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Painting Quotes

Browse 4325 quotes about Painting.

Painting Quotes

“The temple of art is built of words. Painting and sculpture and music are but the blazon of its windows, borrowing all their significance from the light, and suggestive only of the temple's uses.”

Art Use Light Painting Art Is Built Window Temples Significance Sculpture Borrowing

Author:J. G. Holland

“Surface is a modernist concept. What surface does is to encourage one to see the painting as object rather than as a window on the world.”

World Doe Objects Painting Concepts Window Surface Modernism

Author:Kay WalkingStick

“I noticed that the large windows between the paintings [in the Musee d'Art Moderne] interested me more than the art exhibited. From then on, painting as I had known it was finished for me.”

Art Known Painting Window Finished Modernism

Author:Ellsworth Kelly

“No academy could have given me all I discovered by getting my teeth into the exhibitions, the shop windows, and the museums of Paris . Beginning with the market - where, for lack of money, I bought only a piece of a long cucumber - the workman in his blue overall, the most ardent followers of Cubism , everything showed a definite feeling for proportion, clarity, an accurate sense of form, of a more painterly kind of painting, even in the canvases of second-rate artists.”

“I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.”

Ifs Looks My Own Rooms Deals Painting Draws Window Paint Curtains

Book:Picasso, Inside the Image: Prints from the Ludwig Museum, Cologne

Source: Picasso, Inside the Image: Prints from the Ludwig Museum, Cologne

“There is much virtue in a window. It is to a human being as a frame is to a painting, as a proscenium to a play, as 'form' to literature. It strongly defines its content.”

Humans Play Form Literature Human Beings Virtue Painting Window

Book:Mainly on the Air

Source: Mainly on the Air

“When HSBC took the painting out of their building, they had to block the road and use a crane to bring the painting out from the window. They spent about 20,000 dollars just to get the painting out of the building! They said not to bring it back, and told Sotheby's to sell it immediately!”

Said Use Building Painting Window Sells Dollars Block They Said Cranes

Author:Liu Dan

“At bed-time I went into my room and put out the light. I didn't get undressed. I lay on my bed and looked out of the window at the stars. I read in a book that the stars can take you anywhere. I've never wanted to be an astronaut because of the helmets. If I were up there on the moon, or by the Milky Way, I'd want to feel the stars round my head. I'd want them in my hair the way they are in paintings of the gods. I'd want my whole body to feel the space, the empty space and points of light. That's how dancers must feel, dancers and acrobats, just for a second, that freedom.”

Ifs Way Want Feels Book Whole Body Light Wanted Stars Space Rooms Painting Hair Bed Moon Window Empty Lays Rounds Dancer Astronaut Helmet Empty Space Milky Way Points Of Light Bed Time

Author:Jeanette Winterson

“I did not want windows, only skylights. I chose my painting wall as it has the best morning light.”

Want Light Morning Painting Wall Window Morning Light Skylights

Author:Ellsworth Kelly

“I always liked paintings to be walls rather than windows. When we see a painting on a wall, it's a window, so I often put my paintings in the middle of the space to make a wall.”

Space Middle Painting Wall Window

Author:Pierre Soulages

“A window looks outside, but a painting should do the opposite - it should look inside of us. When I put them in the middle of the room, I attach the paintings at the top to the ceiling and on the bottom to the floor. I prefer this to just hanging them from the ceiling because it creates a place in a space, like a wall.”

Should Looks Space Rooms Middle Painting Wall Window Opposites Bottom Ceilings

Author:Pierre Soulages

“I find that I have painted my life, things happening in my life - without knowing. After painting the shell and shingle many times, I did a misty landscape of the mountain across the lake, and the mountain became the shape of the shingle - the mountain I saw out my window, the shingle on the table in my room. I did not notice that they were alike for a long time after they were painted.”

Long Rooms Knowing Saws Painting Shapes Mountain Long Time Happenings Window Tables Things Happen Landscape Lakes Shells Misty Shingles

Book:Georgia O'Keeffe

Source: Georgia O'Keeffe

“I want my paintings to look like what's going on outside my window rather than what's inside my studio.”

Want Looks Painting Window Studios

Author:Robert Rauschenberg

“You have bits of canvas that are unpainted and you have these thick stretcher bars. So you see that a painting is an object; that it's not a window into something - you're not looking at a landscape, you're not looking at a portrait, but you're looking at a painting. It's basically: A painting is a painting is a painting. And it's what Frank Stella said famously: What you see is what you see.”

Said Bits Objects Painting Window Bars Landscape Thick Frank Canvas Portraits Stella

Author:Frank Stella