Welcome to our curated collection of inspiring and thought-provoking painting quotes. Whether you’re an aspiring artist, a seasoned painter, or simply someone who appreciates the beauty of art, this page is designed to ignite your creativity and passion for painting. Throughout history, artists, philosophers, and thinkers from all walks of life have shared their thoughts and insights on the world of painting, capturing the essence of this captivating art form.
On this page, you’ll find a diverse range of painting quotes that explore the profound and expressive nature of art. These quotes encompass the artistic process, the emotions that go into creating a masterpiece, and the power of visual storytelling. Whether you’re seeking motivation, a fresh perspective, or simply looking to infuse your work with new ideas, our collection of painting quotes is here to inspire you.
Feel free to browse through these quotes, and use them to fuel your artistic endeavors. You can copy them, place them on images, or enhance them with stylish fonts to create visually appealing and thought-provoking art pieces. Let these words guide your creativity as you embark on your own artistic journey. Now, without further ado, let’s dive into the world of painting quotes
You can be creative in anything – in math, science, engineering, philosophy – as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance. Ken Robinson
Impressionism; it is the birth of Light in painting. Robert Delaunay
Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight; which are: Darkness, Light, Solidity and Colour, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest. Leonardo da Vinci
When children draw or do rudimentary painting, the whole human being develops an interest in what is being done. This is why we should allow writing to develop from drawing. Rudolf Steiner
Leon Theremin’s original designs are elegant, ingenious and effective. As electronics goes, the theremin is very simple. But there are so many subtleties hidden in the details of the design. It’s like a great sonnet, or a painting, or a speech, that is perfectly done on more than one level. Robert Moog
Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal. E. O. Wilson
Photography is about finding things. And painting is different – it’s about making something. Saul Leiter
I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention. Michael Graves
All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time. Otto Dix
If I’m away from painting for a week, I get bored. Jean-Michel Basquiat
I dream of painting and then I paint my dream. Vincent Van Gogh
When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it – a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand – as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there’s a clash between the two, it’s bad art. Marc Chagall
I stopped painting in 1990 at the peak of my success just to deny people my beautiful paintings, and I did it out of spite. Vincent Gallo
Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and… stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to ‘walk about’ into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want? Wassily Kandinsky
Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture. Michelangelo
To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul. Susan Vreeland
Painting calmed the chaos that shook my soul. Niki de St. Phalle
Painting is a blind man’s profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen. Pablo Picasso
We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it’s opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There’s so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones. Patti Smith
Painting is about the world that we live in. Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them. Kehinde Wiley
A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires. Hedy Lamarr
Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation. Max Ernst
It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting. Albert Camus
Intuition is the key to everything, in painting, filmmaking, business – everything. I think you could have an intellectual ability, but if you can sharpen your intuition, which they say is emotion and intellect joining together, then a knowingness occurs. David Lynch
A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting. Abraham Maslow
To the humblest among them, who may be listening to me now, I want to say that the masterpiece to which you are paying historic homage this evening is a painting which he has saved. Andre Malraux
I have ridiculously bad eyesight, but I have learned to live with an impressionistic view. Life is a Monet painting. I wander around enjoying myopia. Milo Yiannopoulos
Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is. Jackson Pollock
Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting. Ad Reinhardt
Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts. Blaise Pascal
To move the picture into our surroundings and give it real existence has been my ideal since I came to abstract painting. Piet Mondrian
I always work out of uncertainty but when a painting’s finished it becomes a fixed idea, apparently a final statement. In time though, uncertainty returns… your thought process goes on. Georg Baselitz
Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience. Chuck Close
There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking. Jean de la Bruyere
Every song is like a painting. Dick Dale
I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it’s so essential that when I’m involved in the actual process, my so-called ‘real life’ becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying. David Bowie
If commercialization is putting my art on a shirt so that a kid who can’t afford a $30,000 painting can buy one, then I’m all for it. Keith Haring
A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery. Mao Zedong
No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation. Marguerite Duras
Nothing’s sacred anymore. Those girls and I got so close. They were painting me naked every day for months. It was kind of like going to a really bizarre sleepover. It’s what you guys imagine we do: One naked girl and seven pairs of hands all over her. Jennifer Lawrence
I didn’t do so well in the academic world, so I think the only way I could express myself was through visual art – anything I could get my hands on, whether it was glassblowing, sculpture, painting, or photography. I always wanted to be a painter. Or a farmer. Steven Klein
Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course. George Bernard Shaw
The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it. Voltaire
No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition. Claude Monet
I don’t understand it. Jack will spend any amount of money to buy votes but he balks at investing a thousand dollars in a beautiful painting. Jackie Kennedy
Owning vinyl is like having a beautiful painting hanging in your living room. It’s something you can hold, pore over the lyrics, and immerse yourself in the art work. Steven Wilson
Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see. Philip Guston
If you do things, whether it’s acting or music or painting, do it without fear – that’s my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there’s nothing to lose. Anthony Hopkins
People were very affected by the war. But it didn’t mean you stopped painting unless you were called into the Army; then you just couldn’t paint. But otherwise one continued. Lee Krasner
Every painting is a voyage into a sacred harbour. Giotto di Bondone
A painting is a symbol for the universe. Inside it, each piece relates to the other. Each piece is only answerable to the rest of that little world. So, probably in the total universe, there is that kind of total harmony, but we get only little tastes of it. Corita Kent
Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one’s sensations. Paul Cezanne
Painting, I think it’s like jazz. Brian Eno
Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself. Truman Capote
Coming to understand a painting or a symphony in an unfamiliar style, to recognize the work of an artist or school, to see or hear in new ways, is as cognitive an achievement as learning to read or write or add. Nelson Goodman
During the war, women without nylons drew lines up the backs of their legs to give the illusion of silk stockings. Painting over grey hair with spray-on root touch-up – or even dark eyeshadow – is the Covid-19 equivalent. Susanna Reid
I would never finish a painting if I didn’t have a deadline. Peter Doig
Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality. Salvador Dali
Like in great painting and architecture, in couture, to make clothes you must eliminate, eliminate, eliminate to obtain the true sense of a line. You see, the more you add, the more you load on, the more it’s mad. You must try to have just the silhouette, which is an intelligence in clothes. Hubert de Givenchy
Cooking is like painting or writing a song. Just as there are only so many notes or colors, there are only so many flavors – it’s how you combine them that sets you apart. Wolfgang Puck
Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn’t look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself. Roy Lichtenstein
Last year my boyfriend gave me a painting – a very personal one. I really prefer personal gifts or ones made by someone for me. Except diamonds. That’s the exception to the rule. Minnie Driver
The reason I play music is to touch people – for selfish reasons, as well. It feels good to make someone else feel something, whether it’s a kiss, a painting, good idea or it’s a song. Dave Matthews
Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things. Gustave Courbet
The cafes bore me; going downstairs is a nuisance. Painting and sleeping – that’s all there is. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Remember that a painting – before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote – is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order. Maurice Denis
A painting that doesn’t shock isn’t worth painting. Marcel Duchamp
Sketching is like dancing. It’s process as much as product. You can turn your head off and just sort of dissolve into the now. Doing a giant, super thought-out painting is the opposite of that. Molly Crabapple
The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government. Milton Friedman
When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art. Paul Cezanne
Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do. Edgar Degas
I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. Jackson Pollock
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. Pablo Picasso
I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist; or I’d draw a big ram’s head, really messy. I’d never win painting contests. I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect Spiderman. Jean-Michel Basquiat
Sometimes I miss out the morning’s painting session and instead study my Japanese books in the open. Gustav Klimt
From a child, I had an inordinate desire for knowledge and especially music, painting, flowers, and the sciences, Algebra being one of my favorite studies. George Washington Carver
When I can focus on something like guitar or painting, I do. I started painting people I admire, like Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Nelson Algren, Marlon Brando, Patti Smith, my girl, my kids. Johnny Depp
I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza. Robert Indiana
All gardening is landscape painting. William Kent
I want a painting to be difficult to do. The more obstacles, obstructions, problems – if they don’t overwhelm – the better. I would like to feel that I am involved at any stage of the painting with all its moments, not just this ‘now’ moment where a superficial grace is so available. Richard Diebenkorn
I’m sickened by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don’t think there’s any difference between the pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock. Howard Stern
Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish. William Blake
I had always planned to make a large painting of the early spring, when the first leaves are at the bottom of the trees, and they seem to float in space in a wonderful way. But the arrival of spring can’t be done in one picture. David Hockney
When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music. Denis Diderot
Good painting is like good cooking; it can be tasted, but not explained. Maurice de Vlaminck
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks. Plutarch
I’m a big believer in the emotion of design, and the message that’s sent before somebody begins to read, before they get the rest of the information; what is the emotional response they get to the product, to the story, to the painting – whatever it is. David Carson
Through a painting we can see the whole world. Hans Hofmann
A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth. John Singer Sargent
Never invest in anything that eats or needs painting. Billy Rose
My sister Radha, who lives in the U.S., has discovered her craft in painting. She is by far the most beautiful among us sisters. If only Radha had been as tall as me, she’d have been the actor in the family. Rekha
Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible. Balthus
In fine arts, when you make a painting, it’s just a painting. But if you make a painting in the entertainment industry, it can be an album cover or a t-shirt or a logo. Andrew W.K.
The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. Jackson Pollock
Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire – but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being, he is master. David Josiah Brewer
Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas. Georges Braque
It’s not about perfection. What’s a perfect painting? What’s interesting about a perfect painting? Peter Doig
There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. Mark Rothko
It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it. Georgia O’Keeffe