Elizabeth Peyton Quotes

Blest be the art that can immortalize,--the art that baffles time's tyrannic claim to quench it.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

Time is a lot of the things people say that God is. There's always preexisting, and having no end. There's the notion of being all powerful-because nothing can stand against time, can it? Not mountains, not armies. And time is, of course, all-healing. Give anything enough time, and everything is taken care of: all pain encompassed, all hardship erased, all loss subsumed. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Remember, man, that thou art dust; and unto dust thou shalt return. And if time is anything akin to God, I suppose that memory must be the devil.

In the coming days and weeks, Laila would scramble frantically to commit it all to memory, what happened next. Like an art lover running out of a burning museum, she would grab whatever she could--a look, a whisper, a moan--to salvage from perishing to preserve. But time is the most unforgiving of fires, and she couldn't, in the end, save it all.

An artist is the magician put among men to gratify - capriciously - their urge for immortality.

If you know somethin' well, you can always paint it but people would be better off buyin' chickens.

In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live.

Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.

Taking photos is a form of collecting.

Art is longer than life.

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.

It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.

I also paint and enjoy acrylic medium; some of my close friends have paintings I did for them.

When I paint a picture of a house, that goes back to my roots.

My mum is an artist and very into creative expression and freedom.

Painting and music were the only things I worked at industriously and faithfully.

When it comes to partnership, some humans can make their lives alone - it's possible. But creatively, it's more like painting: you can't just use the same colours in every painting. It's just not an option. You can't take the same photograph every time and live with art forms with no differences.

I can paint in jail.

The difference between art about death and actual death is that one's a celebration and the other's a dull fact.

I'm 38 years old and Limp Bizkit is just something I do. If I was a painter, it would just be a type of painting I make.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

Writers and believers live their lives haunted by the same question: What happens to our days once they disappear? The objective fact is that each day that passes is lost forever, as forbidden to us as the dead. But prayer and fiction offer a different answer. Those lost days still live among us, written in each person's hand, turned into stories.

I paint flowers so they will not die.

I think writing, or any form of art-making, is a way to prepare for not being here. Not that we can. No amount of preparing can really ready us, in a meaningful way, for the great void that awaits us all.

I often think about death, and it saddens me to leave this world and not be able to paint more. I love it so much.