A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires.
Hedy Lamarr
I’m painting an idea not an ideal. Basically I’m trying to paint a structured painting full of controlled, and therefore potent, emotion.
A great artist is always before his time or behind it.
George Edward Moore
Whether I’m painting or not, I have this overweening interest in humanity. Even if I’m not working, I’m still analyzing people.
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
Albert Camus
When I work, I work very fast, but preparing to work can take any length of time.
A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.
Michelangelo
A painter paints the appearance of things, not their objective correctness, in fact he creates new appearances of things.
A picture is a poem without words.
Horace
All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
Napoleon Bonaparte
I’m not trying to make paintings look like photos. I want to make paintings using photos as a reference, the way painters did when photography was first invented.
A picture must possess a real power to generate light and for a long time now I’ve been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light.
Henri Matisse
I’ve never believed in God, but I believe in Picasso.
A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds.
Henry Moore
I dream a lot. I do more painting when I’m not painting. It’s in the subconscious.
A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.
Oscar Wilde
At moments of great enthusiasm it seems to me that no one in the world has ever made something this beautiful and important.
A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.
Gertrude Stein
I am essentially a painter of the kind of still life composition that communicates a sense of tranquillity and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all else.
Abstract art is a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
Al Capp
A sincere artist is not one who makes a faithful attempt to put on to canvas what is in front of him, but one who tries to create something which is, in itself, a living thing.
Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
Albert Camus
The holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it.
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.
Marshall McLuhan
I opened the door for a lot of people, and they just ran through and left me holding the knob.
Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.
Marshall McLuhan
Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.
All art is but imitation of nature.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
The music that really turns me on is either running toward God or away from God. Both recognize the pivot, that God is at the center of the jaunt.
All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.
John Ruskin
There’s no retirement for an artist, it’s your way of living so there’s no end to it.
All that I desire to point out is the general principle that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
Oscar Wilde
You come to nature with all her theories, and she knocks them all flat.
An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.
Charles Horton Cooley
I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.
Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity.
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
George Santayana
The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.
An artist is always alone – if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.
Believe it or not, I can actually draw.
An artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs.
Edgard Varese
Man can’t do without God. Just like you’re thirsty, you have to drink water. You just can’t go without God.
An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have.
Andy Warhol
O great creator of being grant us one more hour to perform our art and perfect our lives.
An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
Paul Valery
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
Art begins with resistance – at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.
Andre Gide
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.
Art doesn’t transform. It just plain forms.
Roy Lichtenstein
Every artist was first an amateur.
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
Thomas Merton
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did he would cease to be an artist.
Art for art’s sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.
Frank Lloyd Wright
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination
Art in Nature is rhythmic and has a horror of constraint.
Robert Delaunay
Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
Andre Gide
The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist.
Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed.
Kahlil Gibran
Dreams are like the paints of a great artist. Your dreams are your paints, the world is your canvas. Believing, is the brush that converts your dreams into a masterpiece of reality.
Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers… What we call art is a game.
Octavio Paz
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
Henry Ward Beecher
Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
Paul Gauguin
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
Theodor Adorno
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
Pablo Picasso
Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.
Henry A. Kissinger
Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.
Twyla Tharp
Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.
John Ruskin
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
Pablo Picasso
Art is not a thing; it is a way.
Elbert Hubbard
Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.
Stella Adler
Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.
Harry S. Truman
Painting is silent poetry.
Plutarch, Moralia
Art is science made clear.
Wilson Mizner
Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.
Leonardo da Vinci
Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.
Kary Mullis
It has been said that art is a tryst, for in the joy of it maker and beholder meet.
Kojiro Tomita