Elizabeth Peyton Quotes

Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that.

When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out.

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.

One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters.

It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

The art of pictorial creation is so complicated - it is so astronomical in its possibilities of relation and combination that it would take an act of super-human concentration to explain the final realization.

I influenced the BG style by not being able to draw perspective. The BG artists developed cool graphic painting styles to make my bad backgrounds look like they were that way on purpose.

The musician writes for the orchestra what his inner voice sings to him; the painter rarely relies without disadvantage solely upon the images which his inner eye presents to him; nature gives him his forms, study governs his combinations of them.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

Painting is seen as picture making, the making of an art object, something that can stand on its own.

In painting, you don't have to go through a process of opinion; it speaks directly, and either it works, or it doesn't.

Though the artist must remain master of his craft, the surface, at times raised to the highest pitch of loveliness, should transmit to the beholder the sensation which possessed the artist.

Painting is damned difficult - you always think you've got it, but you haven't.

I don't think you can lightly paint a picture. It's an activity I take very seriously.

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.

If what you want to do is make good art, decide what's good and try to imitate it.

Painting is a coalescing of experience.

It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.

My painting does not come from the easel.

I can't do pieces I only admire technically. I have to feel some direct contact with them.

I believe that the great painters with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions.

Real painters understand with a brush in their hand.

When I sit down to begin penciling a page, most of the hard work for me is done. I can concentrate solely on my art from that point on, which is the fun part!

Color possesses me. I don't have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter.