Paintings Quotes

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.
Albert Camus

I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.
Bob Dylan

Life, Work, Design

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.
Vincent Van Gogh

Nature, Experience, Beautiful

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.
Ansel Adams

Everybody, Trusts

Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter's soul.
Vincent Van Gogh

Life, Soul, Painter

I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.
Samuel Johnson

Rather, Show, Dog

If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.
Andy Warhol

Nothing, Behind, Films

The painter must enclose himself within his work; he must respond not with words, but with paintings.
Paul Cezanne

Work, Words, Himself

I also take pleasure in the so-called negative power in Grotjahn's work. That is, I love his paintings for what they are not. Unlike much art of the past decade, Grotjahn isn't simply working from a prescribed checklist of academically acceptable, curator-approved 'isms' and twists.
Jerry Saltz

Love, Work, Power

Mark Grotjahn's large new paintings abound with torrents of ropy impasto, laid down in thickets, cascading waves, and bundles that swell, braid around, or overlap one another.
Jerry Saltz

Down, Around, Another

After 1909, Monet drastically enlarged his brushstrokes, disintegrated his images, and broke through the taming constraints and delicacy of Impressionism for good. Nineteen gnarly paintings, starting in 1909 and carrying through his final seventeen years, finish off the notion that Monet went happily ever after into lily-land.
Jerry Saltz

Good, Through, After

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.
Jerry Saltz

Art, She, Until

Poor Georgia O'Keeffe. Death didn't soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings.
Jerry Saltz

Art, Death, Poor

Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you'll find it. It's there in paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film.
Jerry Saltz

Art, Find, Idea

It's great that New York has large spaces for art. But the enormous immaculate box has become a dated, even oppressive place. Many of these spaces were designed for sprawling installations, large paintings, and the Relational Aesthetics work of the past fifteen years.
Jerry Saltz

Work, Great, Art

Giorgio Morandi's paintings make me think that artists may not totally choose, or even control, their subjects or style.
Jerry Saltz

May, Control, Choose

'The Night Cafe' and 'The Starry Night' still emit such pathos, density, and intensity that they send shivers down the spine. Whether Van Gogh thought in color or felt with his intellect, the radical color, dynamic distortion, heart, soul, and part-by-part structure in these paintings make him a bridge to a new vision and the vision itself.
Jerry Saltz

Heart, Him, Night

Chris Ofili's suave, stippled, visually tricked-out paintings of the nineties, with their allover fields of shimmering dots and clumps of dung, are like cave paintings of modern life. They crackle with optical cockiness, love, and massive amounts of painterly mojo.
Jerry Saltz

Life, Love, Modern

I like something about George W. Bush. A lot. After spending more than a decade having almost physiological-chemical reactions anytime I saw him, getting the heebie-jeebies whenever he spoke - after being sure from the start that he was a Gremlin on the wing of America - I really like the paintings of George W. Bush.
Jerry Saltz

Him, America, After

Kinkade estimated that one of his paintings hung in every twenty homes in America. Yet the art world unanimously ignores or reviles him. Me included.
Jerry Saltz

Art, Him, America

Kinkade's paintings are worthless schmaltz, and the lamestream media that love him are wrong. However, I'd love to see a museum mount a small show of Kinkade's work. I would like the art world and the wider world to argue about him in public, out in the open.
Jerry Saltz

Love, Work, Art

My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.
Agnes Martin

Mind, Seen, Forever

All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they're about dead people. Paintings you don't think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I'm looking at something dead.
David Bailey

Time, Sad, Special

I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.
Georgia O'Keeffe

Enjoy, Looking, General

I've just finished my 20th book this past year and I'm working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I'll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I'm an artist too.
Jimmy Carter

Morning, Tired, Past

My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I've taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, 'The Hornet's Nest,' I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.
Jimmy Carter

Good, Long, Pretty

The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.
Paul Klee

Life, Art, Whether

I had some money, I made the best paintings ever. I was completely reclusive, worked a lot, took a lot of drugs. I was awful to people.
Jean-Michel Basquiat

Money, Best, Made

That's why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness.
Corita Kent

Music, Why, Touch

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.
Brian Eno

Music, Great, Art

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