Peter Saul Quotes

Oil-painting is a developed technique. Why go backwards?

I learned to paint in a historical method. First through watercolours and then through oil. Then, when I went to college and to the school of architecture, I took up modern painting.

Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.

I love paint. I like watercolours. I like acrylic paint... a little bit. I like house paint. I like oil-based paint, and I love oil paint. I love the smell of turpentine and I like that world of oil paint very, very, very much.

A contemporary artist like Grayson Perry is brilliant partly because of his expert knowledge of art history, not despite it.

Painting is the art of hollowing a surface.

Any innovation that is evident in my paintings is a direct result of something that happened in the course of making a print.

I painted with acrylic paint, and the reason why I went to oil was mainly because I didn't control it. I was looking for the insecurity of it. I mean, I might have found another reason later, but at that moment, the reason was I was looking for the insecurity.

As an artist, you want to play around with mediums and see if you can get the point across in different way.

I have wanted to be a fine artist painter, and I reached the point in art schools were I'd like to understand more about images and how images communicate information to people. And I was not getting very far in that from my professors.

I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period.

And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission.

Most people think an artist tries to be original, but originality is the last thing that develops in the artist.

Painting is the only universal language. All nature is creation's picture book. Painting alone can describe every thing which can be seen, and suggest every emotion which can be felt. Art reaches back into the babyhood of time, and is man's only lasting monument.

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

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

In the nineteenth century the more grandiose word inspiration began to replace the word idea in the arts.

The process of art evolving is always one which has fascinated me.

My father taught me to paint when I was young with watercolors and so I learned at a very young age the essential elements of the value of light and composition.

I've always been a creative person, and I'd always wanted to paint, so I went to art school and began painting and sculpting.

If Monsieur X spent an eternity studying treatises on optics, he would never paint 'La Grande Jatte.'

From 1940 to the present, the art world - and particularly Los Angeles - has undergone a transformation not unlike the Italian Renaissance.

I used to paint a lot of oil and now I paint more mixed-media stuff.

I did some pastels and I did other pieces in which there was just basically one color per square, and then they would get bigger and I could get 2 or 3 colors into the square, and ultimately I just started making oil paintings.

I paint every day. I really have no hobbies. That's all I do.