"First I saw the mountains in the painting; then I saw the painting in the mountains."
-- Chinese Proverb.
"A man paints with his brains and not with his hands."
-- Michelangelo (1475-1564)
"Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things."
-- Edgar Degas (1834-1917)
"Painting is very easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do."
-- Edgar Degas
"Drawing and color are not separate at all; in so far as you paint, you draw. The more color harmonizes, the more exact the drawing becomes. When the color achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also."
-- Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), French Post-Impressionist painter. Quoted by Émile Bernard, L'Occident, July, 1904.
"PAINTING, n: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic."
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), American writer. The Cynic's Word Book, also known as The Devil's Dictionary, 1906.
"Whenever I see a Frans Hals I feel like painting, but when I see a Rembrandt I feel like giving up!"
-- Max Liebermann (1847-1935).
"There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning. An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature."
-- G.K.Chesterton (1874-1936), British writer. Autobiography.
"Painting is stronger than I am. It can make me do whatever it wants."
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), modern Spanish artist. A note written on the back of one of his sketchbooks.
"Painting is just another way of keeping a diary."
-- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), modern Spanish artist.
"Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen."
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Spanish artist. Quoted in: Jean Cocteau, Journals, part 1, "War and Peace" (1956)
"To me, a painter, if not the most useful, is the least harmful member of our society."
-- Man Ray (1890-1976), modern American photographer, artist. Self Portrait, chapter 6 (1963)
"The painting has a life of its own."
-- Jackson Pollock (1912-1956)
"Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings."
-- George Tooker (1920-)
