- Salvador Dali
- “If you understand the painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it!” –
- Michelangelo
A man paints with his brains and not with his hands. - Vincent van Gogh
An artist needn’t be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men. - Pablo Picasso
Are we to paint what’s on the face, what’s inside the face, or what’s behind it? - Pablo Picasso
Art is a lie that makes us realize truth. - Leonardo da Vinci
Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness. - Claude Monet
Color is my day long obsession, joy and torment. - Michelangelo
Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it. - Pablo Picasso
Everything you can imagine is real. - Francis Bacon
I don’t think people are born artists; I think it comes from a mixture of your surroundings, the people you meet, and luck. It is not hereditary, thank goodness. - Pablo Picasso
I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them. - Claude Monet
It’s on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly. - Andy Warhol
Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art. - Pablo Picasso
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone. - Rembrandt van Rijn
Practise what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know. - Leonardo da Vinci
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. - Pablo Picasso
The chief enemy of creativity is “good” sense. - Leonardo da Vinci
The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions. - Leonardo da Vinci
The smallest feline is a masterpiece. - Henri Matisse
There are always flowers for those who want to see them.
- “Colour is fun, colour is just plain gorgeous, a gourmet meal for the eye, the window of the soul.” – Rachel Wolf.
- “On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.” – Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), on drip painting.
- “Like emotions, colours are a reflection of life.” – Janice Glennaway
- “If you didn’t have fantasies you wouldn’t have problems because you’d take whatever was there. But then you wouldn’t have romance, because romance is finding your fantasy in people who don’t have it.” – Andy Warhol, 1970
- “Painting is by nature a luminous language.” – Robert Delaunay
- “The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.” – Willem de Kooning, 1968
- “The profoundest order is revealed in what is most casual.” – Faifield Porter, 1969
- “To draw is to make a shape and movement in time.” – Stuart Davis, 1951
- “The child is really an artist, and the artist should be like a child, but he should not stay a child. He must become an artist. That means he cannot permit himself to become sentimental or something like that. He must know what he is doing” – Hans Hofmann, (1880 – 1966)
- “To wake the soul by tender strokes of art” – Alexander Pope
- “I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. I don’t in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do” – Francis Bacon, 1963
- “If you could say it in words, there’d be no reason to paint.” – Edward Hopper
- “I sense a scream passing through nature. I painted … the clouds as actual blood. The colour shrieked.” – Edvard Munch, on his painting The Scream.
- “Colour and I are one. I am a painter.” – Paul Klee, 1914.
- “Calligraphy’s biggest struggle is not with ink . . .It’s that memory is action minus think!” – from the notebook of Brett Whiteley
- “. . . .its really a tightrope sort of thing, living” – Joy Hester 1920 – 1960
- “Design is like gravity – the force that holds it all together.” – E A Whitney
- “Above all keep your colours fresh!” – Edouard Manet (1832 – 83)
- “The essential of painting is that something, that ‘ethereal glue,’ that intermediary product which the artist secrets with all his creative being and which he has the power to place, to encrust, to impregnate into the pictorial stuff of the painting.” – Yves Klein (1928-1962).
- “When you start a painting, it is somewhat outside you. At the conclusion, you seem to move inside the painting.” – Fernando Botero
- “They’ll sell you thousands of greens. Veronese green and emerald green and cadmium green and any sort of green you like; but that particular green, never.”
Pablo Picasso, 1966. - “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up” – Pablo Picasso
- “There is no must in art because art is free” Wassily Kandinsky
- “How painting surpasses all human works by reason of the subtle possibilities which it contains.”
Leonado da Vinci 1452 – 1519 - “Painting is just another way of keeping a diary” – Pablo Picasso
- “Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings” – George Tooker
- “The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.”
– Jackson Pollock 1912-1956 - “I shut my eyes in order to see” – Paul Gauguin
- “Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.” – Eugene Delacroix
- “As practice makes perfect, I cannot but make progress; each drawing one makes, each study one paints, is a step forward.” Vincent van Gogh 1853 – 1890
- “As an artist. It is central to be unsatisfied! This isn’t greed, though it might be appetite.” – Lawrence Calcagno
- “Creativity is . . . seeing something that doesn’t exist already. You need to find out how you can bring it into being and that way be a playmate with God.” – Michele Shea
- “Painting isn’t so difficult when you don’t know … But when you do … it’s quite a different matter!”
Edgar Degas 1834 – 1917 - “I cannot expect even my own art to provide all of the answers – only to hope it keeps asking the right questions.” – Grace Hartigan
- “The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Life is like a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can.- unknown
- “There is a logic of colours, and it is with this alone, and not with the logic of the brain, that the painter should conform.” – Paul Cezanne
- “Art? You just do it.” – Martin Ritt
- “Just as eating contrary to the inclination is injurious to health, so study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in” Leonado da Vinci, 1452 – 1519
- “Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.” – Edgar Degas
- “To be an artist, one must . . . never shirk from the truth as he understands it, never withdraw from life” Diego Rivera (1886 – 1957).
- ” The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.” – Francis Bacon
- “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1873),
- “Art happens – no hovel is safe from it, no prince can depend on it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about” – James Abbott MC Nrill Whistler
- “On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.” Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), on drip painting.
- “No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.” – Edward Hopper
- “As a child I drew like Raphael but it has taken me a lifetime to draw like a child.” Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1873),
- ” 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, painter - Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it. – unknown
- ” A painting is never finished – it simply stops in interesting places.” – Paul Gardner