Painting Subject Quotes

I intend to do a large painting of the cliff at Etretat, although it is terribly bold of me to do so after Courbet has painted it so admirably, but I will try to do it in a different way.

Everything I paint is a portrait, whatever the subject.

Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which everything he paints in both an homage and a critique, and everything he says is a gloss.

Almost as though the painting itself becomes the embodiment of a type of struggle for visibility, and this might be considered the main subject of the painting.

I do have a dream, a tableau of the bathing place of La Grenouillère, for which I've done some bad pochades (sketches), but it is a dream. Renoir, who have just spent a couple of months here, also wants to paint this subject.

'Playboy' made the good life a reality for me and made it the subject matter of my paintings - not affluence and luxury as such, but joie de vivre itself.

I am glad you encouraged me with the 'Stoke' [his painting 'Stoke-by-Nayland', circa 1835] What say you to a summer morning? July or August, at eight or nine o'clock, after a slight shower during the night, to enhance the dews in the shadowed part of the picture, under 'Hedge row elms and hillocks green.' Then the plough, cart, horse, gate, cows, donkey, &c. are all good paintable material for the foreground, and the size of the canvas sufficient to try one's strength, and keep one at full collar.

I'd say mostly I paint hot chicks.

There is only one absinthe drinker, and that's the man who painted this idiotic picture.