Thoughts of Famous Painting Quotes in English

Painting something that defies the law of the land is good. Painting something that defies the law of the land and the law of gravity at the same time is ideal.

- Banksy

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

Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind.

- Magdalena Abakanowicz

I started painting as a hobby when I was little. I didn’t know I had any talent. I believe talent is just a pursued interest. Anybody can do what I do.

- Bob Ross

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

- Henri Matisse

The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

- Banksy

Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy - the joy of being Salvador Dalí and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalí going to accomplish today?

- Salvador Dalí

It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well-painted. This is the essence of academicism.

- Mark Rothko

When you want to make the main color pure and bright, don’t just keep adding bright colors on it. Just make the colors around the spot darker and dull. It will give the scene dramatical effects. I think the life is the same.

- Hiroko Sakai

It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.

- Mark Rothko

Painting Quotes List and Sayings in English

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

- Scott Adams

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

- Henry Ward Beecher

If I close my eyes, I see things better than with my eyes open.

- Henri Matisse Quotation

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

- Painting Quotes in English by Edmond de Goncourt Quotes

Art is coming face to face with yourself.

- A Quotation From Jackson Pollock

The holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it.

- Banksy

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

Balthus

One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters.

Frank Stella

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations.

- Paul Cezanne

I must have flowers, always, and always.

- Claude Monet

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.

- Charles Horton Cooley

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

- Leonardo da Vinci

Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.

- Andy Warhol

Good painting is like good cooking; it can be tasted, but not explained.

- Maurice de Vlaminck

Painting contains a divine force which... makes the dead seem almost alive.

Leon Battista Alberti

Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye.. it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.

- Edvard Munch

The point of painting is not really deception or imitation.

- A. S. Byatt

I couldn’t give you something mediocre even if that’s all you asked for.

- Michelangelo

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

- Jackson Pollock Quotes

Painting Quotation in English

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

- Philip Guston

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

- Henry Ward Beecher

Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.

- Chuck Close

One eye sees, the other feels.

- Paul Klee

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

Every painting is a voyage into a sacred harbour.

Giotto di Bondone

The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to.

- Frida Kahlo

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

- Paul Cezanne

A simple line painted with the brush can lead to freedom and happiness.

- Joan Miro

Painting is by nature a luminous language.

Robert Delaunay

I’m in fine fettle and fired with a desire to paint.

- Claude Monet

To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.

- Kurt Vonnegut

Every canvas is a journey all its own.

- Helen Frankenthaler

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

- Lucian Freud

All you need to paint is a few tools, a little instruction, and a vision in your mind.

- Bob Ross

I paint flowers so they will not die.

– Frida Kahlo

I don’t paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.

- Frida Kahlo

A blank canvas…has unlimited possibilities.

- Stephanie Perkins

We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents.

- Bob Ross

I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.

- Frida Kahlo

Use your blood to paint. Keep painting until you faint. Keep painting until you die.

- Yoko Ono

Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God.

- Rembrandt

Practice what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know.

- Rembrandt

Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.

- Edgar Degas

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

- Thomas Merton

If you understand a painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.

- Salvador Dalí

The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.

- Robert Henri

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

- Michelangelo Buonarroti Quotes

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

- Salvador Dali

Painting becomes interesting when it becomes timeless.

Peter Doig

I would like to paint the way a bird sings.

- Claude Monet

If I paint something, I don’t want to have to explain what it is.

- Bob Ross

Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing.

- Marc Chagall

Intensity is all that matters in painting.

- John Piper

Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

Jackson Pollock

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way things I had no words for.

- Georgia O’Keeffe

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.

- Alberto Giacometti

Painting is a language of its own. You cannot interpret one form of expression with another form of expression.

- Marcel Duchamp

Painting must be fertile. It must give birth to a world… it must fertilize the imagination.

- Joan Miro

A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.

- Elaine de Kooning

The best reason to paint is that there is not reason to paint.

- Keith Haring

Art is to console those who are broken by life.

- Vincent Van Gogh

If you hear a voice within you saying, ”You are not a painter,” then by all means paint… and that voice will be silenced.

- Vincent Van Gogh

I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart.

- Vincent van Gogh

Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.

Vincent Van Gogh

Painting Quotes List

There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

- Vincent Van Gogh

Art is what you can get away with.

- Andy Warhol

To create one’s own world takes courage.

- Georgia O’Keeffe

A painting is never finished - it simply stops in interesting places.

- Paul Gardner

Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I accomplish.

- Michelangelo

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

- Painting Quotes by Miguel de Cervantes

You can’t learn techniques and then try to become a painter. Techniques are a result.

- Jackson Pollock

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

Edgar Degas

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

- Edgar Degas

If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.

- Edward Hopper

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

- Andy Warhol *

Painting calmed the chaos that shook my soul.

Niki de St. Phalle

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

- Oscar Wilde

When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing.

- Jackson Pollock

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

- Pablo Picasso

Everything you can imagine is real.

- Pablo Picasso

To draw you must close your eyes and sing.

- Pablo Picasso

The public wants to understand and learn in a single day, a single minute, what the artist has spent years learning.

- Paul Gauguin

It's not your painting anymore.  It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

- Jeff Melvoin

A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires.

- Hedy Lamarr

Painting is the aesthetic side of the object but it has never been original, has never been its own goal.

Kazimir Malevich

Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.

Edward Hopper

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

- George Tooker

What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It’s not what you see that is art; art is the gap.

- Marcel Duchamp

Painting does what we cannot do - it brings a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane.

Chuck Jones

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way - things I had no words for.

- Georgia O’Keeffe

Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things.

Gustave Courbet

I paint for myself. I don’t know how to do anything else, anyway. Also I have to earn my living, and occupy myself.

- Francis Bacon

I’m never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.

- Claude Monet

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

- Vincent Van Gogh

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

- Painting Thoughts by Simonides Download or Share

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.

- Twyla Tharp Download or Share

Painting is a source of endless pleasure, but also of great anguish.

- Painting Quotes in English by Balthus Download or Share

I shut my eyes in order to see.

- Paul Gauguin Download or Share

Each painting has its own way of evolving.... When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

- William Baziotes

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.

Edgar Degas Download or Share

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

Salvador Dali Download or Share

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

- Georges Braque Download or Share

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

- Painting Quotes by Ambrose Bierce Download or Share

For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh.

Georges Rouault Download or Share

If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.

- Painting Quotes by Michelangelo Download or Share

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

- Pablo Picasso

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

- Pablo Picasso

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

- Pablo Picasso

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

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

- Pablo Picasso

The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.

- Leonardo da Vinci

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

- Leonardo da Vinci

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 painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.

- Leonardo da Vinci

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

- Leonardo da Vinci

One must spoil as many canvases as one succeeds with.

- Vincent Van Gogh Thought

There is no blue without yellow and without orange.

- Vincent Van Gogh

If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.

- Emile Zola

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.

- Robert Hughes

Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make. Good. Art.

- Neil Gaiman

I love to look at art, I love to look at paintings, and I almost feel like the experience isn’t complete until I’ve made something of my own.

- Cecily Brown

A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.

- Edgar Degas

It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.

- Vincent Van Gogh

If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.

- Vincent Van Gogh

Color is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment.

- Claude Monet

It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color – not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.

- Henri Matisse