John Singer Sargent Quotes

I always start a painting with the sky.

A face in the picture would bother me, so I'd rub it out with the turpentine and do it over.

Remember that a painting - before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.

Well, painting is the one thing I do, that is just me. It's me and easels, and the pencils. And as long as I don't drool too much over the canvas, the colors come out pretty good. And it's a chance to express all that I've got inside, that I sometimes keep hidden. And I think that's why I paint big broad, wide open landscapes.

Through a painting we can see the whole world.

In painting feathers, you want to create the look of feathers, but if you try to paint all the feathers, you have nothing but disaster.

You know, it's just like being a peddler. You want two breasts? Well, here you are -- two breasts. We must see to it that the man looking at the picture has at hand everything he needs to paint a nude. If you really give him everything he needs -- and the best -- he'll put everything where it belongs, with his own eyes. Each person will make for himself the kind of nude he wants, with the nude that I will have made for him.

A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth.

A good painter is to paint two main things, men and the working of man's mind.

Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.

I did not move into developing or processing color. I stayed with black and white. I still think to this day that I prefer to work in black and white if it has to do with poetry or anything other than specific reality. I have worked in color when I thought it was the appropriate way to express the thought that I was working on.

Painting does what we cannot do - it brings a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane.

Painting is seen as picture making, the making of an art object, something that can stand on its own.

The detail adds an element of unexpected something. All fiction is false; what makes it convincing is that it runs alongside the truth. The real world has lots of incidental details, so a painting also has to have that element of imperfection and irregularity, those incidental details.

Color is a passion; painting is a passion.

Each movie you do about a real person is like a painting, and you choose certain things in the painting that you want to pull out and you want to show.

I think of me being a painter eventually.

I'm quite a precious painter; my style is a messy fine art - sort of impressionist. I do portraits, I love painting other artists, but recently, I've been playing around with self portraits, putting on different characters.

Painting does more than just point to things. The very act of pointing is a value statement.

Paint is the skin of a painting: it is fiction. In houses, it disguises the plumbing and wiring and studs and nails.

I paint American people, and I tell American stories through the paintings I create.

Painting is a lonely, mostly solitary act.

My love affair with painting is bittersweet.

My passion for painting is so sacred and personal to me.

I paint paintings of people.