Carolyn Kizer Quotes

Knowing what paint a painter uses or having an understanding of where he was in the history of where he came from doesn't hurt your appreciation of the painting.

I see paintings everywhere. I look at stuff and it looks like painting to me.

I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I'm not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words.

Everybody thinks they know what art should be. But very few of them have the sense that is necessary to experience painting, that is the sense of sight, that sees colors and forms as living reality in the picture.

I love Monet - I've nicknamed him King Blob. When you go up to the painting, it's a series of blobs - amazing.

The painter has to unlearn the habit of thinking that things seem to have the color which common sense says they 'really' have, and to learn the habit of seeing things as they appear.

Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.

I've always had a certain fascination. It's basically paint what you know, and this is what I grew up with.

I look at everything in an artistic way.

I have generally found that persons who had studied painting least were the best judges of it.

Painters were also attorneys, happy storytellers of anecdote, psychologists, botanists, zoologists, archaeologists, engineers, but there were no creative painters.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.

I would love to have been a painter in the tradition of the surrealist painters who I admire so much.

Grant that the true organ with which the beautiful is apprehended is the imagination, and it follows that all arts are likely to affect the feelings indirectly.

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.

The paintings by Van Gough and Chagall had a big influence on me.

When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it.

A person with normal eyesight would have nothing to know in the way of 'Impressionism' unless he were in a blinding light or in the dusk or dark.

You're going to react to a painting in a way that the painting demands you react.

But what is of great importance to me is observation of the movement of colors.

I paint what I see, not what a camera would see.

But I was in awe of the painters; I mean I was new in New York, and I thought the painting that was going on here was just unbelievable.

I paint. I love the visual arts.