Painting
For me a painting is like a story which stimulates the imagination and draws the mind into a place filled with expectation, excitement, wonder and pleasure.
J. P. Hughston
I paint ideas, not things. My intention is less to paint works that are pleasing to the eye than to suggest great thoughts which will speak to the imagination and the heart and will arouse all that is noblest and best in man.
George Frederick Watts
Paint speaks in ways in which we cannot.
Brenda Johima
Paint interacts and communicates something, always.
Brenda Johima
Painting is about the paint and the experience, not the image.
Brenda Johima
Paint does not need an image in order to speak.
Brenda Johima
A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.
Mark Rothko
It is not about painting life, it is about making painting alive.
Paul Cezanne
I am out to introduce a psychic shock into my painting, one that is always motivated by pictorial reasoning: that is to say, a fourth dimension.
Marc Chagall
What I mean by 'abstract' is something which comes to life spontaneously through a gamut of contrasts, plastic at the same time as psychic, and pervades both the picture and the eye of the spectator with conceptions of new and unfamiliar elements.
Marc Chagall
Each brushstroke is precious, never to be repeated.
Brian Knowles
More than a process, painting is being possessed…
Philip Guston
There is something mysterious in this work that I do not ever what to discover.
Philip Guston
Usually I am on a work for a long stretch, until a moment arrives when the air of the arbitrary vanishes, and the paint falls into positions that feel destined.
Philip Guston
Painting is about three things. It's about revelation, communication, and celebration.
Ken Howard
Painting is neither decorative amusement, nor the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.
Max Ernst
Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.
Edgar Degas
A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy.
Edgar Degas
If you work with abstract painting for a period of time, you may come to think of it as a melody, a song, a piece of beautiful music.
Judi Betts
For me, painting is like meditation.
Janet Fish
Abstraction is an esoteric language.
Eric Fischl
Fill a space in a beautiful way.
Georgia O'Keeffe
Painting can be like a roller-coaster ride. For me, it begins with great anticipation and excitement, followed by hills one must chug up with effort, and valleys to glide down into with ease. The grand finale is the final decisive details that make the painting sing - it is like the ultimate grand hill that thrills you and spirits you to the end of the ride.
Anne Hudec
Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle...
Balthus
Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don’t know what to say about what I paint, really.
Balthus
As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color.
James McNeill Whistler
Painting is one of the surest, most direct forms of communication known to man.
Stuart Davis
When I stand before a canvas, I never know what I'll do, and I am the first one surprised at what comes out.
Joan Miro
Each step gives meaning to the last: a brush stroke leading another stroke, a form calling another form, colors singing when put next to each other. As a whole, they unite in harmony and become a symphony.
Alev Oguz
As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color.
James McNeil Whistler
I do not start a painting with sketches, I do not paint on location and I do not work from photos. Instead, many mornings, before the dawn, I climb a mountain to its peak. There, sitting in solitude, I observe rising of the sun. I watch plants open their leaves, buds tear up their dresses and the birds sing to the arrival of their creator. There is an inter-connected serenity that allows all creatures to experience the divine unity. Having felt that creative energy, I rush to my studio, dip my brush into paint, and let it move freely on canvas.
Rassouli
Painting is by nature a luminous language.
Robert Delaunay
When you start a painting, it is somewhat outside you. At the conclusion, you seem to move inside the painting.
Fernando Botero
The paintings are like prayers, relating to wishing for something beyond everyday life.
Susan Rothenberg
I paint to evoke a changing language of symbols, a language with which to remark upon the qualities of our mysterious capacities which direct us towards the ultimate reality.
Morris Graves
A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.
Mark Rothko
My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.
Agnes Martin
I communicate my innermost perceptions through art.
Arshile Gorky
I knew that I must paint not what I saw, but only what was in me, in my soul.
Alexej von Jawlensky
Paint like no one will ever see your painting and like you will never need any money.
Harry Robertson
Painting completes my life.
Frida Kahlo
I always have a good reason for taking something out but I never have one for putting something in. And I don't want to, because that means that the picture is being painted predigested.
Robert Rauschenberg
Basically painting is total idiocy.
Robert Rauschenberg


