top of page
.png){kind=small}
Painting Quotes
"Very quickly a painting is turned into a facsimile of itself when one becomes so familiar with with it that one recognizes it without looking at it."
95
"If I hadn't started painting, I would have raised chickens."
79
"When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing."
71
"But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it."
67
"I have never subscribed to the Dirty Pallet school of painting."
67
"I never know what it's going to look like. Wouldn't be much point in painting if I already knew the outcome. I have a subject in front of me and I start flooding colour and making marks, I don't know, it's improvisation isn't it?"
67
"A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth."
67
"Well, I've been painting for years. I just started doing a lot more in the last couple."
62
"I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall."
62
"Around 1980, I went back to painting with a vengeance."
60
"If I had been around when Rubens was painting, I would have been revered as a fabulous model. Kate Moss? Well, she would have been the paintbrush."
60
"Painting's not important. The important thing is keeping busy."
59
"I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world."
59
"I don't know if it was the whole audience getting stoned out of their minds getting ready for the Floyd thing or what it was, but it was like playing to a painting."
58
"No one can be a painter unless he cares for painting above all else."
58
"If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens."
57
"When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else."
56
"A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object."
55
"Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do."
55
"You don't need a framework. You need a painting, not a frame."
55
"One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters."
54
"Pollock also... wanted one to be wrapped in the painting."
54
"Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal."
54
"Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality."
51
"In a movie, you're raw material, just a hue of some color and the director makes the painting."
49
"Look at any inspired painting. It's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation."
49
"A painting means as much to you as a string of pearls to an ape."
48
"Painting is damned difficult - you always think you've got it, but you haven't."
48
"I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting."
47
bottom of page