577 Quotes About Painting

Everything else has changed and disappeared with time, but not the painting. When we stand in front of it, we realise its significance, we bring it to life, we draw it into our own time and our own reality. Art works with the living, it attempts to grasp life in time, as it is in precisely this moment, and when it succeeds, life in time becomes timeless.

I think if someone would be in the Louvre who looks just like the Mona Lisa - the people wouldn’t care about her - because the only thing they admire is the soul captured in the painting not the body that is mortal.

Paradoxically, minimalism is the maximum use of space.

She had picked the spot the day before and carried out a stool low enough to sit on and still have her paintbox and her water cup within reach. Anna didn't use an easel. Easels seemed to her an altogether too assertive aid, too obvious. She liked to work as unobtrusively as possible, the paper spread on a board in her lap, close to her hand.

Telle une pierre philosophale, l'authenticité semble ainsi avoir le pouvoir de transformer en or l'assemblage de toile et de pigments que constitue un tableau.

My hands are flowing like sunlight. The shapes and colors are astounding. I don't understand these images that are empowering me. My brush touches the canvas like photons to the earth, and a new world develops, free from my control, yet intrinsically dependent upon me. I am sweating with elation. I have no idea what I am doing, or what it is my hands are trying to see. There is so much strength in this clarity I am overpowered by the independence of it.

I had spent many years living with a plain piece of canvas just right on my face as a headboard for my bed. As the years passed by, I watched it slowly transforming into a work of art which still lives above my head. And that my friend, is truly living art.

A person is a collage of people warring to become a portrait.

The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it means nothing. I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist. Why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?" -Pablo Picasso.