Painting Quotes

Painting is the only art that can be practised without either talent or hard work.

There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk.

The principle of painting is also to make a choice. “Even genius,” writes Delacroix, ruminating on his art, “is only the gift of generalizing and choosing.” The painter isolates his subject, which is the first way of unifying it. Landscapes flee, vanish from the memory, or destroy one another. That is why the landscape painter or the painter of still life isolates in space and time things that normally change with the light, get lost in an infinite perspective, or disappear under the impact of other values.[The principle of painting is also to make a choice. “Even genius,” writes Delacroix, ruminating on his art, “is only the gift of generalizing and choosing.” The painter isolates his subject, which is the first way of unifying it. Landscapes flee, vanish from the memory, or destroy one another. That is why the landscape painter or the painter of still life isolates in space and time things that normally change with the light, get lost in an infinite perspective, or disappear under the impact of other values.]

Music, like painting, makes use of materials which have the property of liberating this or that property from the surrounding medium and so suggesting an image. The instruments in music perform this part, as color does in painting.

I could go on painting for a thousand years, but that wouldn’t change men’s folly, bigotry, and savagery in the slightest.