintings despised by my father’s generation.’ – Georg Baselitz

‘Does any art have a practical value? People love to talk about how expensive a painting is. That’s the only way we can talk about paintings in this century.’ – John Guare

‘I am a great lover of art, in many forms: paintings, objets, textiles. I don’t have the talent for painting, but I have a very good sense of colour, a love of visual beauty.’ – Jacqueline Bisset

‘But, when I had this feeling and started painting sacred art, as I had this feeling to do, then it come to me: my problem is I’ll get a lot of criticism and another problem is my work’s not good enough to sell.’ – Howard Finster

‘At 18 I began painting steadily fulltime and at age 20 had my first New York show at the Macbeth Gallery.’ – Andrew Wyeth

‘I don’t work from drawings. I don’t make sketches and drawings and color sketches into a final painting.’ – Jackson Pollock

‘He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.’ – Jackson Pollock

‘Writing requires a great deal of skill, just like painting does. People don’t want to learn those skills.’ – John Milius

‘I was painting sets, working in editorial as an assistant, driving their trucks, lying that I knew how to drive a truck, and doing commercials and documentaries.’ – Richard Donner

‘You know, face painting in non-Western cultures is a sign of collectivism, is a sign of one representing the community, it’s not unique at all.’ – Joseph Jarman

‘The paintings are transferred from my computer to a disk, and I can hand it to the printer this way; or I can modem the painting to the printer over the phone lines from my house in Hawaii.’ – Buffy Sainte-Marie

‘The key is in remaining just aloof enough from a painting so that you know when to stop.’ – Buffy Sainte-Marie

‘As a teenager I started painting and playing guitar.’ – Buffy Sainte-Marie

‘But when I started writing songs, I stopped painting completely, and the only art things I do are connected to the career, like album sleeves and, to some extent, posters and things like that.’ – Bryan Ferry

‘I’m quite sure that all true professional artists, of every description, in all walks of life, whether their craft is painting, music, sculpture, medicine or anything, have one primary concern – mankind.’ – Chico Hamilton

‘I would have liked maybe to be in architecture or painting, something connected to the fine arts.’ – Catherine Deneuve

‘Very quickly a painting is turned into a facsimile of itself when one becomes so familiar with with it that one recognizes it without looking at it.’ – Robert Rauschenberg

‘There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.’ – Robert Rauschenberg

‘Pollock also… wanted one to be wrapped in the painting.’ – Robert Rauschenberg

‘I’m not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings.’ – Robert Rauschenberg

‘But I was in awe of the painters; I mean I was new in New York, and I thought the painting that was going on here was just unbelievable.’ – Robert Rauschenberg

‘And I think a painting has such a limited life anyway.’ – Robert Rauschenberg

‘And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you’re soliciting permission or not, do give you permission.’ – Robert Rauschenberg

‘I still have an old painting the Colonel gave me. It was the first time the Colonel had been back to the Hilton since Elvis had passed away.’ – Mac Davis

‘Coming out of college with a degree in fine arts and painting isn’t worth much any more.’ – Dan Fogelberg

‘I think music has gone through a period of something very severe, rather radical, rather the way painting did with cubism.’ – Harrison Birtwistle

‘The older painting – well, it does have an effect all at once, I suppose, but it’s of a lesser intensity than a lot of the American work in the last ten or fifteen years.’ – Donald Judd

‘Well, I am not interested in the kind of expression that you have when you paint a painting with brush strokes. It’s all right, but it’s already done and I want to do something new.’ – Donald Judd

‘Well, I don’t think anyone now would say that they’re painting the state of the culture of America. I think that’s too grand and pompous a thing for anybody to claim.’ – Donald Judd

‘People were very affected by the war. But it didn’t mean you stopped painting unless you were called into the Army; then you just couldn’t paint. But otherwise one continued.’ – Lee Krasner

‘Well, let’s say we acknowledged the School of French Painting – the Paris School of painting as the leading force and vitality of the time. I think that was understood and felt and experienced.’ – Lee Krasner

‘Painting and music were the only things I worked at industriously and faithfully.’ – Pierre Loti

‘I influenced the BG style by not being able to draw perspective. The BG artists developed cool graphic painting styles to make my bad backgrounds look like they were that way on purpose.’ – John Kricfalusi

‘You buy any book on color theory today, and it’s just complete poppycock. Everybody comes out of school painting pink, purple and green. The whole damn cartoon industry has pink purple and green on their mind.’ – John Kricfalusi

‘Around 1980, I went back to painting with a vengeance.’ – Martin Mull

‘I try to not get to the point where one is making wallpaper, or simply painting money. I want to make sure that I am at least trying to weigh myself down, that there’s a challenge each time.’ – Martin Mull

‘This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer’s art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.’ – Edvard Munch

‘By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.’ – Edvard Munch

‘I want to die painting.’ – Paul Cezanne

‘I am more a friend of art than a producer of painting.’ – Paul Cezanne

‘90% of every art form is garbage – dance and stand-up, painting and music. Focus on the 10% that’s good, suck it up, and drive on.’ – Patton Oswalt

‘Look at any inspired painting. It’s like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation.’ – Philip Guston

‘Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It’s the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe.’ – Philip Guston

‘The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so that what you see is not what you see.’ – Philip Guston

‘In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don’t know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?’ – Philip Guston

‘My sister-in-law is a painter, and I’ll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She’ll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting.’ – Anthony Doerr

‘The way I create music is maybe like a painting, to compose in a more visual way. Basically it’s the music that I want to hear- that’s my inspiration and bottom line. I just try to get ideas from books, movies, paintings.’ – Ikue Mori

‘The substance of painting is light.’ – Andre Derain

‘Doing the show was like painting the George Washington Bridge. As soon as you finished one end, you started right in on the other.’ – Jack Paar

‘Ah, lives of men! When prosperous they glitter – Like a fair picture; when misfortune comes – A wet sponge at one blow has blurred the painting.’ – Aeschylus

‘I hate painting.’ – Howard Hodgkin

‘Last year my boyfriend gave me a painting – a very personal one. I really prefer personal gifts or ones made by someone for me. Except diamonds. That’s the exception to the rule.’ – Minnie Driver

‘When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else.’ – Howard Hodgkin

‘I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!’ – Pablo Picasso

‘Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting.’ – Tom Wolfe

‘What is the use of good painting? We want a spell cast upon the optical part of our existence! We seldom really see the world, but when we do, we become as still as a picture.’ – Robert Musil

‘The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself.’ – Andre Malraux

‘Lovers of painting and lovers of music are people who openly display their preference like a delectable ailment that isolates them and makes them proud.’ – Maurice Blanchot

‘In painting feathers, you want to create the look of feathers, but if you try to paint all the feathers, you have nothing but disaster.’ – John O’Neill

‘I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I’m always painting and drawing as well, and it’s an ongoing creative assignment.’ – P. J. Harvey

‘Sculpture will last a lot longer than painting.’ – Richard MacDonald

‘Yesterday, I did some painting then went out to buy an onion and came home and watched ‘University Challenge.’ The onion was probably the highlight.’ – Karl Pilkington

‘All my album artwork is body painting.’ – Kimbra

‘I have always enjoyed drawing and painting but I don’t always find the time to do much these days.’ – Kirsty Gallacher

‘When I was younger, I had no interest. But after I went to Paris to see the collections for the first time a few years ago, they made a huge impression on me. I realized that fashion is an art form, like acting or painting.’ – Camilla Belle

‘I grew up painting and playing piano so when I was a little kid I thought I was going to be an artist or a painter but my mom had me taking piano lessons for about 10-12 years as a young kid.’ – Mike Shinoda

‘Mostly people are ignorant, what is the language of painting. You know, they’re ignorant. It is so difficult to make them aware, but time will teach them.’ – M. F. Husain

‘I’m 38 years old and Limp Bizkit is just something I do. If I was a painter, it would just be a type of painting I make.’ – Fred Durst

‘You know, painting has given me a lot of freedom, because for some reason, I’ve been able to paint things, organize things in a way that I see that don’t have any buffers or compromises in them.’ – Julian Schnabel

‘I’ve never made a movie to make money. I’ve never made a painting to make money.’ – Julian Schnabel

‘It was a huge challenge to learn digital painting well enough so that computers don’t pop into mind when one sees one.’ – Berkeley Breathed

‘There’s this inherent screenplay structure that everyone seems to be stuck on, this three-act thing. It doesn’t really interest me. To me, it’s kind of like saying, ‘Well, when you do a painting, you always need to have sky here, the person here and the ground here.’ Well, you don’t.’ – Charlie Kaufman

‘I’m compelled to paint nearly every day. I just felt like making a painting, went out and bought paints and a canvas. Now it fulfills me creatively when I’m not doing music: it’s something you can do by yourself and it’s totally yours. It’s a great adjunct to my life.’ – David Johansen

‘I stopped painting in 1990 at the peak of my success just to deny people my beautiful paintings, and I did it out of spite.’ – Vincent Gallo

‘I’ve been painting and drawing and taking pictures as long as I’ve been writing music – and I’ve actually been drawing longer than I’ve been writing music.’ – Brandon Boyd

‘Art, a book, a painting, a song, can definitely inspire change, whether it’s a small change or a big change but you know there’s novels I’ve read or a scene in a film that I’ve seen where I definitely inspired something and made a change or addressed an issue in my life or done something cliche like make a phone call.’ – Rose Byrne

‘The artist himself is actually the subject in everything after, say, 1900. Eventually, art becomes so removed from the community that you have to know about the artist before you can even look at the painting, because there is a conceptual idea going on.’ – Gus Van Sant

‘My mother was the most creative, fantastic person and would come up with great things for us to do. She’d buy art supplies and all of us would sit around painting. I was lucky.’ – Cher

‘See, a painting is much cheaper than making a film. And photography is, you know, way cheap. So if I get an idea for a film, there are many ways to get it together and go realise that film. There’s really nothing to be afraid of.’ – David Lynch

‘Wrestling needs to be about the art form again. It needs to be about painting a picture and having a really good match.’ – Hulk Hogan

‘I’ve always loved painting, although I never show anyone what I’ve done. Mainly because I don’t do it well. But it’s like a form of visual diary for me. A way of fixing things in my mind.’ – Judi Dench

‘Very rarely is there any confusion as to when a painting or a song is finished. You just know when it’s done.’ – Brandon Boyd

‘Rock & roll is not obscure, it’s really easy to understand. So is my painting.’ – Grace Slick

‘When I was living in New York, I had this slightly wannabe bohemian existence and took up painting, at which I’m appalling. I also bought several guitars.’ – Eddie Redmayne

‘I don’t like getting out when I could be painting. And when I’m painting, I don’t want anybody else around.’ – Captain Beefheart

‘I love painting and have a need to do it.’ – Emma Watson

‘At first I had some idea that the absence of color made the work more physical. Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from different directions.’ – Jasper Johns

‘To do a drawing for a painting most often means doing something very sketchy and schematic and then later making it polished.’ – Jasper Johns

‘Used to be, conservatives revered the Average American, that Norman Rockwell oil painting of diner food, humble faith, honest toil, and Capraesque virtue.’ – James Wolcott

‘I think I’ve always been afraid of painting, really. Right from the beginning. All my paintings are about painting without a painter. Like a kind of mechanical form of painting.’ – Damien Hirst

‘A painting probably is the most shocking increase in value, from what it costs to make to what you sell it for.’ – Damien Hirst

‘I always feel a bit trapped when a painting goes for millions of pounds and only one person can have it. If you can have that as well as a poster on every student’s wall, then you’re in a very enviable position. I’d like to do a Damien Hirst for ¬£500 at some point.’ – Damien Hirst

‘I haven’t stopped painting or drawing – I’ve just added another medium.’ – David Hockney

‘My only worry is the painting I’m doing. Nothing else.’ – David Hockney

‘When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing.’ – David Hockney

‘The problem for the Left, however, is that the moment it stops painting the Right as vile, it has to argue the issues.’ – Dennis Prager

‘When you drive, you are doing several things at once. You are using your eyes, ears, hands, your mind. If you have meditated for many years and have reached a lofty height in your meditation, as I have, you can meditate while running and cycling and painting.’ – Sri Chinmoy

‘I’m trying to get every man involved in art, into experimental music, or painting, or novel-writing.’ – Harvey Pekar

‘The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.’ – J. G. Ballard

‘I did painting before I did photography.’ – David Bailey

‘It’s helpful for me to get ideas – the physical action of painting. Sometimes it frees up your writer brain. It’s nice for me now that the writing has become a serious career that painting can become more like a hobby.’ – Erin Morgenstern

‘After my divorce, painting took me out of panic mode and into a serene, calm place. I could absolutely lose myself.’ – Jane Seymour

‘When I started painting 17 years ago, I never imagined that anyone would look at my work or buy my pieces. But now I do about 14 exhibitions each year.’ – Jane Seymour

‘I spend my afternoons painting and working on my Open Hearts jewelry line for Kay Jewelers. I designed an image of a heart that isn’t completely closed. My mom always told me to live with an open heart – when life gets tough, you should go out and help someone else.’ – Jane Seymour

‘The day the producers aren’t minting money, or the fans are done with me and, most of all, I as a person get bored of acting, I will stop and pursue my other interests. There is a lot to do: painting, writing, direction.’ – Salman Khan

‘Sitting in the Oval Office, beneath a painting of George Washington, with a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. over his right shoulder and a bust of Abraham Lincoln over his left shoulder, Obama told ‘National Journal’ that the country’s economic woes are deep and endemic.’ – Ron Fournier

‘In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.’ – Jhumpa Lahiri

‘Painting, I think it’s like jazz.’ – Brian Eno

‘I’m irresponsible to my career in order to paint. Because painting is obsessive. I forget to eat. I forget to sleep.’ – Joni Mitchell

‘Leon Theremin’s original designs are elegant, ingenious and effective. As electronics goes, the theremin is very simple. But there are so many subtleties hidden in the details of the design. It’s like a great sonnet, or a painting, or a speech, that is perfectly done on more than one level.’ – Robert Moog

‘For me, my 20s were all about reaching for the brass ring of work in theater, television, and film, surviving in between by waiting tables, painting houses, serving coffee, and temping.’ – Kate Walsh

‘I grew up loving horses. I was relatively obsessed, starting with my rocking horse at age 2, all the way through my painting and drawing phase.’ – Diane Lane

‘I did photography, painting, and drawing, but I prefer sculpture. I like it because it’s very physical.’ – P. J. Harvey

‘I had tried painting, mostly to give myself a greater appreciation of the craft and to inform how I looked at paintings. That led to collaging some of the work I had done on paper, and I found myself mixing in found pieces as well.’ – Matt Gonzalez

‘I have a Damien Hirst spot painting which I love. It has pride of place over my dining-room table.’ – Cat Deeley

‘There’s nothing worse than sleeping in makeup. You wake up looking like a painting that’s been left out in a rainstorm.’ – Nina Dobrev

‘I’d like to think, that were he alive today, Warhol would be painting the Housewives.’ – Andy Cohen

‘I enjoy painting and can copy almost anything.’ – Vinny Guadagnino

‘You know, when I was younger I was into all kinds of art – drawing, painting, all that stuff. But I played drums, played piano forever.’ – Shooter Jennings

‘I’ve certainly always had a very high regard for Botswana and so I paint a very good picture of the country and I’ve never pretended to be painting an entirely realistic picture.’ – Alexander McCall Smith

‘These days, newish art can be priced between $10,000 and $25,000. When I tell artists that a new painting by a newish artist should go for around $1,200, they look at me like I’m a flesh-eating virus.’ – Jerry Saltz

‘Decades ago, Gerhard Richter found a painterly philosopher’s stone. Like Jackson Pollock before him, he discovered something that had been in painting all along, always overlooked or discounted.’ – Jerry Saltz

‘I rage against Vincent van Gogh for needing to die at 37, after painting for only ten years.’ – Jerry Saltz

‘Elizabeth Peyton, the artist known for tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant youth, is now painting tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant middle age.’ – Jerry Saltz

‘A sad fact of life lately at the Museum of Modern Art is that when it comes to group shows of contemporary painting from the collection, the bar has been set pretty low.’ – Jerry Saltz

‘Think of an abstract painting as very, very low relief – a thing, not a picture.’ – Jerry Saltz

‘I’ve been painting and making things since I was little.’ – Jemima Kirke

‘I wasn’t interested in going to the school dances. I wasn’t interested in going to the football games. What I wanted was to be in my room painting my walls and doing weird stuff. That’s what I wanted and I got to do what I wanted, so that, to me, is my high school experience.’ – Brie Larson

‘For me, acting is about the art of it and it’s about being on a film set and doing your thing, painting a blank canvas.’ – Shailene Woodley

‘A movie is painting, it’s photography, it’s literature – because you have to have the screenplay – it’s music. Put a different soundtrack to a comedy and it’s a tragedy. A movie combines all those forms and forces you to pay attention for two hours with a group of people.’ – Paula Patton

‘I’ve come up through art school, through painting, through graphic design, through advertising, through TV commercials and music video. I’ve designed books, built billboards, matchbooks, corporate identities. I continuously paint, I’ve done conceptual art pictures.’ – Tony Kaye

‘I loved painting and drawing for many reasons. One of them was that all it really required was me, a pencil and a pad. It was something I was passionate about, and still am.’ – Danny Huston

‘I liked English and art and did a lot of painting. And for some reason I was good at math, but I wasn’t an A student. I really had to work hard to get good grades.’ – Natasha Bedingfield

‘I’ve been painting off and on since I was in sixth grade. I don’t paint when I’m acting – I’m not really able to split my focus that way. I do it intensely when I’m doing it, but I’m reluctant to take myself too seriously as a painter because that would mean there would be pressure to be better than I am.’ – Michelle Pfeiffer

‘I do portraits. I usually do live models in a class environment, but I’ve been painting at home more. I really love the human form, and I love faces. I’ve tried to do landscapes a few times.’ – Michelle Pfeiffer

‘You’re going to react to a painting in a way that the painting demands you react.’ – Greil Marcus

‘My painting teacher in high school used to say, ‘I can’t paint like I want to, but through practice I’ll get better.’ But I don’t think that’s true. I think sometimes you just can’t paint.’ – Ellie Kemper

‘I’m interested in painting the most beautifully compelling pictures and images and metaphors and stories and explanations possible that will put Jesus in language for a world that desperately needs to hear it.’ – Rob Bell

‘Painting, drawing – I’m really into photography, I’ve done it since high school.’ – Dianna Agron

‘I’m a storyteller. I love to tell stories about brands. I love to tell stories, period. I like painting pictures through the words, and that’s what I do.’ – Gary Vaynerchuk

‘Painting is not what my life is about, but it is very important to me, and I am very lucky to be able to give some time to it.’ – Margrethe II of Denmark

‘The time that I devote to painting is not a lot of time, but I do it 100 percent while I am working, and then there’s nothing else that counts.’ – Margrethe II of Denmark

‘I paint for the sheer joy of painting. I have never sold any of my paintings. I’d rather give them to people for free.’ – Takeshi Kitano

‘I do all these various activities like painting and writing, comedy and films probably because not that I’m good at everything but because I’m not good at any of these things.’ – Takeshi Kitano

‘I find painting a much slower process than comedy, where you can go a mile a minute verbally and hope to God that some of the people out there understand you.’ – Jonathan Winters

‘I’ve done for the most part pretty much what I intended – I ended up doing comedy, writing and painting. I’ve had a ball. And as I get older, I just become an older kid.’ – Jonathan Winters

‘I began painting well before I started doing comedy. In fact, when I came out of the war in 1946, I enrolled in art school in Dayton, Ohio. I painted for three years, and then show business took hold.’ – Jonathan Winters

‘When I’m painting and drawing I only do people. Acting is obviously portraiture – and writing is as well.’ – Antony Sher

‘Every play I do, every book I write, every painting I paint, I will struggle with. I don’t know what it’s like for a project to come easy.’ – Antony Sher

‘My father made sure that I had lots of levels of education – from ballroom-dancing to painting, commando training, theatre and magic.’ – Baz Luhrmann

‘You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody’s eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody’s life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That’s why I love songwriting.’ – Rodney Atkins

‘When I was painting in art school – and I think many painters in the 1980s worked similarly – a finished painting would often be constructed from lots of other paintings underneath. Some of these individual layers of painting were better than others, but that was something that you would often only realise retrospectively.’ – Chris Ofili

‘People won’t stop painting, just as they won’t stop making music or dancing. This is a facility we have. Children don’t stop doing it or having it. On the other hand, it seems we don’t need painting anymore. Culture is more interested in entertaining people.’ – Gerhard Richter

‘I don’t think I can do this – painting under observation. It’s the worst thing there is, worse than being in the hospital.’ – Gerhard Richter

‘I love art. I used to have a painting of Gorbachev that was given to my family by Gorbachev.’ – Armie Hammer

‘I used to split my time between writing, music and painting. I would work on a book and then abandon it, start a band, do an album, quit music, then do a gallery show. Eventually I decided to give writing a serious shot.’ – Isaac Marion

‘A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don’t get it, I’m not sure why you are doing it.’ – Keegan-Michael Key

‘I don’t want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound.’ – Peter Greenaway

‘My mom dressed me in silk to go to elementary school. In kindergarten, they sent me home because I couldn’t do finger painting in my dress.’ – Allegra Versace

‘I feel like vocals are to music what portraits are to painting. They’re the humanity. Landscapes are good and fine, but at the end of the day everyone loves the Mona Lisa.’ – Grimes

‘I can tell really early on in a painting if I’m going to toss it or not.’ – Grimes

‘If you create something, whether it’s a painting or a company, I think if you care about it, you have some obligation to go out and tell people about it.’ – Daniel H. Pink

‘I’ve been asked which of the other arts novel-writing is most like, and I have come to believe it is acting. Of course, in terms of pattern it can be like music, in terms of structure it can be like painting, but the job to me is most like acting.’ – Andrew O’Hagan

‘I make sure I make a painting – that’s my job. And I cook the Sunday dinner.’ – Billy Childish

‘I liked drawing and painting, because the only failure would be to listen to the doubters who wanted me to stop drawing and painting because ‘you aren’t going to make a living doing that.’ I liked looking in art books at the work of painters.’ – Billy Childish

‘It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn’t understand, you’d have some obligation to guess. Now you don’t.’ – Dave Hickey

‘Also, painting and animation are really solitary pursuits, so the collaborative aspects of music making and acting are pretty welcome sometimes.’ – Tunde Adebimpe

‘The arts community is generally dominated by liberals because if you are concerned mainly with painting or sculpture, you don’t have time to study how the world works. And if you have no understanding of economics, strategy, history and politics, then naturally you would be a liberal.’ – Mark Helprin

‘Well, one always has an instinct to be a painter, and I’ve done quite a lot of painting at one time or another, though not with any public success.’ – Quentin Blake

‘In many ways, theatre is more rewarding for a writer. I used to think it was like painting a wall – that when the play is finished, it’s done – but now I realise it’s more like gardening; you plant the thing, then you have to constantly tend it. You’re part of a thing that’s living.’ – Lee Hall

‘When I go to an art gallery and stand in front of a painting, I don’t want someone telling me what I should be seeing or thinking; I want to feel whatever I feel, see whatever I see, and figure out what I figure out.’ – James Frey

‘I’m very interested in the language of photography in relationship to painting.’ – Catherine Opie

‘Usually when painters use photographs, they enlarge and copy them and simply make a large, boring painting of a large, boring photograph.’ – Duane Michals

‘I would have rebelled against parental authority, no matter what. When I was 15, I started painting my face and making my own clothes.’ – Grace Jones

‘Certainly one of the surprising truths of having a book published is realizing that your book is as open to interpretation as an abstract painting. People bring their own beliefs and attitudes to your work, which is thrilling and surprising at the same time.’ – Marisha Pessl

‘When I was growing up, I wanted to be a house painter like my father, but I was always screwing up when I went to work with him. I had a talent for knocking over paint and painting myself into corners. I also realized fairly quickly that painting bored me.’ – Markus Zusak

‘I’d rather create a miniature painting than a Taj Mahal of a book.’ – Mohsin Hamid

‘I’m innately conservative, and painting is an ideal place to exercise a progressive conservatism. I operate well within limits.’ – Laurie Simmons

‘The growth of art seems to be in cycles, and often its vigorous lifetime is restricted to a century or two. The periods of distinctive drama, Greek, English, Spanish, fall within such a limit; the schools of painting and sculpture likewise; and, in poetry, the Victorian age or the school of Pope will serve as examples.’ – George Edward Woodberry

‘In a painting, you can’t make out whether the artist painted the left eye before the right eye. In Chinese calligraphy, you can see the progression of the artist’s stroke.’ – Vikram Seth

‘I was always artistic – right from childhood – but my love of painting came a bit later. It followed my love of music.’ – Sean Scully

‘I was dishwasher, then promoted to chef in a local kitchen in a restaurant in Seattle, and I was working on a building site as well, putting in insulation and painting houses, and then doing some classes at a community college nearby.’ – Alexis Denisof

‘Film is mostly a visual medium, and so the director has much more control in terms of painting pictures and painting a performance. For theater, the director does everything he can and then says, ‘Out you go,’ and the actors are in charge of that stage every night.’ – David Lindsay-Abaire

‘I don’t get my inspiration from books or a painting. I get it from the women I meet.’ – Carolina Herrera

‘The first painting that I realised I liked was ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ by Hieronymus Bosch, when I was six years old, at the Prado in Madrid. I still find myself returning there every time I’m in the city.’ – Carolina Herrera

‘When I first started painting candyland imagery, I was looking for the best possible metaphor for everything that is pleasure, desire and insatiability.’ – Will Cotton

‘There’s something of a painting of a woman that represents all women – and by extension, all of humanity – that I just find very exciting. It’s a nice distillation, I think, of what it means to be alive.’ – Will Cotton

‘The small amount of people that control the discourse around painting – I thought that the whole museum world was just a bunch of phonies, and I didn’t really want to have anything to do with it. I guess I did installations, in a funny way, because they couldn’t be commodified.’ – Fred Tomaselli

‘When I was young, I didn’t want to do traditional painting and calligraphy. I deliberately wanted to separate from my father so I could feel I existed myself.’ – Cai Guo-Qiang

‘I was always painting when I was a kid. But then when I handled a camera when I was 17, that was it for me. I loved photography. I would work 4 or 5 hours a day. It was like a calling.’ – David LaChapelle

‘The point of painting is not really deception or imitation.’ – A. S. Byatt

‘I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I’m not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words.’ – A. S. Byatt

‘My work since the late ’80s specifically questioned what was presented as the ‘natural’ order of things in the history of post-war-N.Y. painting.’ – Deborah Kass

‘Painting contains a divine force which… makes the dead seem almost alive.’ – Leon Battista Alberti

‘I always sang. I wanted to be in a band with my sister, and I was, at 11. At 12, I started writing seriously, and that was my pacifier all through high school – that and painting.’ – Cyndi Lauper

‘If I was painting or writing, I wouldn’t veer away from things because they seemed unsavoury to me. So as an actor, I kind of think the same way. I should do things that are different and interesting and shed light on the craziness of the world.’ – Josh Hartnett

‘Painting is something that requires a lot of time – it’s not just one good idea out of art school.’ – Caio Fonseca

‘I’m not particularly interested in painting, per se. I’m interested in a painting that has that mysterious life to it. Anything that doesn’t partake of that magic is halfway dead – it returns to its physical elements, it’s just paint and canvas.’ – Caio Fonseca

‘The world of painting has nothing to do with the art world.’ – Caio Fonseca

‘Most days, I practice piano in the mornings and I spend the rest of the day painting.’ – Caio Fonseca

‘How are we going to make painters by lecturing to them? We are going to make questioners, doubters, and talkers. We are going to make painters by painting ourselves, and by showing the paintings of others. By working frankly from our convictions, we are going to make them work frankly from theirs.’ – William Morris Hunt

‘Painting is the only universal language. All nature is creation’s picture book. Painting alone can describe every thing which can be seen, and suggest every emotion which can be felt. Art reaches back into the babyhood of time, and is man’s only lasting monument.’ – William Morris Hunt

‘Don’t put needless expense into painting a head! Don’t try to match tints! Rose and pearly colours blend into each other so that no one can unite them if painted separately. Keep the impression of your subject as one thing!’ – William Morris Hunt

‘Painting is a coalescing of experience.’ – Richard Phillips

‘There was a belief after World War I that painting could be an act of civil revolt. I want this exhibition, ‘New Museum,’ to be an act of civil disobedience. It’s not so much about the New Museum on the Bowery, but the idea of challenging museums as projections of cultural authority. It’s painting as insurgency.’ – Richard Phillips

‘Technically, a makeup artist’s canvas is the face and body. The difference is that my painting of makeup is integrated into the painting of the flesh and not on top of it. I think in some ways it is more difficult to expressively deploy makeup.’ – Richard Phillips

‘I always start a painting with the sky.’ – Alfred Sisley

‘In the West, we look at art through life. Well, that’s one way of living. In the Orient they look at life through art. They even drink their tea without sugar, for the same reason that they don’t like a lot of frilly decorations on a painting. I can’t stand butter on my bread for the same reason. I’m allergic to goo and rococo.’ – Paul Rand

‘I have a painting where somebody’s holding a chicken, and underneath the chicken is somebody’s head.’ – Jean-Michel Basquiat

‘I enjoyed art in school. I’ve always done little drawings and stuff like that. I don’t really know what I’m doing with the painting, but I experiment.’ – Alex Lifeson

‘There are plenty of millionaires who would pay millions to hang a Van Gogh painting on the wall, but hardly one that would have ever had the crazy nut over for dinner. I feel like the big companies are like that with musicians. They’ll say, ‘We love music! It’s all about the music!’ – but if a musician shows up at the door, they call security.’ – Derek Sivers

‘My primary thing is to make a painting, not necessarily to make a painting to sell for gazillions of dollars, but just to make a painting.’ – Eric Fischl

‘The truth is that painting is all about scale; you use scale to create experience. A lot of artists have lost that ability. They don’t even know that’s something they should be doing.’ – Eric Fischl

‘For pure joy, I look at a small painting by Arbit Blatas. An ocean liner is at the center of the composition, perhaps ready to depart. It holds the promise of discovery.’ – Antonio Damasio

‘It’s still an escape for me, painting, so it also takes me elsewhere. I don’t think I would do it otherwise.’ – Peter Doig

‘I would never finish a painting if I didn’t have a deadline.’ – Peter Doig

‘It’s not about perfection. What’s a perfect painting? What’s interesting about a perfect painting?’ – Peter Doig

‘I don’t think money can help you become a better painter, for sure. You can have all the studios you want; it won’t help you make a better painting.’ – Peter Doig

‘If you are someone like Jeff Koons, and you have to work out how to make a big chrome heart or something, then there are lots of people and a big production involved. The money is more natural somehow. For me, I am just on my own in the studio, trying to make things work. One thing is sure: it doesn’t make painting any easier.’ – Peter Doig

‘Painting becomes interesting when it becomes timeless.’ – Peter Doig

‘What is bad painting? Picabia made some deliberately bad paintings, but they were by him, so great in a way.’ – Peter Doig

‘I use printers to make prints of the images that I am creating. And I try to have that surface kind of replicated in the painting.’ – Jeff Koons

‘Every painting I do blends time frames. The great thing about being an artist is I can make the past join the present in some reality of the future.’ – Thomas Kinkade

‘Photography, painting or poetry – those are just extensions of me, how I perceive things; they are my way of communicating.’ – Viggo Mortensen

‘It is impossible to know what fate will bring. If you love to write or paint, you will keep on writing or painting, and things will either work out or not, and you just have to keep being in the process.’ – Maira Kalman

‘If I hold up a red square for 30 seconds and take it away, you will see a perfect green square. It’s how the eye works. So if you want to paint a really good red painting, you have to strategically place in some green, so the eye is brought back.’ – Robert Irwin

‘When I was 18, I lived in Greenwich Village, New York, for nine months. At that time, I wanted to change the world, not through architecture, but through painting. I lived the artist’s life, mingling with poets and writers, and working as a waiter. I was intrigued by the aliveness of the city.’ – Christian de Portzamparc

‘Some people would ask: ‘You are not the one who does the painting, or shot the work, how can it be your work?’ But I was the one who chose which site we should use, and which assistant helps me to do the painting, or the shot.’ – Liu Bolin

‘It’s not like since I make comics I only read comics and since I make movies I will only go out and watch movies. Any kind of artistic expression interests me; it goes from literature to music to sculpture, painting; whatever is extremely inspiring for me becomes a reference also for me.’ – Marjane Satrapi

‘Sunday is the one day I keep reminding myself that I should lay around and take it easy, but because I am O.C.D. and an extreme multitasker, I find it hard to get lazy. I love Sundays for painting because it’s quieter; the gallery is closed, and there are no interruptions.’ – April Gornik

‘When I first started painting, I had an interesting nightmare about Cleveland – I dreamed the houses there were encased in this free-floating cage structure. I guess Cleveland was a confining place for me, even though my parents weren’t too conservative.’ – April Gornik

‘I’ve dreamed landscapes for years, and my dreams play an enormous role in my work. In fact, when I first started doing landscapes I felt insecure about painting in this style, and the dreams were like positive omens for me, and I’ve done a few paintings that were exact replicas of images that came to me in dreams.’ – April Gornik

‘The conceptual artist Ai WeiWei illustrates the schizoid society that rapid change has produced – sometimes by reassembling Ming-style furniture into absurd and useless arrangements, or by carefully painting and antiquing a Coca-Cola logo on an ancient Chinese pot.’ – Arne Glimcher

‘You don’t look at a painting and ask if the artist was gay or straight. I think it’s irrelevant in any situation – I don’t care if my garbageman is gay or straight as long as he picks up the garbage.’ – Bryan Batt

‘Painting puts me into an alpha state. It’s a private event. I make all the decisions in the process and never have to deal with the outside world.’ – Callum Keith Rennie

‘I always wanted to do something creative, but as much as I’m creative, it’s in a really hard-core, right-brained way. For me, painting doesn’t do it for me. There’s no constraint.’ – Joshua Prince-Ramus

‘I’ve done everything from cater, wait tables, pre-school teacher, painting, to being Cinderella, Elmo, a clown, nanny, selling hair… I would do kid’s parties and entertain and do magic and paint faces and balloon animals. The highlight of my life.’ – Diora Baird

‘Every artist is supposed to get emotional. You’re painting pictures of emotions.’ – Wale

‘I was always interested in the arts as a child – drawing, painting, and piano – but acting became a favourite. I was a major theatre geek in high school – if I wasn’t in the drama room at lunch rehearsing, I’d be in the art room finishing up some type of project.’ – Laura Mennell

‘Before adolescence I had an incredible voice. Like when I was 12, 13, 14 – I was taking acting classes, I was painting, I was making music, I was taking photographs. I was kind of exploding creatively, and then something about adolescence really just ground that out of me.’ – Lynn Shelton

‘I love Monet – I’ve nicknamed him King Blob. When you go up to the painting, it’s a series of blobs – amazing.’ – Celia Imrie

‘I have ADD or something. Even when I am doing something, it’s me on the computer, I’m painting and I’m writing music. I have to rotate what I’m doing every 15 minutes.’ – Charlyne Yi

‘My first artistic love was drawing and painting.’ – Wood Harris

‘I enjoy painting, cutting the lawn and working in the garden when I have time. That’s therapy for me. I enjoy working with my hands.’ – Billy Williams

‘I find painting a much slower process than comedy, where you can go a mile a minute verbally and hope to God that some of the people out there understand you. I don’t paint every day. I’m not that motivated.’ – Jonathan Winters

‘All I’m doing is painting. It’s my hobby. And that’s that.’ – John Mellencamp

‘I’m a pretty good drawer. I have trouble painting because you literally have to wait for the paint to dry. I’m disciplined, but I’m not patient.’ – Douglas Coupland

‘With proper acting, I don’t know what I would play – I got sent a script for a play, and it said in the notes that my proposed character was ‘hideously fat and ugly’. That made my day. I mean, I do know I am no oil painting.’ – Jo Brand

‘Painting is as close as a person can get to actually capturing the heat of the moment.’ – Sylvester Stallone

‘The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.’ – Colm Toibin

‘When it comes to partnership, some humans can make their lives alone – it’s possible. But creatively, it’s more like painting: you can’t just use the same colours in every painting. It’s just not an option. You can’t take the same photograph every time and live with art forms with no differences.’ – Ben Harper

‘It’s the idea of a multi-sensory experience stemming from music that opened my interest into painting, to be honest.’ – Serj Tankian

‘As a kid, I was always building things. My father had a shop in the house, and we built things – we were kind of a project family. I started out as a painter, and then painting led to cinema, and in cinema, you get to build so many things, or help build them.’ – David Lynch

‘You get a painting idea, and you go do that. You get a cinema idea, and you go in to do that. The difference is, even though the paintings might take some time to make, with cinema you are booked for a year and a half, minimum.’ – David Lynch

‘I love Christmas tree bulbs, and I started putting them in my paintings. You’ve got to plug this painting in, and it’s got a rig in the back, so that each one can be replaced if it burns out.’ – David Lynch

‘A lot of painters listen to music, I think, while they paint. But I hate to do that. It’s a horror. I can’t really listen to the music. I’m not really concentrating on it, and I’m not really concentrating on the painting.’ – David Lynch

‘Drawing and visual pursuits were first. Music came and found me in a way. Really, what it’s about is creative problem solving, and music is a lot more an expression of that than painting is for me.’ – Brandon Boyd

‘Painting is a lie. It’s the most magic of all media, the most transcendent. It makes space where there is no space.’ – Chuck Close

‘I don’t want the viewer to be able to peel away the layers of my painting like the layers of an onion and find that all the blues are on the same level.’ – Chuck Close

‘I’ve spent a long time avoiding painting and dealing with it from a distance. But as I get older, I’m more comfortable with it.’ – Damien Hirst

‘I gave up painting by 16. I secretly thought I would have been Rembrandt by then.’ – Damien Hirst

”Painting like a child’ isn’t a negative for me… it’s something only great artists can really achieve. The childlike quality of some of Picasso’s drawings is precisely what makes them so masterful and extraordinary; the ability to express complete visions, feelings and portraits through a continuous line.’ – Damien Hirst

‘Writing plays supplied for me everything that painting didn’t, which is the ability to tell stories in real time, in a real space, in three dimensions, in flesh and blood. I realized I had been trying to cram all this narrative into my paintings, but ultimately painting was a static medium. So it just opened up this whole new door.’ – Beau Willimon

‘The moment of creative impulse is what an artist gives you. You look at a Pollock, and it can’t give you the tools to do a painting like that yourself, but in doing the work, Pollock shares with you the moment of creative impulse that drove him to do that work.’ – Patti Smith

‘I’m old fashioned. I really think you should know how to draw before you start painting. I use charcoal and graphite; I put a skylight in. In my house, I turned the garage into an art studio. So I’m awash in art studios.’ – Peter Falk

‘Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.’ – John Berger

‘In drawing after drawing, pastel after pastel, painting after painting, the contours of Degas’s dancing figures become, at a certain point, darkly insistent, tangled and dusky. It may be around an elbow, a heel, an armpit, a calf muscle, the nape of a neck.’ – John Berger

‘When Dick Avedon died, I was so upset that I just started painting.’ – China Machado

‘When I am in New York, you know, my studio is big, about 20,000 to 25,000 square feet, and I have painting rooms and rooms I do etching in, rooms I do lithographs.’ – Peter Max

‘I was attracted to a lot of different art forms – dancing, painting. But there’s something about music that people hold so close. It’s such a powerful art form, and that’s why I live for it.’ – Ani DiFranco

‘Everything I do, it’s a bit painterly. I like being surrounded by objects, mostly on paper. I like the images. I like the painting. I like good photography. It’s something that makes me an emotional connection, and I feel comfortable around it.’ – Mikhail Baryshnikov

‘Although cover notes for classical music albums tend to say that the trill of flutes suggests mountain streams and so on, I don’t think anybody listens to music with the expectation that they’re going to be presented with a sort of landscape painting.’ – Brian Eno

‘Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we’ve been having with painting. There’s no way of looking at art as though you hadn’t seen art before.’ – Brian Eno

‘I’d been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it’s environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this ‘ambient music.’ But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.’ – Brian Eno

‘By the mid-’60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.’ – Brian Eno

‘I did not want windows, only skylights. I chose my painting wall as it has the best morning light.’ – Ellsworth Kelly

‘I’m interested in the space between the viewer and the surface of the painting – the forms and the way they work in their surroundings. I’m interested in how they react to a room.’ – Ellsworth Kelly

‘My dad’s an artist, and my grandfather paints – he’s not a painter; my grandfather’s a butcher – but he does a lot of crafts, stained glass, painting, that stuff. There is art in our family, and I was an art major in college along with being a theater major.’ – Brett Dalton

‘I’ve had a fan who made a painting of my face with her fingers. I have put it up in my room. It was sweet and very different.’ – Virat Kohli

‘Comedy is the one absolutely self-aware art form. Actually, hip-hop’s another one, I suppose. Because in your songs you’re talking about how good a hip-hop artist you are. It’s like a painter painting a panting of himself painting a painting.’ – Bo Burnham

‘In fairness, I don’t think that everyone understands what I say, but I think they understand part of it and part of what the issues are… Just the same way that people like a good painting, I think people really like understanding, knowing about the world.’ – Lisa Randall

‘There was a point after the whole intensity of the Clash finally subsided when I just found that painting grounded me in a way that music didn’t.’ – Paul Simonon

‘I love putting paint on canvas, getting lost in the process of painting.’ – Paul Simonon

‘I’m not knocking conceptual art; it’s another department, but it doesn’t move me like painting.’ – Paul Simonon

‘Over the years I always did some water colors, and I did a series of pictures of drawings. I always did it during a period of time that was slow in the photo business, but in essence it was always frustrating because I’d get started, and then it would be time to get back to work and I wouldn’t get anywhere with the painting.’ – Sante D’Orazio

‘I’m very superstitious. I come from a family that’s big on not painting the nursery until the baby is home.’ – Nina Jacobson

‘I love film – it’s like painting.’ – Azzedine Alaia

‘I believe, even when I’m doing my standup or my acting or whatever I’m doing, I believe in painting pictures.’ – J. B. Smoove

‘When I was 12 years old, I went to Natchitoches, La.; it was summer vacation with my family. We visited a plantation, Melrose. And I met an Afro-American woman who was a painter. I already had some idea of what I wanted to do in life, and one of the things that interested me was painting.’ – Robert Wilson

‘If you over-think, it affects things too much; I work instinctively, like painting in a way. Think too much, and you ruin everything.’ – Chris Lilley

‘Wine pricing is an art – like painting.’ – Joe Bastianich

‘Whenever I go on holiday, I like to time travel and imagine what it must have been like 500 years ago. I love the Tuscan landscape, which is reminiscent of a Claude Lorrain painting.’ – Jools Holland

‘When I was in high school, I was going to be a painter because I had a facility for painting. I could do it, but I didn’t have anything to say in that medium.’ – Ellen McLaughlin

‘Portland in particular is a cheap enough place to live that you can still develop your passion – painting, writing, music. People seem less status-conscious. Even wealthy people buy second-hand clothes and look a little bit homeless.’ – Chuck Palahniuk

‘I hate painting with a broad brush, but I think the birther thing, at its root, is racist. The guy was born in Hawaii. A black guy is president. It’s cool. Get over it. Just deal with it. There’s nothing you could show these birther people that would shut them up.’ – Henry Rollins

‘Like most sensible people, you probably lost interest in modern art about the time that Julian Schnabel was painting broken pieces of the crockery that his wife had thrown at him for painting broken pieces of crockery instead of painting the bathroom and hall.’ – P. J. O’Rourke

‘I’m sick of the foodies who need every morsel that goes into their mouth to be a Picasso painting, a Giacometti sculpture, a Proust novel, evoking the world with each crumb.’ – Jessi Klein

‘My hobbies away from horse racing would be reading and painting; I love art.’ – Chantal Sutherland

‘What I can’t tell with a photo I will tell with a painting, and what I can’t tell with a painting I will tell with a video or text sometimes, et cetera.’ – Francis Alys

‘My interest in society – at times so pronounced that the word ‘snob’ comes a little to mind – derives from the fact that I like an immense number of things which society, money, and position bring in their train: painting, tapestries, rare books, smart dresses, dances, gardens, country houses, correct cuisine, and pretty women.’ – Frank Crowninshield

‘In the visual arts, particularly painting, I distrust all those abstractions, those artificial constructions. I have a very simple way of judging them: if I can do them, they are not art.’ – F. Sionil Jose

‘I counterfeited Mark Kostabi’s artworks. During the eighties, Mark didn’t paint his own paintings. Instead, he had other artists painting them, and he just added his signature. So what I did was to use some of the same painters, and signed his name myself.’ – Andy Behrman

‘In our world, in which religious images are losing their meaning, in which our customs are getting more and more secular, we are losing our sense of the eternal. I think it’s a loss that has done a great deal of damage to modern art. Painting is a return to origins.’ – Antoni Tapies

‘I often avoid using the terms ‘figuration’ and ‘abstraction’ because I’ve always tried to have it both ways. I want the experience of looking at one of my paintings to be similar to the process of making the painting – you go from the big picture to something very intense and detailed, and then back again.’ – Cecily Brown

‘When I moved to New York, I was waiting tables, painting in the daytime and working at night, and I felt it was possible to find a balance and just about get by.’ – Cecily Brown

‘You care enough, that you want your life to be fulfilled in a living way, not in a painting way, not in a writing way… you really do want it to be involving in living, corresponding with other living objects, moving, changing, that kind of thing.’ – Edie Sedgwick

‘Painting, for me, is a dynamic balance and wholeness of life; it is mysterious and transcending, yet solid and real.’ – Richard Pousette-Dart

‘At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.’ – Alice Walker

‘I am like a security camera ever on the watch. The furtive quality of vision feels to me like an incredibly valuable weapon. Everything I see gets transformed into a private sketch or painting in my mind, stored away for future reference, future evidence, future ammunition.’ – Rosemary Mahoney

‘That’s why I ended up going to Lancaster University, because they had a visual arts course, and in the first year it was like a broad visual arts course in sculpture, painting, graphics – all of that.’ – Andy Serkis

‘People who look at my painting say that it makes them happy, like the feeling when you wake up in the morning. And happiness is the goal, isn’t it?’ – Agnes Martin

‘You can’t make a perfect painting. We can see perfection in our minds. But we can’t make a perfect painting.’ – Agnes Martin

‘If I say ‘Find me an interesting painting’ to Google, someday a robot could go around the Picasso museum and take a picture for me.’ – Vijay Kumar

‘I used to do stop motion in my own garage and Claymation and all that stuff. That led to doing backgrounds and matte paintings. I started doing matte paintings professionally back before the computer, sort of painting on glass.’ – Robert Stromberg

‘We share a huge visual memory bank, mostly through painting and other images in history. I think when a modern photograph taps into those, sometimes very subliminally, it makes people respond.’ – Chris Hondros

‘Some directors were brilliant in the silent era but never felt at home in sound. It’s like a sculptor being forced to take up painting.’ – Kevin Brownlow

‘A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of anxiety, but a Kokoschka painting, or a Schiele self-portrait, reveals what an anxiety state really feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of the mind, yet they are rarely brought together.’ – Eric Kandel

‘Unlike painting, sculpture, or music, typefaces must be useful to someone. Fortunately for designers, the digital age has produced new problems to solve – developing typefaces that work on mobile phones, for one – and enabled better solutions to old problems.’ – Virginia Postrel

‘I was always most interested in drawing – most of my childhood drawings are black-and-white line work. And when I kind of abandoned comics, through college and art school, I was doing a lot of painting. But once I started doing comics again, everything else just fell by the wayside.’ – Jeffrey Brown

‘Lou Tyrrell has created a theatre that is a safe haven for playwrights, a birthing center for new American writing. Arts Garage has created a vital, enthusiastic audience for theatre, music, painting and sculpture in Delray Beach.’ – Israel Horovitz

‘When I’m not painting, I’m Oujia-boarding with my photos. I’ll sort through my pictures, put them in different folders, and come back months later to one in particular and try to figure out why I took it.’ – Damian Loeb

‘If it weren’t for how esoteric the art world likes to be, I would love actually to play the music in the shows, painting the music that influences me most.’ – Damian Loeb

‘Painting keeps me occupied in those moments when travel can be aimless and even disorienting. Mainly it is a way to register at least some of the new impressions of a foreign place, when its thrilling barrage can sometimes overwhelm you.’ – Susan Minot

‘A great painting is a great painting.’ – Larry Poons

‘There are people who don’t respond to color. That’s what painting is. It’s color.’ – Larry Poons

‘I love painting. I went to college in fine arts, and I still do it all the time.’ – Jessalyn Gilsig

‘A painting of a person can be descriptive, but for me it’s about all the things that make up a picture – the feelings, the brushstrokes – more than describing somebody. People latch on to the personalities when they talk about my work and forget the other parts.’ – Elizabeth Peyton

‘Wash your face at the end of the night! There’s nothing worse than sleeping in makeup. You wake up looking like a painting that’s been left out in a rainstorm.’ – Nina Dobrev

‘For the general public, my work is sometimes easier than a painting because there is someone addressing you; it can actually be a relief. What’s interesting is the idea of a tourist randomly coming in and the experience they’ll have.’ – Tino Sehgal

‘When you’re a fledgling youth-type adult, it appears that all people in their 40s look old enough to be in a painting hanging on the wall of a stately home in England. It’s not until you limp into your 70s that people in their 40s look too young to vote, and college cheerleaders closely resemble Yorkshire terriers.’ – Dan Jenkins

‘I had decent but not great grades in high school because I was highly motivated in some subjects, like the arts, drama, English, and history, but in math and science I was a screw-up. Wooster saw something in me, and I really flourished there. I got into theatre, took photography and painting classes.’ – J. C. Chandor

‘In film, you’re painting a canvas. I got really excited about that.’ – Alice Lowe

‘Love is important. I didn’t have the energy to be giving it to somebody else in a way that they deserved, and I knew that. So I’ve always been scared to go too far with somebody I care for because I knew there would come a day when I’d need to pick up and finish a painting for the next three months. That day is inevitable.’ – Dan Colen

‘A lot of my work is about what’s abstract and what’s pictorial. Is it bubblegum, or is it an abstract painting using bubblegum? The energy comes from walking that line and watching things dip this way and that.’ – Dan Colen

‘I didn’t do so well in the academic world, so I think the only way I could express myself was through visual art – anything I could get my hands on, whether it was glassblowing, sculpture, painting, or photography. I always wanted to be a painter. Or a farmer.’ – Steven Klein

‘I like the feeling of not knowing where to look when you are only performing for one person or watching someone practice. It creates this kind of a strange in-between, which can be mirrored in the feeling of making a painting.’ – Dana Schutz

‘There are a lot of artists in Gowanus, and certain things come into your visual vocabulary from living there – the scale of the subway and the canal, sometimes it almost looks like a de Chirico painting, with the intense angles of the shadows and everything.’ – Dana Schutz

‘That’s when I feel really excited about a painting. When it starts to feel real, when it feels like it has a personality.’ – Dana Schutz

‘Painting and photography keep the creative channel open, and for an actor, it’s to keep alive, it’s to keep awake, it’s to keep watching, it’s to keep feeling, it’s to keep enjoying, to keep that sensuality of feeling alive.’ – Charlotte Rampling

‘If you want to paint the inner life, you paint it from the exterior. From the exterior, you breathe the inner life into your painting.’ – Charlotte Rampling

‘I feel fairly certain that my painting skills might not be best shown on ‘Dancing with the Stars.’ I’ll have to come up with another way to showcase that side of me.’ – Derek Hough

‘When I was in high school, I thought I might be an artist. I was very good at drawing and painting.’ – Roma Downey

‘The most difficult thing about painting is the self-discipline. When I finish a job, I give myself a few days, but then I have to discipline myself quite fiercely if I want to do some painting that’s worthwhile. Otherwise, you’re just doodling. It’s much easier when you’re just told what you have to do.’ – John Hurt

‘Every writer has their rituals. For me, it’s morning walks along the beach. And then, in my study I have a huge painting of the Black Madonna hung over my desk, and quite a few pictures of Mary around me for inspiration.’ – Sue Monk Kidd

‘I have always loved contemporary dance, but it has always been a bit of a mystery to me. But choreography is very much like what I do when you are putting characters in frame on the page. It’s so impressive what they do with their bodies. It’s like painting: an abstraction.’ – Michael Leunig

”State’ can be a word that is a noun or a verb or an adverb – it’s kind of why I chose that title. It’s not to confound the audience but to keep me from painting myself into a cul-de-sac in the early stages of making a record by having too high concept or having some really strict set of rules I have to adhere to.’ – Todd Rundgren

‘I’ve always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.’ – Ric Ocasek

‘I’m a classically trained painter, and I was an illustrator in New York working with Fortune 500s companies as well as the NBA and the Olympics. I first got into sculpting when I created a sculpture based on a painting I had done for the 1984 Olympics.’ – Richard MacDonald

‘In the end, the gesture of painting becomes almost meditative, like a ritual.’ – Shahzia Sikander

‘My whole purpose of taking on miniature painting was to break the tradition, to experiment with it, to find new ways of making meaning, to question the relevance of it.’ – Shahzia Sikander

‘Punk rock and skateboarding took the ‘school’ out of living your life, and I related to learning as I went, doing a lot of different things that I liked, when I liked. Consequently, I’m mediocre at all of the above, but still stoked on being a lifetime student of music, skating, painting, writing, etc.’ – Jeff Ament

‘I had an idea for a technologically advanced luxury watch. I got involved in digital art and neon painting and put on shows of my work.’ – Giorgio Moroder

‘As a kid, there was a painting of ‘Appeal to the Great Spirit’ that I would see when I would get oatmeal bowls out of the cupboard. This painting, it was so real to me that it frightened me.’ – Lance Henriksen

‘I like to treat paint as material – to daub it, drop it, let it slide. There was Action Painting, but I also compare it to paint effects found on the streets. This approach is superimposed on a sculptural surface that is also ‘painterly.” – Claes Oldenburg

‘Treasure is the kind of thing you dig up… or bury! And when people say, ‘Oh, he’s an icon,’ well, an icon is a very old painting hanging in a Russian church! If you want to say something, say something nice about me. Don’t call me a national treasure.’ – Terry Wogan

‘I’ve always been a creative person, and I’d always wanted to paint, so I went to art school and began painting and sculpting.’ – Shirley Eaton

‘The only thing in life that really gives me any peace is just being lost in the process of creating something, whether it’s the film or painting and drawing, which has been a big part of my life, for a long time.’ – Ellar Coltrane

‘When I act, I feel like I am a color in someone else’s painting – I can be the best blue that there is, but I’m still only part of their entire picture – but, with music, when I am performing with Reserved For Rondee, I am the painter, you know?’ – Billy Magnussen

‘Because I went to Chouinard, which then became CalArts, I became a multi-discipline artist – it wasn’t just about painting, it was about media and performance.’ – John Van Hamersveld

‘I wrote ‘My Name is Red’ just to remember painting, where the hand does it before the intellect. When I’m captive to it, I’m a happier person. Kierkegaard tells us that a happy person is someone who lives in the present; the unhappy person, someone who lives either in the past or the future.’ – Orhan Pamuk

‘The irony is that the more we fight age, the more it shows. Paint on a 50-year-old face brings to mind a Gilbert and Sullivan comic figure. Smooth the cheeks, and suddenly the ear lobes and hands look out of place. Do we run around in October, painting the gold leaves green?’ – Karen DeCrow

‘I have always loved science, but I have always loved the arts – drawing, painting and, yes, writing – more.’ – Charles M. Blow

‘In England, there is a dividing line between artists and illustrators, who are thought inferior to painters. Well, that’s absolute rubbish. Some of the most creative work is being done in children’s books. In Japan, everything is art. They don’t say painting is better than ceramics or dress design.’ – Brian Wildsmith

‘Because I was traveling a lot during the ’70s, the only thing I could do on the road was take photographs, so there wasn’t much painting during those years.’ – Sigmar Polke

‘My mother painted and wrote. She always had a painting in progress on an easel in the kitchen, so our house always smelled like oil paint. At night, she wrote after she’d put my sisters and me to bed, and the sound of her typing was our lullaby.’ – Luanne Rice

‘Scientifically, information is a choice – a yes-or-no choice. In a broader sense, information is everything that informs our world – writing, painting, music, money.’ – James Gleick

‘When I work, I’m thinking in terms of purely visual effects and relations, and any verbal equivalent is something that comes afterwards. But it’s inconceivable to me that I could experience things and not have them enter into my painting.’ – Adolph Gottlieb

‘I began to see cinema as the perfect combination of so many wonderful art forms – painting, photography, music, dance, theater.’ – James Gray

‘When you’re telling stories, you are actually trying to illuminate some portion of the truth in an artful way. The story may immediately seem to be a lie, but it’s like an impressionistic painting – you see the light and the color better than you would with a photo-realistic piece.’ – Christopher Moore

‘There isn’t an amount of money you could offer me to do reality TV. I would rather get my job back on the building site. Or I could own a construction business. Maybe I could retire to my house in Long Island and take up painting, like Captain Beefheart. A crazy recluse: I like that idea.’ – Dave Gahan

‘Indeed, an engineer designing a structure is not unlike an artist painting one. Both start with nothing but talent, experience, and inspiration. The fresh piece of paper on the drawing board is as blank as the newly stretched piece of canvas.’ – Henry Petroski

‘I had always loved cartoons, especially ‘Bugs Bunny,’ and I found I enjoyed making animated films. Even a 30-second commercial involved drawing and painting, storytelling, not to mention actors, music, and sound effects.’ – Mordicai Gerstein

‘Years ago, when I was in Siena for the first time, I saw the works of Duccio, whose deeply emotional painting from the thirteenth century has never left me.’ – Siri Hustvedt

‘We feel closer to the drawings on the walls of Chauvet than the painting of, say, an Egyptian mural. These artists are not remote ancestors; they are brothers. They saw like us; they drew like us. We wear essentially the same clothes against the cold.’ – Simon McBurney

‘I feel that, as an actor, you’re constantly working to become better, which I love, but with painting, I can fail on my own terms. There’s a freedom in that, so that’s why I love to paint.’ – J. August Richards

‘I started painting when I was in high school.’ – James Best

‘I learned a lot of painting tricks painting outside.’ – James Rosenquist

‘I started billboard painting in Minneapolis, and I went to General Outdoor Advertising, and I said, ‘I could do that.’ They said, ‘Oh yeah… we can always use a good man around here.” – James Rosenquist

‘When things become peculiar, frustrating and strange, I think it’s a good time to start painting.’ – James Rosenquist

‘I feel lucky that I’ve been able to make a living from painting any idea that comes into my head.’ – James Rosenquist

‘I stick the collages on the wall and, if I still like them after a month or two, I make a painting.’ – James Rosenquist

‘The poet is a specialist in something which everyone practises. Herein, poetry differs from the other arts. Everyone does not practise music or painting or even dancing, but everyone without exception puts together words poetically every day of his life.’ – Louis MacNeice

‘When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in.’ – Marcel Duchamp

‘Painting is a language of its own. You cannot interpret one form of expression with another form of expression.’ – Marcel Duchamp

‘Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn’t realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.’ – Marcel Duchamp

‘All painting, beginning with Impressionism, is antiscientific, even Seurat. I was interested in introducing the precise and exact aspect of science, which hadn’t often been done, or at least hadn’t been talked about very much.’ – Marcel Duchamp

‘Futurists wanted to suggest movement by means of a dynamic painting; Duchamp applies the notion of delay – or, rather, or analysis – to movement.’ – Octavio Paz

‘To me, this was an oxymoron, doing a painting of a dancer. Dancers are always moving.’ – Jamie Wyeth

‘I’m a terrible technician, and I have a very hard time painting.’ – Jamie Wyeth

‘Painting is a field that attracts a lot of lazy people. You can just sort of sit and wait for things to come to you. I know a lot of painters who’ll sit and chat it up all night. But God, I just can’t do that.’ – Jamie Wyeth

‘Painting is such an individual profession. I’m not performing. There’s no audience.’ – Jamie Wyeth

‘Your creativity before it gets formed into words and songs is the actual substance. No one else can see it, right? Unless you give it the shape of a song or a painting or whatever.’ – John Darnielle

‘I couldn’t live on the singing at first, so I worked as a cleaner, in a launderette, in a garage, face painting and doing the windows of shops at Christmas, ’cause I had been to art college.’ – Imelda May

‘I’d always loved writing, in the same way that I’d loved painting. I wouldn’t have seen it as a career.’ – Robyn Davidson

‘I’ve always loved painting and drawing. I wish I’d developed it more and exhibited.’ – Mary Quant

‘I feel like I became an artist by default. I went to art college, but my interest was always more towards film than painting or sculpture.’ – Sam Taylor-Johnson

‘In the beginning, I started doing portraits of children, and of course, children have large eyes. For some reason, they just started getting bigger and bigger. Then, when I started painting imaginary children rather than real ones, they became bigger still.’ – Margaret Keane

‘Once I found these sticker things for your nails – Sally Hansen – those were really fun to do. They’re really fun to do when you’re bored, and it’s better than painting your nails because you don’t mess up. It looks really good, very professional. I tried a zebra one that was really pretty, but I always get a little bored of it.’ – Gia Coppola

‘Delphine Lucielle’s paintings are profound, unique, and moving. It is rare to find contemporary art that combines both beauty, innovation, and creates a new style of painting by fusing technology and nature. Delphine Lucielle is pushing the boundaries of what art is capable of.’ – Jerry Yang

‘The question I ask myself when adapting a book is how do I be true to the spirit and soul of the character? How would I describe this character in my medium? If you asked one person to do a painting of something and another to create a sculpture of it, you’ll never ask, ‘Why doesn’t the painting look like the sculpture?” – Gavin Hood

‘I’ve enjoyed collecting. I’ve enjoyed art ever since – I’ll tell you when – I went to Columbia. I went to the Met, and I saw Poussin’s ‘Rape of the Sabine Women’, and it’s this incredible, epic, great, great painting.’ – Daniel S. Loeb

‘I started experimenting with jewelry in my 20s – I was playing around with gemstones and painting things in gold leaf, and it turned into this huge obsession for me, so I launched my first jewelry line, Jade Inc.’ – Jade Jagger

‘Strange story about Degas. He hated women, didn’t want to be with them. Yet he spent much of his life painting them. He had seen his father maltreat his mother, must have had a deep fear that he’d do the same thing.’ – Irving Stone

‘I came down successfully through Picasso and Braque, down through Pollock, I guess, but I began to stop at Franz Kline and the Abstractionists. I like their design, brilliant design, marvelous color layers. But I don’t find any human content there. I’m from an old school, and painting has to have human content for me.’ – Irving Stone

‘I was making big paintings with mythological themes. When I started painting black figures, the white professors were relieved, and the black students were like, ‘She’s on our side.’ These are the kinds of issues that a white male artist just doesn’t have to deal with.’ – Kara Walker

‘Especially in the world today, where science rightfully is so important in terms of technology, innovation, telecom, Internet, fighting diseases, I think it’s equally important that poetry and painting have their share of support.’ – Leon Black

‘A painting doesn’t have to have a real usability other than you looking at it. Obviously, a car, an engine, or battery has to fit people’s needs.’ – Henrik Fisker

‘For most Americans, poetry plays no role in their everyday lives. But also for most Americans, contemporary painting or jazz or sculpture play no role either. I’m not saying poetry is singled out as a special thing to ignore.’ – Billy Collins

‘I always wanted to be a painter. I loved painting. I went on three different art courses but had no talent whatsoever.’ – John Burnside

‘I wrote as a kid, but I never wanted to be a writer, particularly. I had been drawing and painting for years and loved that.’ – Gail Carson Levine

‘I go through the arc of a relationship with every single painting that I do.’ – Mark Bradford

‘I’m kind of an insecure artist. I hop from piece to piece. I always think my life depends on every painting. Every painting is my first painting.’ – Mark Bradford

‘True Boogie-Woogie I conceive as homogeneous in intention with mine in painting: destruction of melody, which is the equivalent of destruction of natural appearance, and construction through the continuous opposition of pure means – dynamic rhythm.’ – Piet Mondrian

‘To move the picture into our surroundings and give it real existence has been my ideal since I came to abstract painting.’ – Piet Mondrian

‘The real sustains the same relation to the ideal that a stone does to a statue – or that paint does to a painting. Realism degrades and impoverishes.’ – Robert Green Ingersoll

‘I’m not going to sit for some painting. That’s so 1800s. I’m not doing that.’ – Jason Chaffetz

‘What do you see when you look at a representational painting? Most of the time, the first thing I see is a flat piece of canvas covered with colored patterns.’ – Terry Teachout

‘If you look at a painting that you love by one of the great masters, every time you go back to it, you see something different – a different attitude or brushstroke. ‘Hamlet’ is like an entire gallery of old masters.’ – Rory Kinnear

‘My music is more than me writing a flashy soul song. They’re heartfelt songs about my family and true stories. I have also songs that aren’t personal, but just painting a picture. I don’t like being put under labels, but my music is going to continue to stay classic and timeless forever.’ – Leon Bridges

‘I tell my workshop students, ‘I want you to think of yourselves as artists. Then, when you’re writing, you’re painting, you’re crafting, you’re making a design, you’re sculpting, you’re creating choreography, sound, a sound script.” – Juan Felipe Herrera

‘I think photography is closest to writing, not painting. It’s closest to writing because you are using this machine to convey an idea. The image shouldn’t need a caption; it should already convey an idea.’ – Mary Ellen Mark

‘In traditional Asian arts, the word and the picture always sit next to each other. I have an aunt, a Chinese brush painter, who told me that when you do a Chinese brush painting, you have to pair the image up with some poetry.’ – Gene Luen Yang

‘The idea of being close to where pigments were mined – that’s the first thing in making a painting, getting the material. And what’s the last thing you do in making a painting? You put a frame around it.’ – Susan Vreeland

‘It was only after I began to write fiction that I found a way to connect with painting.’ – Susan Vreeland

‘To feel the grace of God in a painting of the dear, quiet commonness of a domestic interior, or in a landscape, seascape, cityscape, trains us to feel the grace of God in the thing itself in situ.’ – Susan Vreeland

‘Pablo Picasso would paint a painting and hang it on the wall, and you would go and see the painting exactly how he wanted it to be made. But if you have an idea for a TV show, for example, you’re beholden to studios to produce it and distributors to distribute it.’ – Casey Neistat

‘Movies are weird; it’s like trying to make a painting with one hundred people. It’s a weird world, but every job is weird; it’s always a little bit hard, crazy and fun, a nice combination.’ – Dito Montiel

‘A painting should be tough; it should have muscle, but I have to find some tenderness in it, too. There has to be that dynamic.’ – Gary Hume

‘People constantly describe me as a formalist or even a minimalist, but I’m not really bothered with the rules of painting or the history of painting. My approach is that everything is mine. I take what I can use from wherever, and then I forget where I’ve taken it from. But there is no point me making anything that looks like anyone else’s.’ – Gary Hume

‘I don’t vote. I voted Labour once, in that moment of euphoria. I know that if people only made a voice for change, then change will happen, but I’m not that person. I’m painting pictures.’ – Gary Hume

‘Now, I love painting. I love looking. I love the fact that they don’t move. They constantly change with the light. They are sort of patient.’ – Gary Hume

‘I have to take it as a given that I have got a certain ability to do something. I can be an artist, which is take something and transform it into another thing. I can just see something, and I can see my painting.’ – Gary Hume

‘One drawing demands to become a painting, so I start to work on that, and then the painting might demand something else. Then the painting might say, ‘I want a companion, and the companion should be like this,’ so I have to find that, either by drawing it myself or locating the image.’ – Gary Hume

‘Small paintings can be fantastic. But you can’t often get a narrative out of a small painting. In any case, museums are huge places, and you want to take up some space.’ – Gary Hume

‘Sometimes I can see the whole painting from the outset in my mind’s eye. But more often than not, that idea doesn’t last the duration of the painting. Sometimes it comes out easy, just as I had envisaged. But that is reasonably rare.’ – Gary Hume

‘I have to go with what the painting says to me. The painting is always informing me. I’m its servant; it’s not mine. I’m doing what it wants.’ – Gary Hume

‘We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it’s opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There’s so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.’ – Patti Smith

‘I became an American on Nov. 4, 2010, at an elegant ceremony in Great Hall of Bullfinch’s Faneuil Hall, Boston, beneath a vast painting of Daniel Webster debating the preservation of the Union with Robert Hayne of South Carolina, before the Civil War.’ – Nigel Hamilton

‘Back to the painting of the Sistine Chapel, there’s always been run-ins between benefactors and artists.’ – Jon Favreau

‘I used a kind of gray-green early on in my practice for painting steel, to make it look more like it had a kind of patina to it, like copper and bronze and so on. The color I used was a Benjamin Moore color called 2012. My then-young daughter started calling me 2012 – it was my nickname.’ – Michael Graves

‘Because fashion essentially is art, and as an artist and someone who is also a musician and an artist in regards to drawing and painting, anything I can do that expresses my feelings is something I’m really drawn to.’ – Ruby Rose

‘My grandmother was fond of painting and playing the piano. She had been given lessons by Emmanuel Chabrier, who used to spend the summer months in nearby Membrolle.’ – Yves Chauvin

‘I’ve been working in sculpture and painting since 1920.’ – Betty Parsons

‘I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it’s so essential that when I’m involved in the actual process, my so-called ‘real life’ becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying.’ – David Bowie

‘Egon Schiele is my favorite painter. There’s just something about art – photography, painting, music, plays – whatever you see, sometimes there’s a gut reaction that’s more important or more visceral than what your brain is thinking about. You can’t explain that reaction. It’s like what happens when you fall in love.’ – Albert Hammond, Jr.

‘Painting is almost like a sport. It’s like this action thing. When I do it, I’m really not thinking. The paintings are like a diary that I might not want to read again.’ – Alison Mosshart

‘If I’m at a party, and there are lots of people running around, you’ll most likely find me on the floor, painting… I want to be at the party, but I want to do something. I’m just not very idle at all.’ – Alison Mosshart

‘I’m inspired by being in a different town every day – all the people I meet, all the things I see. There’s no way of compartmentalizing everything in my head; whatever I’m taking in is coming out in some way. I think I love painting so much because, for me, it’s so fast. There’s not too much thought in these paintings.’ – Alison Mosshart

‘No painting is ever not an infinitely reproducible image any more.’ – Molly Crabapple

‘The detail adds an element of unexpected something. All fiction is false; what makes it convincing is that it runs alongside the truth. The real world has lots of incidental details, so a painting also has to have that element of imperfection and irregularity, those incidental details.’ – Shaun Tan

‘Illustrating is more about communicating specific ideas to a reader. Painting is more like pure science, more about the act of painting.’ – Shaun Tan

‘I wanted to study painting and become a painter, but I had a huge flip-over in my life when I was about 18 or 19. I was part of a criminal environment; I got arrested and convicted, and I had to start thinking in a new way.’ – Aksel Hennie

‘I think a lot of times our culture has an attitude toward art and the production of art that separates artists from the rest of us, like making art or music or painting or whatever is some magical thing that you have to be inspired to do, and special people do it.’ – Ann Leckie

‘As soon as I went to painting school in New York, I took an experimental film course, and everything clicked and came together. I realized my love of music and drama and the visual arts all came together. This happened in 1989. Since then, it’s been a long road of educating myself in every possible way.’ – Patty Jenkins

‘I’ve painted in the past, but I only average about one painting a year, and the last painting I did, I actually really liked.’ – Mike Mignola

‘My whole life has been singing and painting. I just do those two things.’ – Tony Bennett

‘I try to vote as left as I can. I hope that my paintings will coincide and be far left, but frequently… the painting rebels and goes fascist on me.’ – Peter Saul

‘While in college, I used to get my ideas from photographs in ‘National Geographic.’ I started painting palm trees and motorboats.’ – Peter Saul

‘As a teenager, I was really interested in drama and art. I did painting and drawing. I did some acting and loved theater.’ – Sarah Gavron

‘Modern art, in particular, seems especially vulnerable to fraud. Its abstractions are sometimes difficult to understand or grasp, and a modern painting is often loved less because of its intrinsic quality – its beauty, as conventionally understood – than because of the identity of the painter, its mark of social status.’ – Peter Landesman

‘Photography is about finding things. And painting is different – it’s about making something.’ – Saul Leiter

‘I was a hyperactive kid, and it took awhile for me to find the right teacher. My master was a Shaolin kung fu teacher, but he also taught tai chi, Chinese medicine, brush painting – he was adept at all facets of Chinese culture.’ – Daniel Wu

‘Not all paintings are abstract; they’re not all Jackson Pollock. There’s value in a photograph of a man alone on a boat at sea, and there is value in painting of a man alone on a boat at sea. In the painting, the painting has more freedom to express an idea, more latitude in being able to elicit certain emotion.’ – Aaron Sorkin

‘It is the single image, as used in a photograph or a painting – or the frame of a film – to which words have been added to enlarge the context. The method is not the same as that by which most paintings are named. It is closer in its performance to what dialogue does to a movie, to what the caption does to a good poster.’ – Muriel Rukeyser

‘Relevance, for me, is about being creative and doing things that you believe in, whether that’s music or acting or painting a picture, or whatever that is.’ – Larry Mullen, Jr.

‘At art college, I started to do music and then painting and drawing – and that would have been my ideal life, to be an artist and be paid for it, to be able to create stuff. I realized it was difficult, but I don’t know if I had the application for it.’ – Sean Bean

‘I have seen Colonial churches since I was very small, Colonial painting and polychrome sculpture. And that was all I saw. There was not a single modern painting in any museum, not a Picasso, not a Braque, not a Chagall. The museums had Colombian painters from the eighteenth century and, of course, I saw Pre-Columbian art. That was my exposure.’ – Fernando Botero

‘My popularity has to do with the divorce between modern art, where everything is obscure, and the viewer who often feels he needs a professor to tell them whether it’s good or not. I believe a painting has to talk directly to the viewer, with composition, color and design, without a professor to explain it.’ – Fernando Botero

‘People say, ‘What a discipline, painting so much.’ I say, ‘No, I love it.’ Nothing amuses me as much as my work. To have discipline would be not to paint.’ – Fernando Botero

‘I’m the most Colombian of the Colombians, even though I’ve lived 47 years outside of Colombia. I’ve lived 13 years in New York, and I never did a painting about New York. I’ve lived in France more than 30 years, and I’ve never painted Paris.’ – Fernando Botero

‘Before anything else, I started painting bulls and matadors. That was my initiation to paint.’ – Fernando Botero

‘I love art so much because of curiosity. At the start of a painting, I know 10 percent of what the painting will be, and then I have to improvise the whole thing.’ – Fernando Botero

‘Most people don’t really like to pose. It is difficult to get them to be present and relaxed under this kind of molecular scrutiny. I want them to understand I’m not simply painting them: I am painting them within a precise moment in time, as a shadow moves across their eyebrows. Then it is gone. The moment is over.’ – Taylor Negron

‘To make money, I did portraits . The truth is so bizarre! I’m kind of embarrassed. I was like a 19th-century pirate painter. I’d say, ‘Your mom would love a painting of you!’ A salesman! I’d hawk paintings.’ – Taylor Negron

‘If you listen to one of my albums, you can tell I do a lot of different things. In the case of ‘Vincent’, I thought of his picture ‘Starry Night.’ It was a beautiful road-map for a song. I used a lot of imagery from that painting.’ – Don McLean

‘Will you tell me, ‘Oh, painting is a special art, whereas anyone can write prose passably well’? Can he, indeed? … Can you, sir? Nay, believe me, you are either an archangel or a very bourgeois gentleman indeed if you admit to having spoken English prose all your life without knowing it.’ – Arthur Quiller-Couch

‘Painting was a problem – you produce a thing, and then you sell it and get money, and that was quickly considered totally uncool.’ – Rachel Kushner

‘When me and Sheila got married, all we had was an oval table, four chairs, a bed, and a painting by Matthew Smith.’ – Richard Attenborough

‘As a kid, I wanted to be a sportscaster. On the radio. I loved the idea of painting a picture. I didn’t want to be on TV. I wanted to be Jon Miller, who called all the Orioles games.’ – Thomas Kail

‘I acquired quite a lot of technical skill and got quite a long way with my painting, but I never felt I was doing what New Zealand was about with my paint.’ – Ngaio Marsh

‘How do you make something the same but different? That’s the question I had to deal with in my approach to the cover painting for ‘Percy Jackson’s Greek Heroes.’ I wanted it to have many similarities to ‘Percy Jackson’s Greek Gods,’ but I knew they couldn’t be too similar.’ – John Rocco

‘I couldn’t resist painting Orpheus and Charon on the River Styx. There was something strangely intriguing about seeing Orpheus playing his lyre as he is being shuttled across the river.’ – John Rocco

‘I was really serious about painting, so I could never be a Sunday painter. You can’t just switch it on and off.’ – Roger Rees

‘I have a little studio in Chinatown, and I sometimes go there and rearrange my brushes. But I would have to stop acting altogether in order to become a painter. At the moment, I’m still interested and active as an actor and director. Besides, I rather think acting and painting are all part of the same creative urge.’ – Roger Rees

‘I don’t see myself as a photographer. I still see the photographs and collages as a resource for the painting.’ – Mickalene Thomas

‘The first painting I remember selling was ‘Panthera.’ I made it while I was in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the museum actually purchased it directly from me.’ – Mickalene Thomas

‘My working habit is to separate my aims as a painting from my aims as a poet. They come from very different places and ultimately lead me to very different places… I’ll leave what I mean by ‘places’ ambiguous.’ – Terrance Hayes

‘We look at the Mona Lisa and say we’re going to do our version of the Mona Lisa. We mirror it. But exaptation would say that painting the Mona Lisa would lead to a whole new place… Bugs Bunny.’ – Terrance Hayes

‘Contrary to what many Westerners believe, Islam has a rich tradition of secular painting in spite of its ban on images. It is only in religious rituals that the use of pictorial representation is totally prohibited.’ – Fatema Mernissi

‘There’s this idea of bankers retiring and painting watercolours. You can’t dabble in art – it’s a life. Being a writer, an artist… is a whole life.’ – Justin Cartwright

‘I want my paintings to look like they were found in a garage. If they get a scratch or a hole in them, it just becomes part of the painting.’ – John Mellencamp

‘I wanted to study at the Art Students League in New York when I was young, but I didn’t have the money. Then I was fortunate enough to become Johnny Cougar Mellencamp. At the time, I thought I’d make a couple of records and get back to painting. It never dawned on me that I’d be 64 years old and still making music.’ – John Mellencamp

‘A painting has to be beautiful. Even in its grotesqueness.’ – John Mellencamp

‘When children draw or do rudimentary painting, the whole human being develops an interest in what is being done. This is why we should allow writing to develop from drawing.’ – Rudolf Steiner

‘The mere drawing and painting world of the pattern designer and the applied artist must become a world that builds again.’ – Walter Gropius

‘The Bauhaus strives to bring together all creative effort into one whole, to reunify all the disciplines of practical art – sculpture, painting, handicrafts, and crafts – as inseparable components of a new architecture.’ – Walter Gropius

‘Do not think that I have stopped painting, for at any moment, I am liable to paint a good picture.’ – Winslow Homer

‘I believe in the ethos of the remix, like Andy Warhol making a painting of a Campbell’s soup label.’ – Mike Posner

‘I’ve always enjoyed painting, but I went to teach in schools in Zimbabwe instead.’ – Louis Theroux

‘The true fans were capable of not only painting their cars and homes their team colors, but also naming family pets and offspring after famous NFL all-stars.’ – Burgess Owens

‘I paint. I have been painting since I was kid. If I hadn’t gone into radio when I did, I probably would have come out of the Army, gone into the art business, and probably would have flopped because I’m not that great.’ – Bob Elliott

‘I wanted to get out of this country and experience different ways of seeing the world. So I went to Europe, but I went as an artist. I was increasing my skill set and exploring storytelling through painting.’ – Robert Redford

‘I like to think of my work and the way people approach it in the same way people approach a Lichtenstein painting. You can write a one-hundred-page dissertation about why he used comics. Or it could be like, ‘This is cute!” – Jeremy Scott

‘I’m quite a precious painter; my style is a messy fine art – sort of impressionist. I do portraits, I love painting other artists, but recently, I’ve been playing around with self portraits, putting on different characters.’ – Tali Lennox

‘I’m in a really nice position because I can be selective with the modeling jobs that I do and just work with brands I’m passionate about. The two worlds balance out nicely for me because modeling is so social – it has travel, you meet people, it’s extroverted. Whereas painting is very solitary – when I paint, I’m kind of in my own world.’ – Tali Lennox

‘I started out with projected-light works and working indoors, but I’d prepare the walls – by sanding, etcetera – the way you’d prepare a canvas for painting.’ – James Turrell

‘If you think about art, if you look at Rembrandt and Vermeer and Caravaggio, if you look at Turner and Constable and all the Impressionists and the Hudson River School, there’s a tradition of light in art, especially painting.’ – James Turrell

‘In music, they’re not endlessly rewriting Beethoven’s ‘Third Symphony;’ in visual art, they aren’t painting portraits of 16th-century royalty. Art moves forward.’ – David Shields

‘Only by painting the great panorama of history, can the great history-reading public be entertained or satisfied.’ – Norman Davies

‘I hope to be painting more and travelling. Maybe fall in love. Have a dog one day. You know, all the good things.’ – Alia Shawkat

‘I do have a dream, a painting, the baths of La Grenouillere for which I’ve done a few bad rough sketches, but it is a dream. Renoir, who has just spent two months here, also wants to do this painting.’ – Claude Monet

‘I’ve been doing this since I was a kid. Then, I got in trouble for painting like this on the wall, but now, I get paid for it.’ – Michael Israel

‘No one purposefully paints a bad painting. It’s someone who’s trying to do a good painting, but it’s terrible. I have one with a matador, and the bull is going through the blanket. You can tell the painter didn’t know how to paint it.’ – Jennifer Coolidge

‘I feel like I’ve done Pete Hornberger, and that is a painting I have signed, and I don’t need to play that character anymore. So I’ll get offers for panicky, pathetic guys, and while it’s a great compliment to get them, I feel like I don’t need to play that again.’ – Scott Adsit

‘Someday, I plan to buy a house in Goa, do only one movie a year, and spend the rest of time painting, learning how to cook, cooking for friends, and doing yoga.’ – Ranveer Singh

‘I am a creative person. I like painting, singing, dancing, etc.’ – Mouni Roy

‘I wasn’t artistic in drawing or painting, but I think I am artistic in sport. I think I’m always looking for the ultimate, the maximum. It’s a challenge that excites me.’ – Robin Van Persie

‘I paint, and painting gives me my much needed break from my routine. Painting was a subject in my school, and I developed a liking for the lines and colours and started practising in my free time. It helps me de-stress amidst my hectic shooting schedules.’ – Hansika Motwani

‘Maybe some people, when they sit down to write their great novel or make their great record or paint their great painting, they have it all planned out in their head. But for me, it’s never worked that way.’ – Mike D

‘If I had to compare myself to another artist, I wouldn’t. I feel like my lyrics are really strong. I’m good at painting pictures and telling picture stories.’ – Bryson Tiller

‘I decided one day to put on my tutu and jump on the coffee table and sing Aretha Franklin songs for the painters that were painting the house.’ – Phillipa Soo

‘I always see my songs in colors, and I’m often more inspired by movies and photographs than I am by other songs when I write my music. I’m also inspired by fashion, and I want my music to be a visual painting of what’s in my mind.’ – Charli XCX

‘To some extent, the act of creation and the act of selling are hard to disentangle. If you create something, whether it’s a painting or a company, I think if you care about it, you have some obligation to go out and tell people about it.’ – Daniel H. Pink

‘Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.’ – John Constable

‘In the early ’60s, it was still a fairly subversive thing, though, to say that you should take a painting, cut it, set it on fire, step on it, hammer nails into it.’ – Elvis Mitchell

‘We took our Catholicism very seriously. We never missed Mass; our father was a lector, and both our parents taught catechism. At 3 in the afternoon on Good Friday, we gathered in the living room for 10 minutes of silence in front of a painting of the Crucifixion.’ – Stephen J. Dubner

‘I have always been a fan of Salvador Dali, but Amrita Sher-Gil, who was an Indian-Hungarian painter, is another favourite. She was painting Indian women, and, growing up here, I’d never seen anyone paint Indian women, so that was really incredible to see a painting of someone who looks like you. I think that has a lot of impact on you.’ – Rupi Kaur

‘Everything from the music to our clothes was truly authentic. Lisa and I were in my basement spray painting our overalls.’ – Rozonda Thomas

‘As soon as I went to painting school in New York, I took an experimental film course, and everything clicked and came together. I realized my love of music and drama and the visual arts all came together.’ – Patty Jenkins

‘If I was painting a picture, I wouldn’t want to take a picture of a single paint stroke. I’d rather show people what it looks like when it’s done.’ – Josh Trank

‘There’s not a lot of pictorial evidence from the Highlands, because only the very wealthy had their portraits painted – but there is one well-known painting of the two sons of the Duke of Argyll, wearing tartan.’ – Diana Gabaldon

‘In retrospect, the pace of change in the arts and industry in the nineteenth century seems pretty glacial. Painting, music, the novel, architecture were all evolving, but at a pretty observable pace.’ – Amor Towles

‘I want to make music three-dimensional. I want to make a song also a painting, and a painting also a culinary experience.’ – Benny Cassette

‘What we accepted as great art – whether the book, the script, the painting, the symphony – is that which could be saved and savored. But the performances of the athletic artists who ran and jumped and wrestled were gone with the wind.’ – Frank Deford

‘Any promising young white man rich enough to theoretically afford a giant oil painting of himself gets to remain young and innocent forever, and none of his actions have any consequences, whether there is magic involved or not.’ – Alexandra Petri

‘I think when you work alone – the way I do it, anyway – you could sort of liken it to painting, where there’s sort of a one-on-one with the canvas.’ – Lindsey Buckingham

‘I have an amazing wife and three beautiful children, and that certainly makes you less obsessive about your art as a musician – which I’ve always felt was more like painting than anything.’ – Lindsey Buckingham

‘We really were poised to make ‘Rumours 2,’ and that could’ve been the beginning of kind of painting yourself into a corner in terms of living up to the labels that were being placed on you as a band.’ – Lindsey Buckingham

‘When you work with a band, obviously you’ve got to present them with something they can get a hold of, so it has to be a little more fleshed out as a song. And then where it goes is more collaborative, obviously; it’s more political possibly, certainly more a conscious process than a subconscious process, which the painting can be.’ – Lindsey Buckingham

‘A painting lets us know how somebody literally saw things. A piece of music is another language that transmits a whole wealth of emotion and wordless experience. But writing is special in the way at allows us to temporarily enter another person’s world, to step outside the boundaries of our own time and space.’ – Claire Messud

‘In painting, you don’t have to go through a process of opinion; it speaks directly, and either it works, or it doesn’t.’ – Derek Walcott

‘Musical composition, about which I know little, is a complicated art, and some contemporary music may be the equivalent of a complex abstract painting.’ – Derek Walcott

‘You don’t eat a painting of an apple; you don’t find it morally good. Instead, it tells you something strange about apples in themselves.’ – Timothy Morton

‘In a book, you can describe a scene and have any song you want playing on the radio and have any painting you want hanging on the wall. That was really freeing to me when I was writing ‘Ready Player One.’ I could throw in everything that I love.’ – Ernest Cline

‘I should like to achieve free, spontaneous painting delineating a powerful, strong structured image. One must be possible with the other. A difficult problem in itself, but one which I shall achieve.’ – Eva Hesse

‘I’ve been painting all my life, and I’m serious about it. I use it as more or less an outlet.’ – Yvette Mimieux