Quotes by Painters - Page 21

Action is the foundational key to all success.
Pablo Picasso
Nature is energy and struggle. It is what exists without any promise. If it can be thought of by man as an arena, a setting, it has to be thought of as one which lends itself as much to evil as to good. Its energy is fearsomely indifferent.
John Berger
The continent is full of buried violence, of the bones of antediluvian monsters and of lost races of man, of mysteries which are wrapped in doom. The atmosphere is at times so electrical that the soul is summoned out of its body and runs amok. Like the rain everything comes in bucketsful - or not at all. The whole continent is a huge volcano whose crater is temporarily concealed by a moving panorama which is partly dream, partly fear, partly despair. From Alaska to Yucatan it's the same story. Nature dominates. Nature wins out. Everywhere the same fundamental urge to slay, to ravage, to plunder. Outwardly they seem like a fine, upstanding people - healthy, optimistic, courageous. Inwardly they are filled with worms. A tiny spark and they blow up.
Henry Miller
We therefore find that the triangles and rectangles herein described, enclose a large majority of the temples and cathedrals of the Greek and Gothic masters, for we have seen that the rectangle of the Egyptian triangle is a perfect generative medium, its ratio of five in width to eight in length 'encouraging impressions of contrast between horizontal and vertical lines' or spaces; and the same practically may be said of the Pythagorean triangle
Samuel Colman
I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers
Claude Monet
The mountains are intimations of transcendence, which he is now free to pursue, and the walking writes messages in every cell of his body, telling him that he is not locked inside a cement box, nor in a water drum, but is moving forward.
Michael D. O'Brien
Out yonder they may curse, revile, and torture one another, defile all the human instincts, make a shambles of creation (if it were in their power), but here, no, here, it is unthinkable, here there is abiding peace, the peace of God, and the serene security created by a handful of good neighbors living at one with the creature world.
Henry Miller
Endless moons, an opaque universe, thunder, tornadoes, the quaking earth. Rare moments of peace; forehead up against my knees, arms around my head, I though, I listened, I longed not to exist. but life was there, a transparent pearl, a star revolving slowly on its own axis.
Shan Sa
The world is not to be put in order. The world is order. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.
Henry Miller
I was getting an A for work. But not for talent. The story of my life.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
I am that clumsy human, always loving, loving, loving. And loving. And never leaving.
Frida Kahlo
History is a succession of things that ought never to have happened, and the writing act is a kind of revenge against this.
Breyten Breytenbach
Even if we have bad feelings about our past and it causes a sense of alienation, it belongs to our history. Its benchmarks are stored in the granary of our mind and crucial evaluations for the future cannot be made without consulting the archive of our memory. ( “Not without the past”)
Erik Pevernagie
When we are “time traveling”, we may trip over problems from the past which distort our memory. If we are weary of dealing with lost causes or lame ducks in our history, we have to make up our mind and give up destructive thinking patterns. At that juncture, time has come to go back to the future. ( “A glimpse of the future" )
Erik Pevernagie
A nation that forgets its past has no future
Sir Winston Churchill
Only eight months had gone since Henry VIII of England had been suspended in death, there to lie like Mohammed’s coffin, hardly in the Church nor out of it, attended by his martyrs and the acidulous fivefold ghosts of his wives. King Francis of France, stranded by his neighbour’s death in the midst of a policy so advanced, so brilliant and so intricate that it should at last batter England to the ground, and be damned to the best legs in Europe—Francis, bereft of these sweet pleasures, dwindled and died likewise.
Dorothy Dunnett
When the past gets its teeth into our daily life, it may get to grips with an astringent reality and adjust our timeline. By recognizing ourselves in the light of our history, we become aware of what we are. ("Going back to yesterday")
Erik Pevernagie
We were meant to survive because of our minds' ability to reason, our ability to live with frustration in order to maintain our virtue. We wore smiling masks while dying inside.
Anchee Min
The places and people in the following stories have been represented accurately to the best of my ability; yet my writing is supposed to be a tale, and as in any historical novel, my own imagination has blended with fact to create poetical reality.
Eric Sloane
History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
John Berger
History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
John Berger
Emotion often outwits intelligence, while intuition renders life surprisingly fluent and enjoyable. ("Le ciel c'est l'autre")
Erik Pevernagie
A living together becomes a living apart, when the pineal gland has not been able to create a luster of spiritual togetherness and emotional attachment. (“I wonder what went wrong.” )
Erik Pevernagie
What a wonderful world it could be, when spiritual factions would choose to read sacred writings as colorful metaphors and not as bloody declarations of war. (“Is heaven a place in the sky?”)
Erik Pevernagie
Thou art a manGod is no moreThy own humanityLearn to adore
William Blake
They never opened the door which leads to the soul.
Henry Miller
Ah, the deliciousness of discovering a masterwork. My heart begins to lift. I can see myself sitting all day in my chair, immersed in lives, plots, and sentences, intoxicated by words and chimeras, paralyzed by satisfaction and contentment, reading until the deepening twilight, until I can no longer make out the words, until my mind begins to wander, until my aching muscles are no longer able to keep the book aloft. Joy is the anticipation of joy.
Rabih Alameddine
When we fail to reflect on the undercurrents of the circumstances of our life, we may have permanent misgivings about the quality of our interpretations. A lucid reading of our acts and our desires helps us to avoid tumbling into a frustrating gap between what we expect and what others expect. (“Alors, tout a basculé”)
Erik Pevernagie
If we don’t live in the same vibe, it is hard to be aware of each other. When our reading differs from our neighbors’ reality, our surroundings may take a range of discordant shades and daily episodes become unrecognizable. But if we endeavor to find out, the “who is who”, the “what is what” and the “where is Waldo”, we might demonstrate our social literacy and connectedness. ("Fish for silence.")
Erik Pevernagie
And when I read, and really I do not read so much, only a few authors, - a few men that I discovered by accident - I do this because they look at things in a broader, milder and more affectionate way than I do, and because they know life better, so that I can learn from them.
Vincent van Gogh
We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.
Henry Miller
There's nothing more difficult than a line.
Pablo Picasso
Everyday objects shriek aloud.
René Magritte
I wish to approach truth as closely as is possible, and therefore I abstract everything until I arrive at the fundamental quality of objects.
Piet Mondrian
How do I define art? A work of art is not an object of monetary value; it is a timid attempt by man to recreate the miracle of which every young woman is capable: to produce life from nothing. Hence, only women and artists have respect for life, and the segment of the so-called "society" that denies women the right to vote and therefore to participate, and denies artists the right to exist, does not really care for life. It oppresses humanity,and it has, directly or indirectly, a vested interest in wars.
Oskar Kokoschka
With Michelangelo anatomical science is transformed into music. With him the human body is architectonic matter for the construction of dreams.
Umberto Boccioni
Don't wait for inspiration. It comes while working.
Henri Matisse
The world concerns me only in so far as I owe it a certain debt and duty, so to speak, because I have walked this earth for 30 years, and out of gratitude would like to leave some memento in the form of drawings and paintings—not made to please this school or that, but to express a genuine human feeling.
Vincent van Gogh
You’ve got sadness in you, I’ve got sadness in me – and my works of art are places where the two sadnesses can meet, and therefore both of us need to feel less sad.
Mark Rothko
As regards the artists themselves, most of them gave up their freedom quite lightly, placing their art at the service of someone or something. As a rule, their concerns and their ambitions are those of any old careerist. I thus acquired a total distrust of art and artists, whether they were officially recognised or were endeavouring to become so, and I felt that I had nothing in common with this guild. I had a point of reference which held me elsewhere, namely that magic within art which I had encountered as a child.
René Magritte
If you are only moved by color relationships, you are missing the point. I am interested in expressing the big emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom.
Mark Rothko
You must study the Masters but guard the original style that beats within your soul and put to sword those who would try to steal it.
El Greco
A drawing is a translation. That is to say each mark on the paper is consciously realted, not only to the real or imagined "model", but also to every mark and space already set out on the paper. Thus a drawn or painted image is woven together by the energy (or the lassitude, wen the drawing is weak) of countless judgements [sic]. Every time a figuration is evoked in a drawing, everything about it has been mediated by consciousness, either intuitively or systematically.
John Berger
Photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them.
John Berger
Choose only one master — Nature.
Rembrandt
Art consists in going the full length. If you start with the drums you have to end with dynamite, or TNT.
Henry Miller
A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art. And from this results that modern desire for rhythm in painting, for mathematical, abstract construction, for repeated notes of colour, for setting colour in motion.
Wassily Kandinsky
My business is to paint what I see, not what I know is there.
J.M.W. Turner
To those that are not accustomed to it the inner beauty appears as ugliness because humanity in general inclines to the outer and knows nothing of the inner.
Wassily Kandinsky
What is drawing? How does one learn it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.
Vincent van Gogh
Only the painter who knows his business can create the impression that a picture was done in one stroke.
Auguste Renoir
Art can blow us out of our pigeon hole. In deafness it may shout or scream, in blindness it may arrest our attention, in numbness it may shake up our mind. If we don’t sense anything at all and take everything for granted, art can kick us in the ass, give a conscience and make us aware. ("When is Art?")
Erik Pevernagie
One of the most beautiful things to do is to paint darkness, which nevertheless has light in it.
Vincent van Gogh
To paint is to love again, live again, see again. To get up at the crack of dawn in order to take a peek at the water colors one did the day before, or even a few hours before, is like stealing a look at the beloved while she sleeps. The thrill is even greater if one has first to draw back the curtains. How they glow in the cold light of early dawn! … Is there any writer who rouses himself at daybreak in order to read the pages of his manuscript? Perish the thought!
Henry Miller
I must have flowers, always and always.
Claude Monet
I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene, whether in friendship or mere observation, that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.
Mark Rothko
Art is not what you see but what you make others see
Edgar Degas
An artist is above all a human being, profoundly human to the core. If the artist can’t feel everything that humanity feels, if the artist isn’tcapable of loving until he forgets himself and sacrifices himself if necessary, if he won’t put down his magic brush and head the fightagainst the oppressor, then he isn’t a great artist.
Diego Rivera
High culture is paranoid about sentiment, but human beings are intensely sentimental. And if art doesn’t speak language that’s acceptable to people, it relegates itself to obscurity.
Thomas Kinkade