Painter Quotes - page 26

In The Night Watch, again in Amsterdam, we have the feeling of communication: that something dramatic is happening before our very eyes. This scene of a company of guards painted as a group portrait was very popular in Rembrandt's day. The only other Dutch painter who could do anything at all with the subject was Frans Hals, who did it several times and rather well. But the conventions prevailing at the time were for such a group portrait to consist of an inert line of figures which was boring in the extreme. Rembrandt, tackling this subject, sees it as a dramatic event but also as an entirely realistic everyday occurrence... It was probably the most ambitious painting in size and scope that Rembrandt had painted up to that time, but it began his downfall among his contemporaries and from then his popularity waned. As his painting got better and better, he got poorer and poorer - so much for the Dutch public of his day and their taste in art! p. 404. (Rembrandt)
He has done like Orbaneja, the painter of Ubeda, who, being asked what he painted, answered, "As it may hit;" and when he had scrawled out a misshapen cock, was forced to write underneath, in Gothic letters, "This is a cock." View quote
Miguel de Cervantes
I'm really very happy if people can connect at all to anything I do. I don't really mind if people mishear lyrics or misunderstand what the story is. I think that's what you have to let go of when you send it out in the world. I'm sure with a lot of paintings, people don't understand what the painter originally meant, and I don't really think that matters. I just think if you feel something, that's really the ideal goal. If that happens, then I'm really happy. View quote
Kate Bush
It is by deciding what is real for him and portraying it convincingly that the painter serves the true ends of art. The question of "social” reality does not arise on this profoundly personal level. On the other hand the question of personal salvation and our relationship to God does. Art, if it is successful in the task of questioning reality, if it is good painting and not merely a performance of dexterity, will be an affirmation of God. View quote
Patrick Swift
For even the painter himself cannot be fully aware of the way in which the picture gets made: there is a wide area of the unpredictable in the act of pushing paint about in the definition of an image. View quote
Patrick Swift