Painter Quotations

If you're a painter, you're not alone. There's no way to be alone.

I always think about what's the difference between being tenacious and having an inability to learn from failures. The difference between the homeless guy who wanted to be a great painter and the guy who is a great painter could be anything.

I think there's a deep impulse in most humans to do creative stuff, whether that's music or art, photography or writing. Most people at some point in their life say they want to do something creative - they want to be an actor, a director, a writer, a poet, a painter or whatever.

When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a portrait painter. As I got to be older, I realized that as a portrait painter I wouldn't be able to support a goldfish.

I like all those painters who loved and had a strong feeling for nature.

Cummings' career as a writer - and a painter - was as wobbly as his love life. He tried his hand at playwriting, satirical essays, and even a dance scenario for Lincoln Kirsten.

She was an enthusiastic painter of oils and watercolors. She was also very generous. I could mess with her paints and brushes all I wanted. On one condition: that I kept my brushes clean. The only art lesson my mother gave me was how to wash my brushes.

Having great friends in New York is like having great friends on an expedition into Darkest Africa in the early 19th century. You need them. And you need sponsorship on a daily basis. I have a painter friend here who says, 'I need two compliments a day just to break even.' And we gave them to each other, and we got them - and honestly got them.

No one can be a painter unless he cares for painting above all else.

I'm inspired by artists who use a limited palette, like painter Piet Mondrian, and the White Stripes, two musicians who create an incredible sound. Our food is starting to go back to a 'less is more' style.

I grew up wanting to be a painter and paint pictures.

I didn't want to be a writer. First I wanted to act, and then I wanted to be a painter like my big sister.

So I've tried to be this very eccentric character, and that works very well if you want to be a painter which I did once upon a time, if you want to be a musician which I did once upon a time. But if you want to make movies and you want to make challenging movies, you've got to be the sanest person in the room.

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

I began photographing in 1946. Before that, I was a painter and drawer, with my mother and father's support. They were a bit pissed when I went into photography. They thought photographers were guys who took pictures at weddings.

My father was a psychiatrist and a social worker but he was a very talented painter and musician and writer on the side.

Writing changed my life. It has an existential dimension, and that's the same for every writer. Every artist has a moment of awakening, of happening upon an idea that grabs hold of you, regardless of whether you are a painter or a writer.

There is no must in art because art is free.

I wish there was a painter who could paint as well as Ted Williams could hit.

If I had parallel lives to pursue, I would also want one as a painter.

Dali was the great painter then and surrealism was a way of life.

I'm an independent artist, but I do have a good business relationship with Lego, since I'm a unique customer. They're aware of what I'm doing. A painter may not have a relationship with a paint maker, but there's only one company that makes Lego.

My father was in the ad business, and he wanted to be a painter.

Acting is a general thing; it's not like being a primary artist like a painter or writer which stands the test of time. I don't think acting stands the test of time, but it can capture the mood of the moment, which is in itself very exciting, but it rarely lasts.

Painters must speak through paint, not through words.

The painter's obsession with his subject is all that he needs to drive him to work.

It's possible to have more than one interest. I've been a painter and did summer stock.

I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world.

I was a terrible painter - my portraits looked like the evil chimera love-children of Picasso's demoiselles and the BBC test card clown.

A painter may be looking at the world in a way which is very different from everyone else. If he's a craftsman, he can get other people to see the world through his eyes, and so he enlarges our vision, perception, and there's great value in that.

My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms.

I have been criticized rather strenuously by painters and sculptors for not incorporating their work in our buildings.

I'm related to the portrait painter George Romney.

I feel like I've cheated. I never knew what to do. I was never a good enough painter to earn a living, and so I drifted into the theatre, and I've had a successful life. I feel guilty that I've never done a day's work in my life!

I started out to be a painter and was born into the theater.

Painters aren't expected to paint bleak pictures, are they?

If I were a painter, you'd be calling me Shaqcasso.

The picture is all he feels about it, all he thinks worth preserving of it, all he invests it with. If all the qualities which a painter took from the model for his picture were really taken, no person could be painted twice.

I remember when you used to have your profession on your passport and I always thought that being a painter was the best one to be, because my heroes were Goya and Francis Bacon.

My parents always knew that I loved music. They just didn't think I'd try to make it a career. They thought I'd be a painter or an art teacher or something like that.

A thousand painters ought to be killed yearly. Say what you like: I'm every inch a painter.

The great poet is a great artist. He is painter and sculptor. The greatest pictures and statues have been painted and chiseled with words. They outlast all others.

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

I would have loved to have been a painter or a sculptor. I'm still fascinated by those things.

Who's going to ask a painter to see a diploma? They'd say, 'Can I see your paintings?', wouldn't they?

To be a great painter means to be a great poet: someone who transcends the limits of his language.

When I'm dead, I wanna leave a body of work, like authors or great painters do.

I painted. I wanted to be a painter. I sang.

Sally Field taught me to do needlepoint on 'Steel Magnolias,' and a standby painter on 'Pelican Brief' taught me to knit. I'm pretty good at it now!

I would love to have been a painter in the tradition of the surrealist painters who I admire so much.

All painters are interested in photography to a certain extent.

The humblest painter is a true scholar; and the best of scholars the scholar of nature.

I think I'm a much better painter than an actor.

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

I have always thought of myself as a painter derailed by circumstance.

When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk you'll end up as the pope.' Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.

The painter who is familiar with the nature of the sinews, muscles, and tendons, will know very well, in giving movement to a limb, how many and which sinews cause it; and which muscle, by swelling, causes the contraction of that sinew; and which sinews, expanded into the thinnest cartilage, surround and support the said muscle.

I wanted to be a painter, really, when I was growing up as a kid. It was one thing that really took a grip on me.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects - things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language - either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

When men are prosperous, they are in love with life. Nature grows beautiful, the arts begin to flourish, there is work for painter and sculptor, the poet is born, the stage is erected - and this life with which men are in love is represented in a thousand forms.

A painter is a choreographer of space.

Every good composition is above all a work of abstraction. All good painters know this. But the painter cannot dispense with subjects altogether without his work suffering impoverishment.

I am married to Beatrice Salkeld, a painter. We have no children, except me.

You can be sure that a painter reveals himself in his work as much as and more than a writer does in his.

Anybody who perceives colors can become a painter. It's simply a question of whether or not one has felt anything and whether one has the courage to recount the things one has felt.

Matt Painter will do well there, give him some time. They're so far down you have to give him some time.

Matt Painter has done probably the best job of any coach in our league when you look at the players he lost.

I am a writer and a poet, a director and a painter and an immigrant to the United States and to Canada where my family migrated to after WW2.

I am following Nature without being able to grasp her...I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

I have a theory that most people disagree with. I really feel that acting for film and acting for the stage are two different crafts. I think that they share things in common. But I liken it to a painter switching over to photography.

If I wasn't a musician I could find something else... maybe an artist or a painter because I still do all that. Or possibly a writer.

Franz was the artist who taught us charcoal drawing, which was done with a burned coal stick. He was a darn good painter and painted most of the Quaker Meeting Houses in our area. He was a great teacher.

From a win-loss standpoint it is because we put together two good games as far as playing hard and doing what coach Painter asks us to do and we come up short both games.

Whatever China I'd been born into, I would probably still have become a painter - I loved sketching portraits as a child, and began art classes at the age 7. But if China hadn't been under Maoist rule, I might never have become a writer.

The painter turns a poem into a painting; the musician sets a picture to music.

It connects with the soul. People connect with the environment and their surroundings and this painter really strove to do that with the landscape by finding the peace in it.

I went to St. Mary's School and to St. James High School. We left just before my senior year and moved to California. My dad was a painter in Grand Forks and a house painter in California. My mother was sick, and my grandmother and aunt lived out there, so our transition was family-covered. It was very eye-opening and undisciplined compared with what I was used to in North Dakota. In Catholic school, I was used to standing to answer when someone asked a question. In California, they didn't care if you chewed gum.

My parents divorced. There was the usual awkward business of going between them, but I was mostly with my mother. She remarried to a Greek painter Nico Ghika, so we were always around artists and intellectuals.

My mom is a painter and an artist. She would play music, and she always had very good taste in music, fashion, and art. She was also a young single mom, so I think she had really good style; she was really free... just really inspiring in her own way and allowed me to find the direction I wanted to take in my life.

I can picture things, like a painter would, though Im not good at painting, either.

I was supporting myself, but nothing like the guy painters, as I refer to them. I always resented that actually.. we were all getting the same amount of press, but they were going gangbusters with sales.

I am not a juicy painter.

I'm not a very good painter, but I'm learning a lot.

No, I'm not a great painter. Neither am I a great poet.

One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person.

With both acting and ballet, often you can't just choose when you do it, whereas a painter can go at his own pace.

Women are very different to men, and that hasn't been respected. So when people say there's never been a good woman painter or poet or engineer or whatever, they don't understand that our skills are many simultaneously and men's skills are single.

We didn't make them pay tonight. I thought Matt Painter just had his game plan that Marco was not going to beat us. Marco got the ball out but we didn't take advantage.

Being a painter is the only profession where you have to stand there with all your shortcomings on the wall.

Being a painter is a lonely, desolate life, but I learned by observing people, observing conditions around me, the way things worked. And I've found that painting-which I still do-has helped me a great deal as an actor. There's a surprising amount in common.

Every game, coach Painter wants us to win. So, just because it's IU, it's not going to be any different, I don't think; as far as in terms of his nature, how he's going to coach, how he's going to motivate us, how he's going to prepare us for the game.

The writer dreams of being the sculptor of words and the painter of ideas.

The stubby French painter Toulouse-Lautrec supposedly invented chocolate mousse - I find that rather hard to believe, but there you have it.

Definitely, when you see a coach Painter or coach Alford, that's going to stick in your mind. It's a big deal. (The head coach) is the guy.

You play two different quarterbacks during the year, you're going to have problems with consistency. You hope Curtis Painter continues to grow and improve, because we think he has a chance to be awfully special.

All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this -- as in other ways -- they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.

For a writer to sit before a blank page, as a painter before a white canvass or general before a bloodless field; before the first scribble of creation, is a moment like no other. The writer is consumed by the trice of bliss, jollity, determination, and sensitive to a true and deepest affection.

The north hill is devoted to Paul Klee the musician and teacher, the central hill to the painter and poet and the south hill to the researcher and mathematician.

Edwards is a major figure in radio, TV and film, as a writer, producer and a director. He is also a painter and a sculptor. There is no one quite like him in his generation.