Painting Technique Quotes

At present I absolutely want to paint a starry sky. It often seems to me that night is still more richly coloured than the day; having hues of the most intense violets, blues and greens. If only you pay attention to it you will see that certain stars are lemon-yellow, others pink or a green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without my expatiating on this theme it is obvious that putting little white dots on the blue-black is not enough to paint a starry sky.

Little more black, little more blue. And we'll just put that in using little crisscross strokes or - or little X's, whatever you want to call them. Whatever.

One morning, one of us ran out of the black, it was the birth of Impressionism.

I often avoid using the terms 'figuration' and 'abstraction' because I've always tried to have it both ways. I want the experience of looking at one of my paintings to be similar to the process of making the painting - you go from the big picture to something very intense and detailed, and then back again.

What one has most to work and struggle for in painting is to do the work with a great amount of labour and sweat in such a way that it may afterward appear, however much it was laboured upon, to have been done almost quickly and almost without any labour, and very easily, although it was not.

I paint daily with watercolors on 5-by-7-inch pads that are small enough for me to take them everywhere.

I don't want the viewer to be able to peel away the layers of my painting like the layers of an onion and find that all the blues are on the same level.

Painting is something that takes place among the colors.

When I used to do abstract paintings at school, like everyone else, the tutor said these would make great curtains. I would always neglect the formal stuff that was going on by using colour, because colour kind of came naturally to me.

Though colour may appear at first a part of painting merely mechanical, yet it still has its rules, and those grounded upon that presiding principle which regulates both the great and the little in the study of a painter.

When I am painting I have a general notion as to what I am about. I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident.

Well, I have a very simple method of painting.

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

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

People ask me why I don't paint oils. It takes too long. Cleaning brushes in linseed oil, and it takes six months to really dry, and all this. I don't have that kind of time. I work with acrylic. It's water based. You can clean it under water. If you spill it on yourself, you just throw it in the washing machine.

For those colours which you wish to be beautiful, always first prepare a pure white ground.

I like to do really realistic paintings, which requires so much focus; like, if I have to go to the bathroom or change a song, I can't; I'm so in it.

I think most paintings are a record of the decisions that the artist made. I just perhaps make them a little clearer than some people have.

I use printers to make prints of the images that I am creating. And I try to have that surface kind of replicated in the painting.

Cover the canvas at the first go, then work at it until you see nothing more to add.

For example, in one of my last exhibitions I had a 50-foot massive painting with I think perhaps a hundred thousand hand-painted small flowers. This was the Christ painting [The Dead Christ in the Tomb, 2008] in my Down exhibition [2008]. Now, I simply can't spend eight hours a day painting small, identical flowers. And so I've got a team that allows me to have these grand, sweeping statements.

I wanted to learn how to paint rather than just doing black-and-white work.

One paints with one's head, not one's hand.

Sometimes I scrape off a lot. You have on the floor, like cow dung in the field, this big glob of paint... and it's just a lot of inert matter, inert paint. Then I look back at the canvas, and it's not inert - it's active, moving and living.

When a figure painter executes a landscape he treats it as if it were a face; Degas' landscapes are unparalleled because they are visionary landscapes.