Painting Process Quotes

Painting is the art of hollowing a surface.

The greatest work of an artist is the history of a painting.

I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it's very hard to guess at a size or a color and all the colors around it and what it will really look like.

I paint the way some people write an autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages from my diary.

The process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than is the picture. The process in fact is habit-forming

To paint is the most terrific thing that there is, but to do it well is very difficult.

Painting is a lonely, mostly solitary act.

I think, if one is a painter, all you experience does come out when you’re painting.

I don't have much of a problem with interruptions. I keep a detailed record of paint and materials as a work on each painting. I can restart exactly where I left off.

When I was painting in art school - and I think many painters in the 1980s worked similarly - a finished painting would often be constructed from lots of other paintings underneath. Some of these individual layers of painting were better than others, but that was something that you would often only realise retrospectively.

I'm not going to say paint is an easy spruce-up. It takes time, it needs touch-ups, and you have to be very methodical. But it is worth it, and it isn't particularly expensive.

Then you learn about composition, you learn about old masters, you form certain ideas about structure. But the inhuman activity of trying to make some kind of jump or leap, where , the painting is always saying, 'What do you want from me? I can only be a painting.' You have to go from part to part, but you shouldn't see yourself go from part to part, that's the whole point.

Watercolors is the first and the last thing an artist does.

Painting is a field that attracts a lot of lazy people. You can just sort of sit and wait for things to come to you. I know a lot of painters who'll sit and chat it up all night. But God, I just can't do that.

If you've never mixed paint, you aren't going to be able to paint properly.

When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing.

Every painting is a voyage into a sacred harbour.

...the problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron.

All you need to paint is a few tools, a little instruction, and a vision in your mind.

For me painting is a dramatic action in the course of which reality finds itself split apart

When I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.

I go out each morning and draw. I can't really start a painting in the morning until I've done a drawing.

Finishing a painting demands a heart of steel: everything requires a decision, and I find difficulties where I least expect them... It is at such moments that one fully realizes one's own weaknesses.

When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in.

Painting it was hard graft. There are one and a half large tubes of white in the ground - yet that ground is very dark.