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Painting Quotes
"If I hadn't started painting, I would have raised chickens."
36
"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."
20
"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."
18
"I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world."
16
"When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing."
14
"A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth."
12
"Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal."
12
"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."
11
"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."
10
"Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality."
9
"We have as many planes of speech as does a painting planes of perspective which create perspective in a phrase. The most important word stands out most vividly defined in the very foreground of the sound plane. Less important words create a series of deeper planes."
8
"Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting."
8
"Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do."
8
"Pollock also... wanted one to be wrapped in the painting."
8
"Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again."
8
"A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object."
7
"Around 1980, I went back to painting with a vengeance."
7
"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."
7
"If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens."
7
"You don't need a framework. You need a painting, not a frame."
7
"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."
7
"Well, I've been painting for years. I just started doing a lot more in the last couple."
7
"No one can be a painter unless he cares for painting above all else."
7
"Painting does what we cannot do - it brings a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane."
6
"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?"
6
"Painting is damned difficult - you always think you've got it, but you haven't."
6
"The dog, the rabbit and the hoop all feature in the painting, and take the place of the orrery."
6
"When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else."
5
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