Brushstrokes Quotes

I love painting so much that nothing else matters.

The only thing I can say is consistent in all my paintings is vivid color.

Try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, 'Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow,' and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives you your own impression of the scene before you.

Where Cezanne captured and intensified shards of the eternal (every pear far more sharply defined than it could be in life), Monet portrayed the changeability and flux of every moment. 'The Water Lilies' give you a jittery, amorphous sense of a world seen at the speed of light.

The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.

In traditional Asian arts, the word and the picture always sit next to each other. I have an aunt, a Chinese brush painter, who told me that when you do a Chinese brush painting, you have to pair the image up with some poetry.

In painting feathers, you want to create the look of feathers, but if you try to paint all the feathers, you have nothing but disaster.

When you read Chekhov, everything has an even gray tone. When you read 'Family Life', everything has an even white tone. It is almost like when you paint on paper, and you can see the paper through the paint.

I always start a painting with the sky.

My passion for painting is so sacred and personal to me.

Well, painting is the one thing I do, that is just me. It's me and easels, and the pencils. And as long as I don't drool too much over the canvas, the colors come out pretty good. And it's a chance to express all that I've got inside, that I sometimes keep hidden. And I think that's why I paint big broad, wide open landscapes.

I paint from the top down. From the sky, then the mountains, then the hills, then the houses, then the cattle, and then the people.

Yes, I'm very expressive with my painting.

Painting does what we cannot do - it brings a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane.

My love affair with painting is bittersweet.

In the bit of painting that I've done, I'm interested in colour and texture. I'm very interested in transparency.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

The colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas.

Painters aren't expected to paint bleak pictures, are they?

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.

Franz Kline, who became known for his black and white paintings, did a whole series of gorgeous landscapes and wonderful portraits that may still hang in Greenwich Village.

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.

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

I'm quite a precious painter; my style is a messy fine art - sort of impressionist. I do portraits, I love painting other artists, but recently, I've been playing around with self portraits, putting on different characters.

I paint abstract expressions.