Best painting & self Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“I don't express myself in my paintings. I express my not-self.”

Self Painting Expression Self Expression

“In a sense, every work you do is a self-portrait because your paintings always reveal more about you than about your subject. Your experience of something, not the something itself, is the true underlying subject of every work you do.”

Art Self Subjects Painting Experience Portraits Revealing Famous Artist Portraiture Self Portrait Self Portrait Photography

Author:Richard Schmid

“Painting is a means of saying something about one's self in a beautiful or powerful way that people would like to see, but not hear.”

People Way Mean Self Beautiful Powerful Silence Painting

Author:David Luiz

“Many of Bonnard's later paintings are shot through with a powerful sense of morbidity. The self-portraits he painted after catching sight of himself in the various mirrors in the house - the mirror in the bathroom or the mirror in his bedroom, still lit from above by a single accusatory light bulb - are almost appallingly raw.”

Stills Self Light House Powerful Painting Shots Sight Mirrors Various Bedroom Portraits Bathroom Lit Catching Bulbs Light Bulb Self Portrait Morbidity

Author:Andrew Graham-Dixon

“The ego must be developed, not for its own sake, but because it is needed by society. If you are only interested in self-realization then you cannot make a good painting. To do this you have to have thought about forming, and about how ideas of forming stem from history.”

Ifs Ideas Self Painting Needed Ego Sake Self Realization Realization Stem

Author:Joseph Beuys

“We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We're difficult to ourselves, we're difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning?”

“An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.”

Men Self Desire Consciousness Honest Painting Ego Degrees Shadow Paint Dramatic Artificial Introducing Portraits Highlights Self Consciousness Self Portrait

Author:W. H. Auden

“Self-painting is a further development of painting. The pictorial surface has lost its function as sole expressive support. It was led back to its origins, the wall, the object, the living being, the human body. By incorporating my body as expressive support, occurrences arise as a result, the course of which the camera records and the viewer can experience”

Humans Self Body Courses Lost Results Support Records Objects Painting Wall Development Function Cameras Surface Arise Sole Viewers Human Body Expressive Pictorial Incorporating

Author:Gunter Brus

“Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made me--a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life; not concerned with some third-hand, extraneous purpose, like all other books.”

Made Book Self Hands Purpose My Own Color Painting Concerned Thirds Originals Inward

Book:The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters

Source: The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters

“But you begin to feel as you go on working that unless painting proves its right to exist by being critical and self-judging, it has no reason to exist at all - or is not even possible. The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance.”

Feels Art Self Reason Artist Painting Judging Goes On Prove Court Critical Disappear Trials No Reason Canvas Glances Jury Prove It Prosecutor

Author:Philip Guston

“One is conscious of no brave and noble earnestness in it, of no generalized passion for intellectual and spiritual adventure, of no organized determination to think things out. What is there is a highly self-conscious and insipid correctness, a bloodless respectability submergence of matter in manner--in brief, what is there is the feeble, uninspiring quality of German painting and English music.”

Source: H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series

“Painting seems to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs. When that has educated the frame to self-possession, to nimbleness,to grace, the steps of the dancing-master are better forgotten; so painting teaches me the splendor of color and the expression of form, and as I see many pictures and higher genius in the art, I see the boundless opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist stands free to choose out of the possible forms.”

Source: The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“When I look back on the years of excessive self-doubt, I wonder how I was able to make my paintings. In part, I managed to paint because I had a desire, as strong as the desire for food and sex, to push through, to make an image that signified.”

Years Looks Art Self Able Desire Strong Sex Wonder Doubt Painting Paint Self-doubt

Author:Miriam Schapiro

“I loved surrealism and abstract painting, and anything related to those. I always thought painting was the highest form of art. What led me to drawing was seeing so much self-important, pretentious, conceptual-type art in university. I wanted to reject that by making quick, fun art.”

Art Important Self Wanted Form Fun Seeing Painting Type Highest University Drawing Related Abstract Rejects Pretentious Surrealism Abstract Painting

Author:Neil Farber

“I come alive when I'm painting. I like to work in oils and acrylics, and the full sensory engagement and self-expression is very stimulating to me.”

Self Alive Painting Expression Oil Engagement Self Expression Sensory

Author:Carmen Ejogo

“My work is an exploration of the self. I've always been concerned with how I'm living and how that reflects in the painting.”

Self Painting Concerned Exploration

Author:Jose Parla

“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.”

Ifs Want Giving Self Jobs Difficult Painting Discipline Easier Worthwhile Self Discipline Difficult Things Doodling

Author:John Hurt

“Psychoanalysis comes down to the process itself - the self, and life. I think I can say that I'm friends with the unconscious life, but I've never tried to make a painting directly from a dream.”

Thinking I Can Self Dream Process Painting Unconscious Psychoanalysis

Author:Malcolm Morley

“Writing, playing, composing, painting, reading, listening, looking-all require that we submit to being swept away by Eros, to a transformation of self of the kind that happens when we fall in love.”

Writing Kind Self Happens Fall Reading Painting Listening Transformation Falling In Love Submit Composing Eros Swept Away

Book:Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art

Source: Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art

“I don't think my paintings are self-conscious but you feel the consciousness of them. Without them being self-conscious.”

Thinking Feels Self Consciousness Painting Conscious Self Conscious

Author:Julian Schnabel

“Self-portraits have been done in painting, but never in music or literature. It has no meaning, it makes no sense. And in movies I was wondering if it could. And how.”

Ifs Has Beens Self Done Literature Wonder Painting Portraits Self Portrait

Author:Jean-Luc Godard

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