Edward Hopper Quotes

What you do when you paint, you take a brush full of paint, get paint on the picture, and you have faith.

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.

Remember that a painting - before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.

You just don't know when you get all the paint across the canvas how it will turn out. When you step back after you've finished, you say, 'This one is not so good. This one is good.'

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

If you're going to paint extremely, you need a big piece of canvas.

An artist's initial broad stroke is always most impactful, and obsessively adding layer upon layer of paint to fill in details often diminishes the painting's aura. When an aura is lost, it is impossible to get back.

The space between the dish and the pitcher, that I paint also.

I look at a nude. There are myriads of tiny tints. I must find the ones that will make the flesh on my canvas live and quiver.

No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.

I paint abstract expressions.

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.

The way I create music is maybe like a painting, to compose in a more visual way. Basically it's the music that I want to hear- that's my inspiration and bottom line. I just try to get ideas from books, movies, paintings.

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

My painting does not come from the easel.

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.

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

I am like a folk painter. Paint and move ahead.

Hands are the tool of the painter, the artist.

I couldn't go into the haphazard drawing or the paintings, the splashing of paint. I wanted to go back to a completely dry drawing, a dry conception of art.

It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

I'm not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings.

A painting of a person can be descriptive, but for me it's about all the things that make up a picture - the feelings, the brushstrokes - more than describing somebody. People latch on to the personalities when they talk about my work and forget the other parts.

I'll take anything and slap it on a canvas.