Michelangelo has achieved the peak of painting and sculpture. Michelangelo: Heart and Stone starring Rutger Hauer & Massimo Odierna & Giancarlo Giannini et al, Sky Arts 2013
Sculpture is the lantern to painting. Michelangelo
Not every painter has a gift for painting; in fact, many painters are disappointed when they meet with difficulties in art. Painting done under pressure by artists without the necessary talent can only give rise to formlessness, as painting is a profession that requires peace of mind. The painter must always seek the essence of things, always represent the essential characteristics and emotions of the person he is painting. Titian, cited Peggy Hadden, 'The Quotable Artist'
There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. Mark Rothko
I paint very large pictures. I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them however, – I think it applies to other painters I know –, is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command. Mark Rothko, Interiors vol 110 May 1951
Every day if I [Alan Streets] paint it’s like bliss. My Name is Alan, Sky Arts 2012
Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do. Edgar Degas
Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things. Edgar Degas
A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people. Edgar Degas
One must be of one’s time and paint what one sees. Edouard Manet
There is only one true thing: instantly paint what you see. When you’ve got it, you’ve got it. When you haven’t, you begin again. All the rest is humbug. Edouard Manet
No-one can be a painter unless he cares for painting above all else. Edouard Manet
Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed, at its aspect everyone may create romance at the will of his imagination, and at a glance have his soul invaded by the most profound memories, no efforts of memory, everything summed up in one moment. Complete art which sums up all the others and completes them. Like music, it acts on the soul through the intermediary of the senses, the harmonious tones corresponding to the harmonies of sounds, but in painting, a unity is obtained which is not possible in music, where the accords follow one another, and the judgement experiences a continuous fatigue if one wants to reunite the end and the beginning. In the main, the ear is an inferior sense to the eye. The hearing can only grasp a single sound at one time, whereas the sight takes in everything and at the same time simplifies at its will. Paul Gauguin, Notes Synthethiques
Every good painter paints what he is. Jackson Pollock
When I am in a painting, I'm not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc, because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well. Jackson Pollock
When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God-made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art. Paul Cézanne
Painting must give us the flavour of nature’s eternity. Paul Cézanne
For an Impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject, but to realize sensations. Paul Cézanne
Painting is damned difficult – you always think you’ve got it, but you haven’t. Paul Cézanne
There are two things in the painter, the eye and the mind; each of them should aid the other. Paul Cézanne
Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one’s sensations. Paul Cézanne
Don’t be an art critic. Paint. There lies salvation. Paul Cézanne
The Clydeside Shipyards ... Spencer turned out fourteen huge paintings ... Spencer’s shipyard paintings are works of political, social realism. The dignity of the humble ship worker in the fight against the enemy. Jon Snow, The Genius of British Art: War, Channel 4 2010
I think that painting today is pure intuition. And luck. And taking advantage of what happens when you splash the bits down. Francis Bacon, cited The Art of Francis Bacon
Painting is a world of its own. It’s self-sufficient. ibid.
Real painters do not paint things as they are, after a dry and learning analysis. No, they paint them as they themselves feel them to be. ibid.
Nine-tenths of the nation, ninety per cent of the people, ninety-five per cent of the people, are absolute fools. And they’re bigger fools about painting than about anything else. ibid.
Painting is a duality and abstract painting is an entirely aesthetic thing. It always remains on one level. It is only really interesting in the beauty of its patterns or its shapes. Francis Bacon
Painting is but another word for feeling. John Constable
There is room enough for a natural painter. The great vice of the present day is bravura, an attempt to do something beyond the truth. In endeavouring to do something better than well, they do what in reality is good for nothing. Fashion always had, & will have, its day – but truth (in all things) only will last, and can only have just claims on posterity. John Constable, letter to John Dunthorne 1802
Claude: The most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw. John Constable
The promise of happiness is felt in the act of creation but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then that the painter realises that it is only a picture he is painting. Until then he had almost dared to hope that the picture might spring to life. Lucian Freud
The problem with painting a nude ... is that it deepens the transaction. You can scrap a painting of someone’s face and it imperils the sitter’s self-esteem less than scrapping a painting of the whole naked body. Lucian Freud
The paint is the person. I want paint to work for me just as flesh does. Lucian Freud
The essence of painting has actually always been to make it plastically perceptible through colour and line. Piet Mondrian
I wanted to be a painter. Damien Hirst, interview Damien Hirst: Thoughts, Work, Life, 2012
Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity. Damien Hirst
All painting, no matter what you’re painting, is abstract in that it’s got to be organised. David Hockney, 1986
When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing. David Hockney
The kind of painting which I find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational, but it is musical and architectural ... Whether this visual relationship is slightly more or slightly less abstract is, for me, beside the point. Ben Nicholson
Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend. John Singer Sargent
When you paint, try to put down exactly what you see. Whatever else you have to offer will come out anyway. Winslow Homer
I could not paint at all if I had to paint slowly. Every effect is so transient, it must be rapidly painted. Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida
Cézanne had abandoned the fiction that a painting is a picture into reality. Apples, Pears and Paint: How to Make a Still Life Painting, BBC 2014
I think most paintings are a record of the decisions that the artist made. I just perhaps make them a little clearer than some people have. Chuck Close