Balthus Quotes

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.

I think when somebody's painting they don't necessarily... I'm not illustrating what I know. I'm mapping out, like topographically, some terrain I am satisfied with, how awkward that mark is.

If you want to paint the inner life, you paint it from the exterior. From the exterior, you breathe the inner life into your painting.

I will preach with my brush.

I have to go with what the painting says to me. The painting is always informing me. I'm its servant; it's not mine. I'm doing what it wants.

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.

Painting, music, photography, and visual art have been creative forms of expression for me for decades.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

Painting is as close as a person can get to actually capturing the heat of the moment.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

Over the years I always did some water colors, and I did a series of pictures of drawings. I always did it during a period of time that was slow in the photo business, but in essence it was always frustrating because I'd get started, and then it would be time to get back to work and I wouldn't get anywhere with the painting.

Every good painter paints what he is.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

Painters must speak through paint, not through words.

The only thing in life that really gives me any peace is just being lost in the process of creating something, whether it's the film or painting and drawing, which has been a big part of my life, for a long time.

One drawing demands to become a painting, so I start to work on that, and then the painting might demand something else. Then the painting might say, 'I want a companion, and the companion should be like this,' so I have to find that, either by drawing it myself or locating the image.

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.

A drawing is an autobiographical record of one's discovery of an event - either seen, remembered or imagined. A 'finished' work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.

Because I was traveling a lot during the '70s, the only thing I could do on the road was take photographs, so there wasn't much painting during those years.

Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.

The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Like an opera singer, I am able to sing out my song in paint.

Before I discovered moviemaking, I hadn't found anything where I could kind of galvanize or meld all of the things that I wanted to do.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.