Grandma Moses Quotes

I always start a painting with the sky.

Painting on the ground was a cool challenge because you can't just stand back and see what you're doing.

No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.

There are these painterly things that happen while I'm working.

On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.

Photographs are two-dimensional. I work in four dimensions.

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.

I have a master's degree in photography as a fine art, and I would call my work primarily conceptual. I don't carry cameras with me wherever I go. I get an idea of a subject matter I want to deal with and I pull out my cameras.

I don't believe in making pencil sketches and then painting landscape in your studio. You must be right under the sky.

I paint landscapes, figuratives. I painted all my life. In fact, I started as a commercial artist.

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

There is nothing that special to see when looking at me. I'm a painter who paints day in day out, from morning till evening - figure pictures and landscapes, more rarely portraits.

I paint with shapes.

I'm just a landscape painter. I look out the window and I see what's going on, and I paint it. While I'm painting it, I also write thoughts about what I see going on out there.

When I look at green trees on a sunny day, I don't know how to make an interesting picture of that.

Photography is about finding things. And painting is different - it's about making something.

All I try to do is put as many colors as I can on the canvas every night.

Everything does come from nature. That's where you get new ideas. Just draw the landscape. I felt doing it with a bit of burnt wood was also good because I was drawing burnt wood with a piece of wood. I wanted to do black and white. After using color, I thought black and white would be good. You can have color in black and white. There is color in them, actually.

Selection is the invention of the landscape painter.

If drawing belongs to the world of spirit and color to that of the senses, you must draw first to cultivate the spirit.

I create my subjects somehow visualizing them in my style. I start as a poet, put the colors and composition down on canvas as a painter, but finish my work as a sculptor taking delight in caressing the forms.

Painting is something that takes place among the colors.

I don't make a lot of distinctions between things like landscape or figure painting, because to me the problems are inherently the same - lighting, color, structure, and so on - certainly traditional and ordinary problems.

The vivacity and brightness of colors in a landscape will never bear any comparison with a landscape in nature when it is illumined by the sun, unless the painting is placed in such a position that it will receive the same light from the sun as does the landscape.

Until I saw my drawings replayed on the iPad, I'd never seen myself draw. Someone watching me would be concentrating on the exact moment, but I'd always be thinking a little bit ahead. That's especially so in a drawing where you are limiting yourself, a line drawing for example. When you are doing them you are very tense, because you have to reduce everything to such simple terms.