painter quotes

Edward Hopper is the great painter of American hell in the 20th century, the limner-laureate of the beauty, poignance, eternityand bone-ache disquietude of life.

- Henry Southworth Allen
 In the Washington Post, 25  Jun.

All the others translate: the painter sketches Avisible world to love or reject.

-W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden
  'The Composer' (XXXI V), collected in The English  Auden. Poems1936^39 (1977).

La volaille est pour la cuisine ce qu'est la toile pour les peintres. Fowls are to the kitchen what his canvas is to the painter.

-Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
  Physiologie du gou"  t, pt.1, ch.6, section 34 (translated by Anne Drayton,1970).

Every good painter who aspires to the creation of genuine masterpieces should first of all marry my wife.

- Salvador Dal| 
Quoted in Saranne  Alexandrian Surrealist  Art (1970).

He that would be a painter must have a natural turn thereto.Love and delight are better teachers of the Art of Painting than compulsion is.

- Albrecht Du« r er
c.1512  On Painting. Quoted in William Martin Conway Literary Remains of  Albrecht Du«  rer (1889).

   Color possesses me. I don't have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter.

- Paul Klee
  The Diaries of Paul Klee1898^1918, entry 926.

   I do not find any difference between painting and sculpture except that the sculptor pursues his work with greater physical fatigue than the painter and the painter pursues his with greater mental fatigue.

-Leonardo daVinci
Treatise on Painting (published1651, translatedby A P McMahon, 1956).

A good painter has two chief objects to paint, man and the intention of his soul; the former is easy, the latter harder, because he has to represent it by the attitudes and movements of the limbs.

-Leonardo daVinci
Quoted in Irma  A Richter (ed) Selections from the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1977).

The painter who draws by practiceand judgement of the eye without the use of reason is like a mirror which copies everything placed in front of it without knowledge of the same.

-Leonardo daVinci
Quoted in Irma  A Richter (ed) Selections from the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1977).

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man.

- (Harry) Sinclair Lewis
  Babbitt, ch.14.

Dire au peintre qu'il faut prendre la nature comme elle est, vaut de dire au virtuose qu'il peut s'asseoir sur le piano. Telling a painter that he must take nature as it is is like telling a virtuoso that he can sit on the piano.

- Ste  phane Mallarme 
  Le 'ten o'clock'de M. Whistler.

Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head†everything he paints is both an homage and a critique.

- Robert Motherwell
  In the Los  Angeles Times, 31  Jul.

The men liked to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I'm one of the best painters.

- Georgia O'Keeffe
Quoted in W Chadwick Women,  Art and Society (1990). Nigerian  writer,  winner  of  the 1987  Commonwealth  Prize  for Africa  for  Incidents  at  the  Shrine  (1986)  and  the  1991  Booker Prize  for   The  Famished  Road.  Other   works  include  Songs  of Enchantment   (1993),   Dangerous  Love   (1996)   and   In   Arcadia (2002).

Le style, pour l'e  crivain aussi bien que pour le peintre, est une question non de technique mais de vision. For the writer as well as for the painter, style is not a question of technique, but of vision.

- Marcel Proust
' 1927  A la recherche du temps perdu,'LeTemps retrouve ' .

   It is impossible to repeat in one period what was done in another.The pointof view isnotthesame, anymorethan are the tools, the ideals, the needs, or the painters' techniques.

- Pierre Auguste Renoir
From Renoir's notebook, quoted in L Nochlin Impressionism and Post-Impressionism1874^1904 (1966).

   The subject is to the painter what the rails are to a locomotive. He cannot do without it.

- Diego Rivera
  CreativeArt.

At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to actrather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or 'express'an object, actual or imagined.What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.

- Harold Rosenberg
  'TheAmerican Action Painters', in Art News, no.51, Dec.

   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.

-John Ruskin
  Lectures on Architecture and Painting.

With hue like that when some great painter dips His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley
  'The Revolt of Islam'.

Mr Lewis'spictures appeared, as averygreat painter said to me, to have been painted bya mailed fist in a cotton glove.

- Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell
  OnWyndham Lewis. Taken Care Of, ch.11.

A life passed among pictures makes not a painterelse the policeman in the National Gallery might assert himself.

-James (Abbott) McNeill Whistler
  The GentleArt of Making Enemies.

To say to the painter, that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player, that he may sit on the piano.

-James (Abbott) McNeill Whistler
  The GentleArt of Making Enemies.

A writer of talent needs onlya typewriter and paper, a painter only needs brushes, canvas and paint, but I need a million dollars or moreto be in business.That's a hell of a business to be in.

- Langdon Winner
  In the Observer Magazine,7 Jul.

If mine had been the painter's hand, To express what then I saw; and add the gleam, The light that never was, on sea or land, The consecration, and the poet's dream.

-William Wordsworth
  'Elegiac Stanzas: suggested by a picture of Peele Castle in a storm', stanza 4 (published1807).