Home / Topics / Painting Quotes

Painting Quotes

Browse 4325 quotes about Painting.

Painting Quotes

“The painting is always conceived as the linear record of a rhythmic gesture: it is a graph of a dance executed by the hand. Not only the artist's eye and hand perform this dance, so does the eye of the beholder.”

Doe Hands Eye Artist Records Painting Gestures Linear Beholder Eye Of The Beholder Graphs

Author:Roger Fry

“My work is not so overtly about movement. My horses' gestures are really quite quiet, because real horses move so much better than I could pretend to make things move. For the pieces I make, the gesture is really more within the body, it's like an internalized gesture, which is more about the content, the state of mind or of being at a given instant. And so it's more like a painting...the gesture and the movement is all pretty much contained within the body.”

Mind Real States Body Moving Given Pieces Movement Painting Quiet Horse Instant State Of Mind Gestures

Author:Deborah Butterfield

“The material memories are not usually part of what is said about a picture, and that is a fault in interpretation because every painting captures a certain resistance of paint, a prodding gesture of the brush, a speed and insistence in the face of mindless matter.”

Said Matter Faces Certain Memories Painting Materials Faults Paint Speed Resistance Interpretation Capture Gestures Brushes Mindless Insistence

Book:What Painting Is

Source: What Painting Is

“Paint records the most delicate gesture and the most tense. It tells whether the painter sat or stood or crouched in front of the canvas. Paint is a cast made of the painter's movements, a portrait of the painter's body and thoughts.”

Made Body Records Fronts Movement Painting Paint Casts Painter Sat Delicate Gestures Canvas Portraits Tense

Book:What Painting Is

Source: What Painting Is

“In the end, the gesture of painting becomes almost meditative, like a ritual.”

Ends Painting Ritual Gestures

Author:Shahzia Sikander

“There's a spectrum of possibilities. You can underline the bass, or not at all. You can create something that is well-anchored or that is floating and never arriving. You can make a melodic line dominant or barely visible. The conducting gesture is akin to painting or sculpture.”

Wells Lines Possibility Painting Visible Gestures Dominant Floating Sculpture Spectrum Bass Arriving Conducting

Author:Laurence Equilbey

“The paintings are more about physicality and gesture than meditation. I'd compare it to playing scales on the Cello - each sound (pitch and intensity) depends on the manner in which you hold and apply the bow. The same goes for the gesture of applying paint to a surface.”

Sound Meditation Painting Depends Paint Surface Scales Compare Intensity Gestures Bows Physicality

Author:Stephen Beal

“For one thing, I want gesture-any kind of gesture, all kinds of gesture-gentle or brutal, joyous or tragic; the gesture of space soaring, sinking, streaming, whirling; the gestures of light flowing or spurting through color. I see everything as possessing or possessed by gesture. I've often thought of my paintings as having an axis around which everything revolves.”

Want Kind Light Space One Thing Color Painting All Kinds Gentle Tragic Gestures Possessed Brutal Soar Joyous Possessing Sinking Axes Streaming

Author:Elaine de Kooning

“...if photos can reproduce the world more perfectly than any painter, can capture an instant, a look, a gesture, then what makes a painting good anymore? Painting subverts this subversion of its traditional nature by redefining itself - art is idea, not simply skillful execution. So, a work can be crudely made, or even machine made - but it has to be practically and functionally useless.”

Ifs World Looks Art Made Ideas Painting Art Is Machines Traditional Painter Useless Instant Capture Gestures Execution Skillful Subversion Redefining

Author:David Byrne