Paint Quotes - page 11
In this big moonlit landscape by the painter N.N., that deservedly celebrated technician, one sees more than one would wish, or that can actually be seen by moonlight. But what the perceptive, sensitive soul looks for in every painting, and rightly expects to find, is missing.. ..If that painter could find it in himself to paint fewer, but more deeply-felt, pictures instead of so many clever ones, his contemporaries and posterity would be more grateful to him.
Caspar David Friedrich
I saw the passers-by on the avenue clearly and simply, in the way they are in Japanese prints [she saw some earlier, together with Mary Casatt in the 'Ecole des Beaux Arts', Paris]. I was thrilled, I knew definitely why I had been painting badly and why I would never paint that way again. I mean to say, I am fifty years old and once a year at least I have the same joy and the same hope.
Berthe Morisot
Artists encounter the landscape they propose to paint - they look at it, observe it from this angle and that. They are, as we say, absorbed in it. Or, in the case of abstract painters, the encounter may be with an idea, an inner vision, that in turn may be led off by the brilliant colors on the palette or the inviting rough whiteness of the canvas.
Rollo May
The vision of the artist or the poet is the intermediate determinant between the subject (the person) and the objective pole (the world-waiting-to-be). It will be nonbeing until the poet's struggle brings forth an answer - meaning. The greatness of a poem or a painting is not that it portrays the thing observed or experienced, but that it portrays the artist's or the poet's vision cued off by his encounter with the reality. Hence the poem or the painting is unique, original, never to be duplicated. No matter how many times Monet returned to paint the cathedral at Rouen, each canvas was a new painting expressing a new vision.
Rollo May
We do, to what extent of freedom we have earned or are allowed by others and ourselves, what we most want to do. We say - speak, paint, carve, write, express ourselves... as we damn please. And in both the doing of things and the talking about them - which together seem to me to sum up life - we so crave freedom or liberty or whatever one may choose to call it as to justify our Declaration's romantically terming it an unalienable right of Man, bestowed on Man by his Creator.
Rockwell Kent
You have the opportunity to be more than spectators, you can be actors in the revolution, writing about it, expressing yourselves about it. And the generations to come, what will they ask of you? You might produce magnificent artistic works from a technical point of view, but if you were to tell someone from the future generation, 100 years from bow, that a writer, an intellectual, lived in the era of the revolution and did not write about the revolution, and was not a part of the revolution, it would be difficult for a person in the future to understand this. In the years to come there will be so many people who will want to paint about the revolution, to write about the the revolution, to express themselves on the revolution, compiling data an information in order to know what it was like, what happened, how we used to live.
Fidel Castro
I shall now address you on the subject of the present situation in research in the foundations of mathematics. Since there remain open questions in this field, I am not in a position to paint a definitive picture of it for you. But it must be pointed out that the situation is not so critical as one could think from listening to those who speak of a foundational crisis. From certain points of view, this expression can be justified; but it could give rise to the opinion that mathematical science is shaken at its roots.
Paul Bernays
But I find, because of modern painting, that things which couldn't be seen in terms of painting, things you couldn't paint.... it is not that you paint them, bit is the connection. I imagine that Cézanne, when he painted a ginger pot with apples, must have been very grotesque in his day, because a still life was something set up of beautiful things. It may be very difficult, for instance, to put a Rheingold bottled beer on the table and a couple of glasses and a package of Lucky Strike [cigarets]. I mean, you know, there are certain things you cannot paintat a particular time, and it takes a certain attitude how to see those things, in terms of art.
Willem de Kooning
I think I would choose Soutine... I've always been crazy about Soutine - all of his paintings. Maybe it's the lushness of the paint. He builds up a surface that looks like a material, like a substance. There's a kind of transfiguration, a certain fleshiness in his work... I remember when I first saw the Soutine's in the Barnes Collection.... the Matisse's had a light of their own, but the Soutine's had a glow that came from within the paintings - it was another kind of light.
Willem de Kooning
Well, now I can make some highways, maybe. Well, now I can set out to do it and maybe it will be a painting of something else. Because if you know the measure of something, for yourself... There's is no absolute measure that you can identify yourself. You can find the size of something. You say, now, that's just this length, and immediately with that length you can paint, well, a cat maybe. If you understand one thing, you can use it for something else. Well, that is the way I work... I get hold of a certain thing of area or measure or size and then I can use it. I mean, I have an attitude. I have to have an attitude.
Willem de Kooning
The aesthetics of painting were always in a state of development parallel to the development of painting itself. They influenced each other and vice versa. But all of the sudden, in that famous turn of the century [1900] a few people thought they could take the bull by the horns and invent an aesthetic beforehand. After immediately disagreeing with each other, they began to form all kinds of groups, each with the idea of freeing art... The question as they saw it, was not so much what you could paint, but what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that the subject matter came into existence as something you ought not to have.
Willem de Kooning
Certain artists and critics attacked me for painting the 'Women' [series of paintings, De kooning started in 1950], but I felt that this was their problem, not mine. I don't really feel like a non-objective painter at all... It's really absurd to make an image, like a human image. With paint, today, when you think about it, since we have this problem of doing it or not doing it. But then all of a sudden it was even more absurd not to do it. So I fear I have to follow my desires.
Willem de Kooning
Recipe idea: take on fire extinguisher and pour out all the contents. Mix down a nice bright emulsion paint to the consistency of full fat milk, stirring constantly to remove any lumps. Pour into the extinguisher, screw on cap tightly and write on things up to 50 feet high. Re-use by swapping over the CO2 charged canister (costs about one pound). The perfect accompaniment to a night out drinking heavily with friends.
Banksy
Tell [Père] Tanguy to send me some paints. What I need most are ten tubes of white, two of chrome yellow, one bright red, one brown lac, one ultramarine, five Veronese green, one cobalt j I have on hand only one tube of white ... I expect to begin to paint again from nature, and I need the colors.
Camille Pissarro
