Quotes & Sayings About Canvas
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Top Canvas Quotes
I don't go into the studio with the idea of 'saying' something. What I do is face the blank canvas and put a few arbitrary marks on it that start me on some sort of dialogue. — Richard Diebenkorn
I often use an old canvas and I particularly enjoy painting over something I've already done, allowing bits to come jumping through accidentally. — Myfanwy Pavelic
If hindrances obstruct the way, Thy magnanimity display. And let thy strength be seen: But O, if Fortune fill thy sail With more than a propitious gale, Take half thy canvas in. — William Cowper
Life is a Canvas. Every action of ours is a stroke of paint and at the end, how beautiful our painting is will depend upon all our strokes, all our Actions. -RVM — R.v.m.
Goethe's Faust risks all if he should cry to the moment, the 'augenblick', "Verweile doch!" "Last forever!" Who hasn't prayed that prayer? But the 'augenblick' isn't going to 'verweile'. You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying; it is a canvas, nevertheless. — Annie Dillard
Exactly. The dots guy. I've always thought getting older was a bit like looking at those paintings. You're born, and that's when you're standing right up next to the canvas. Nothing makes any sense. There's just a lot of light and color. But as you get older, you begin to back away, and that's when the image starts to cohere. All those little spots of color turn into flowers, or people, or dogs. You gain perspective. — Tommy Wallach
Only the series of colors on the canvas with all their power and vibrancy could, in combination with each other, render the chromatic feeling of that landscape. — Maurice De Vlaminck
The key role of entrepreneurs, like the most crucial role of scientists, is not to fill in the gaps in an existing market or theory, but to generate entirely new markets or theories ... They stand before a canvas as empty as any painter's; a page as blank as any poet's. — George Gilder
Every parent is an artist, for the bared canvas of a newborn's soul begs for the artist's touch. And because this is so, a parent must prepare the palette with the utmost care, choose the brushes with poised caution, and mindfully attend to every brushstroke regardless of how slight. And such caution is utterly imperative for the emerging rendering will be both a legacy borne of the parent, and a life lived by the child. — Craig D. Lounsbrough
So long as a canvas is empty its potential is infinite ... The empty canvas can become a gateway into the landscape of nightmares or a vision of sensual bliss. — Ben Okri
Is it an inspiring sight to see a man commit a heroic gesture, and then learn that he goes to vaudeville shows for relaxation? Or see a man who's painted a magnificent canvas - and learn that he spends his time sleeping with every slut he meets?"
"What do you want? Perfection?"
" - or nothing. So, you see, I take the nothing. — Ayn Rand
Darkness does something to a place, doesn't it? It distorts. It becomes a canvas for the imagination. The good news is that shadows are only the deflection of light. They can frighten, but they can do no harm. — David Jeremiah
Writers and painters have a medium that can foster self-effacements. Actors haven't. An actor can't hide himself behind paper or canvas. If you're not there your art's not there. That's why we actors are often such self-centered objects. — Elizabeth Goudge
People are much like those stars up there. Some burn faintly for millions of years, barely visible to us on earth. They're there, but you'd hardly know it. They blend in, like a speck on a canvas. But others blaze with such intensity, they light up the sky. You can't help but notice them, marvel at them. Those are the ones that never last long. They can't. They use up all their energy quickly — Sarah Jio
If I do anything, I have to start over, but all I have is fragments of ideas. Just pieces. Like a germ of an idea for this, and a germ of an idea for that. Nothing whole or concrete" - Violet
" 'Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.' Pearl S. Buck. Maybe a germ is enough. Maybe it's all you need. We can start small. Open up a new document or pull out a black piece of paper. We'll make it our canvas. Remember what Michelangelo said about the sculpture being in the stone - it was there from the beginning, and his job was to bring it out. Your words are in there too" -Finch — Jennifer Niven
I faced the gaudy sunflower on her canvas bag
it looked hand-painted and at last my eyes fell into hers. I said, 'Thanks for the card.' Her smile put the sunflower to shame. She walked off. — Jerry Spinelli
The love of the painter standing alone and staring, staring at the great coloured surface he is making. Standing with him in the room the rearing canvas stares back with tentative shapes halted in their growth, moving in a new rhythm from floor to ceiling. The twisted tubes, the fresh paint squeezed and smeared across the dry upon his palette. The dust beneath the easel. The paint has edged along the brushes' handles. The white light in a northern sky is silent. The window gapes as he inhales his world. His world: a rented room, and turpentine. He moves towards his half-born. He is in love. — Mervyn Peake
Taylor and I both pride ourselves on having escaped that collapsed circus tent of epistemology - those acres of canvas under which many of our colleagues still thrash aimlessly about. — Richard M. Rorty
What do you see when you look at a representational painting? Most of the time, the first thing I see is a flat piece of canvas covered with colored patterns. — Terry Teachout
I am not concerned with simply surviving. I am very concerned about improving. I start each day by examining yesterday's work and looking for areas where I can improve. I am always trying to draw the characters better, and trying to design each panel somewhat in the manner a painter would treat his canvas. — Charles M. Schulz
Suddenly one of these gypsies in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and moving her hands like Frisco dances out alone on the canvas platform. — F Scott Fitzgerald
Stop complainin." Jess climbed up to the cab and leaned down to pull me up beside him. "I'm not complaining." His fingers clung to my wrists as the soles on my gray, canvas shoes slipped up the worn steps. "It's hot. I'm sweatin'. I don't want to go campin'," his voiced pitched high to mock me. — S.D. Hendrickson
Then eventually Westwood arrived. He looked nothing like Reacher expected, but the reality fit the bill just as well as the preconceptions had. He was an outdoors type, not a lab rat, and sturdy rather than pencil-necked. He looked like a naturalist or an explorer. He had short but unruly hair, fair going gray, and a beard of the same length and color. He was red in the face from sunburn and had squint lines around his eyes. He was forty-five, maybe. He was wearing clothing put together from high-tech fabrics and many zippers, but it was all old and creased. He had hiking boots on his feet, with speckled laces like miniature mountain-climbing ropes. He was toting a canvas bag about as big as a mail carrier's. — Lee Child
Because I expected so little, Gaines's painting is startlingly powerul. A lank-haired blond woman with a hard face sits at akitchen table in the harsh light of a bare bulb. She's surrounded by dirty cereal bowls and fast-food bags, and her shirt is open to the waist, revealing small sagging breasts. Her hollow eyes look out from the canvas with the sullen resignation of an animal that has helped build its own cage. — Greg Iles
The mind, and the unconscious mind in particular, is a canvas. We paint on it constantly. Art and music can add such colors, such style. — J.D. Robb
BEANNACHT For Josie On the day when the weight deadens on your shoulders and you stumble, may the clay dance to balance you. And when your eyes freeze behind the gray window and the ghost of loss gets in to you, may a flock of colors, indigo, red, green and azure blue come to awaken in you a meadow of delight. When the canvas frays in the curach of thought and a stain of ocean blackens beneath you, may there come across the waters a path of yellow moonlight to bring you safely home. May the nourishment of the earth be yours, may the clarity of light be yours, may the fluency of the ocean be yours, may the protection of the ancestors be yours. And so may a slow wind work these words of love around you, an invisible cloak to mind your life. — John O'Donohue
Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to ...
How different everything is for the craftsman who ... can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object
whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug
and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see. — Alain De Botton
Angst is for the Middle Class - Marcus in Rough Canvas — Joey W. Hill
The canvas you are working on modifies the previous ones in an unending, baffling chain which never seems to finish. What sympathy is demanded of the viewer? He is asked to 'see' the future links. — Philip Guston
Life itself, too, is forever turning an infinitely vacant, dispiriting blank side towards man on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. But no matter how vacant and vain, how dead life may appear to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, who knows something, will not be put off so easily. — Vincent Van Gogh
One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be - though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain - because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone. — Oswald Spengler
He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood. — Oscar Wilde
I'm a blank canvas that I can paint however I desire. For the first time ever, I get to be the character in my own fantasy land. — E.K. Blair
This could be your big ticket," he said. "You know what happens to you at art school?"
I shook my head.
"All that good natural technique you have? All that detail? They'll beat it right out of you. They'll be so threatened by it, they'll make you start throwing paint at the canvas like a monkey. By the time you graduate, the only thing you'll be able to do is teach art to high school kids."
Okay, I thought. I'm glad he's excited for me.
"On the plus side, you'll probably get laid a lot."
I gave him a nod and a quick thumbs-up. He patted me on the shoulder and then left me alone. — Steve Hamilton
When I work alone, it can be like dabbling with a canvas. Maybe you paint over bits, and it starts to form its own life and lead you off in a direction. It becomes an intuitive, subconscious process. — Lindsey Buckingham
The creative act of the artist lifts him above himself by demanding full surrender. No one puts words on paper or paint on canvas, doubting. If one doubts, one does so five minutes later ... — Czeslaw Milosz
I'm ... getting there. I'm beginning to think that maybe it's okay to be a blank canvas. Maybe it's okay that my future is unknown. And maybe," I say with another smile, "it's okay to be inspired by the people who do know their future." "It goes both ways, you know." I link his icicle fingers through mine. "What does?" "Artists are inspired by blank canvases." My smile grows wider. — Stephanie Perkins
The artist invites the spectator to take a journey within the realm of the canvas ... Without taking the journey, the spectator has really missed the essential experience of the picture. — Mark Rothko
Hands are difficult. You would think they would be just five quick lines, but no, they have personalities as intimate as faces. Elizabeth's hands, for instance - they are fine hands, with long fingers that remind me of tapered candles. A person one has loved - the memory of their hands. Did they flutter or sit still? Dry? Moist? Cool on a hot forehead? What? That is what I wish to express in my paintings. The memory - of the movement - of very particular hands, even though they appear to be unmoving on canvas. — Sarah Ruhl
My room is cheerfully located between the sixth-floor elevators. The springs of my bed wheeze. The elevator dings. The ice machine right outside my door rumbles forth its icy bounty, a steady tattoo that beats "Stay up! Stay up!" I am in a canvas that Edward Hopper never felt bummed out enough to paint. — David Rakoff
Every day is a blank canvas to use our free will to create something beautiful for our Creator. — Alisa Hope Wagner
Whether I'm at home and researching online or whether I'm in the studio just drawing, I think I'm more interested in practical research - discussing with other people, trying to find the exact formula of putting things on the canvas, what is the consistency of paint that works best. — Camille Henrot
Seldom was blue for blue's sake present till Pollock hurled pigment at his canvas like pies. — William H Gass
Words are your paintbrush, and your life is the canvas. You can paint whatever you want to paint; you can even copy another artist's work - but what you express with your paintbrush is the way you see yourself, the way you see the entire reality. — Miguel Ruiz
When I begin, theoretically and practically I can smear anything I want on the canvas. Then there's a condition I have to react to, by changing it or destroying it. — Gerhard Richter
With every experience, you alone are painting your own canvas, thought by thought, choice by choice.
— Oprah Winfrey
Human, you are a machine, an organism, an animal, a primate, an artist, an athlete, a thinker, a sponge, a spirit, a comedian, a connoisseur, a cycle of breath in and breath out, an inventor, an expressor, an orator, a lover, an explorer, a creator, evolved. Your mind paints the flowers and the sky using the mind's eye as a paintbrush and light as paint. Splashing life across the blank canvas of reality. That's what you do. Every moment of every day. — Laren Grey Umphlett
Poetry of the universe is written with flowers and the lights of love on a canvas we call earth. — Debasish Mridha
Shapewear is the canvas and the clothes are the art. — Sara Blakely
We're trying to do what Miles Davis would have wanted us to do, which is approach it as artists with his life as the canvas. — Don Cheadle
Ultimately, we are all products of the experiences we have and the decisions we make as children, and it remains a peculiar detail of human condition that something as precious as the future is entrusted to us when we possess so little foresight. Perhaps that's what makes hindsight so intriguing. When you're young the future is a blank canvas, but looking back you are always able to see the big picture. — Simon Pegg
There is some other form that you contain within yourself that is not will or purpose and, when applied to art, serves you best. If you systematically apply to the art that you create the aggression of the world that turned you towards art in the first place; if you, in turn, become the aggressor towards your canvas, the thing that you're doing; if you, in turn, work your will upon this thing that you want - you will then cause a dissatisfaction in this life that you create. — Milton Resnick
He was like a living, breathing painting on an all-male canvas. — Karina Halle
The sky is a canvas, so paint your own life. — Jada Berglund
The geometry of landscape and situation seems to create its own systems of time, the sense of a dynamic element which is cinematizing the events of the canvas, translating a posture or ceremony into dynamic terms. The greatest movie of the 20th century is the Mona Lisa, just as the greatest novel is Gray's Anatomy. — J.G. Ballard
This is your world
You're the creator
Find freedom on this canvas
Believe, that you can do it,
'Cuz you can do it.
You can do it. — Bob Ross
Art deals with profound and simple moods ... Let us suppose that the artist - in this instance (the artist )Picabia - gets a certain impression by looking at our skyscrapers, our city, our way of life, and that he tries to reproduce it ... he will convey it in plastic ways on the canvas, even though we see neither skyscrapers nor city on it. — Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
I think that writers have natural canvases, and my canvas, even in short stories, often seems to be the scope of a life. — Lauren Groff
The future is an empty canvas or a blank sheet of paper, and if you have the courage of your own thought and your own observation you can make of it what you will — Lewis H. Lapham
My use of evenly repeated dots and diagonal lines and uninflected color areas suggest that my work is right where it is, right on the canvas, definitely not a window into the world. — Roy Lichtenstein
It takes more time to rework a painting than it takes to fill in the canvas in the first place. I wish I could get them all right with the first coat like many of the old masters could, but seem destined to have to rework to make them even passable. — E. J. Hughes
Cold exactitude is not art ... The so-called consciousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring. People like that, if they could, would work with the same minute attention on the back of their canvas. — Eugene Delacroix
I stand in the sacred human presence. As I do now, so should you stand some day. I pray to your presence that this be so. Let the future remain uncertain for that is the canvas to receive our desires. Thus the human condition faces its perpetual tabula rasa. We possess no more than this moment where we dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence we share and create. — Frank Herbert
But Hannah's friend didn't understand the volatile balancing act between art and sanity, that the act of creation was like walking a tightrope during an earthquake. She didn't understand Hannah's stupid need for validation, or that the size of the audience increased the stakes and multiplied the fear. She didn't understand that creativity was dangerous, that, yes, there were some people who could stand before a canvas, paint a sunset that would bring the world to its knees, and return to their loved ones as a complete person who didn't hurt, didn't cry, didn't spill blood to appease the host of fickle muses. But Hannah did. Hannah's best ideas - sometimes her only ideas - were buried beneath the skin. — Jake Vander Ark
daughter's death had loosed something in Sara, a savage kind of grief that burned onto the canvas. — Dominic Smith
Subject becoming less relevant, each painting having a life of its own, each stroke leading to the next. It is more about the connection of body and spirit to canvas, over mind to canvas. — Ken Gillespie
Fill the canvas of life with the colors of peace bliss beauty and love. — Amit Ray
Salem"
In salem seasick spindrift drifts or skips
to the canvas flapping on the seaward panes
until the knitting sailor stabs at ships
nosing like sheep of Morpheus through his brain's
asylum. Seaman, seaman, how the draft
lashes the oily slick about your head,
beating up whitecaps! Seaman, Charon's raft
dumps its damned goods into the harbor-bed,--
There sewage sickens the rebellious seas.
Remember, seaman, Salem fisherman
Once hung their nimble fleets on the Great Banks.
Where was it that New England bred the men
who quartered the Leviathan's fat flanks
and fought the British Lion to his knees? — Robert Lowell
Painter"
"I said you are only keeping me here
in the hospital, lying to my parents
and saying I am madder than I am,
because you only want to keep me here,
squeezing my last dollar to the pennies
I'm saner than anyone in the hospital.
I had to say what every madman says
a black phrase, the sleep of reason mothers monsters ...
When I am painting the canvas is a person;
all I do, each blot and line's alive,
when I am finished, it is shit on the canvas ...
But in his sketches more finished than his oils,
sketches made after he did those masterpieces,
constable can make us see the breeze ... — Robert Lowell
I was called Rembrandt Hope in my boxing days, because I spent so much time on the canvas. — Bob Hope
Death, like fiction, is brutal in its symmetry. Take this story and strip it down -all the way back- until you are left with two points. Two dots on a vast, blank canvas, separeted by a sea of white. Here, we have come to the first point, where the batj is drawn and the hand is reachinh for the razor blade. I will meet you at the next, by the axle of a screaming wheel, the revolution of a clock, the closing of an orbit. — Lang Leav
Put a colour upon a canvas - it not only colours with that colour the part of the canvas to which the colour has been applied, but it also colours the surrounding space with the complementary. — Henri Matisse
Freeform radio is an art form. The airwaves are the empty canvas, the producer is the artist, and the sound is the paint. — Julius Lester
Duck-bill, n. Your account at your restaurant during the canvas-back season. — Ambrose Bierce
She made the ground a canvas and transformed the dusty barren land into a beautiful painting ever — Manoj Kumar Duppala
A painter's got a canvas. The writer's got reams of empty paper. A musician has silence. — Keith Richards
Photography is inherently an analytic discipline. Where a painter starts with a blank canvas and builds a picture, a photographer starts with the messiness of the world and selects a picture. A photographer standing before houses and streets and people and trees and artifacts of a culture imposes an order on the scene - simplifies the jumble by giving it structure. He or she imposes this order by choosing a vantage point, choosing a frame, choosing a moment of exposure, and by selecting a plane of focus. — Stephen Shore
And yet viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way," Leibniz said. "Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle
all in the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe
for he sees it from every point of view at once. By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient. — Neal Stephenson
If a woman is a work of art, the frame is just as important as the canvas. — Chloe Thurlow
It was as if I was in a picture, a flat canvas, and everything around me was flat, me painted on like everything else: no colour, nothing in front and nothing behind me, not even earlier today or tomorrow, nothing to look back or forward to, just this moment. — Tim Relf
No; for instead of delivering myself up to the full enjoyment of them as others do, I am always troubling my head about how I could produce the same effect upon canvas; and as that can never be done, it is more vanity and vexation of spirit. — Anne Bronte
My philosophy is that I'm an artist. I perform an art not with a paint brush or a camera. I perform with bodily movement. Instead of exhibiting my art in a museum or a book or on canvas, I exhibit my art in front of the multitudes. — Steve Prefontaine
My faith is that I don't believe in fate! We are not puppets or zombies of destiny. We are the main painters of our life's canvas. — Mehmet Murat Ildan
I have tried to preserve in my relationship to the film the same closeness and intimacy that exists between a painter and his canvas. — Norman McLaren
What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace. they would defile it, and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It would be always alive. (Dorian Gray regarding his portrait) — Oscar Wilde
The thing for me is, what if one returns to these maxims, these rather simplistic maxims "Be the change you want to see in the world." Because what canvas have we but the self for these kind of explorations, ultimately. — Russell Brand
It is for that moment when I might steady you so you don't fall, I have added my blood to an inkwell. Indelible now will be my mark on history's canvas and upon any sincere debate of God where reason finally prevails. And when you have the strength, you too may find another to hold up. They lean against each other in a storm, those cypresses grown tall together ... through the years. If they had not trusted and protected one another the way they do, they would not have survived and given us their grace and shade - a place for our eyes to meet. Our friendship can be like this: a needed lift, a sail, a pillar, a springboard to taste the unfathomable. It is to tend you as you come into being, like a new world, that causes me to stay, gives me a purpose. Of course I thank you for that ... for letting me help. — Rumi
There are no rules about investment. Sharks can be good. Artist's dung can be good. Oil on canvas can be good. — Charles Saatchi
Speak, breathe, prophesy, get behind a pulpit and preach, mark exam papers, run a company or a nonprofit, clean your kitchen, put paint on a canvas, organize, rabble-rouse, find transcendence in the laundry pile while you pray in obscurity, deliver babies for Haitian mothers in the midwifery clinic - work the Love out and in and around you however God has made you and placed you to do it. Just do it. Don't let the lies fence you in or hold you back. — Sarah Bessey
Gardening is like landscape painting to me. The garden is the canvas. Plants, containers and other garden features are the colors. I paint on the garden of canvas hoping to create a master piece with my colors. — Ama H. Vanniarachchy
You know when you take the paint off an old canvas and you discover that something's been painted underneath it? That's what I feel like - that part of the old is coming through the new. — Carly Simon
By itself, tofu is like wet foam rubber, but you'd no more eat it by itself and expect fine dining than you would stare at a blank canvas and expect to see fine art. — Victoria Moran
Magick is an art; using reality and the world as its canvas. — Dacha Avelin
It was a placid explosion of orange and red, a great chromatic symphony, a
colour canvas of supernatural proportions, truly a splendid Pacific sunset, quite wasted on me. — Yann Martel
I write on a visual canvas, 'seeing' a scene in my thoughts before translating it into language, so I'm a visual junkie. — Marianne Wiggins
I can't wait to escape the dilapidated/ crippled thoughts, feelings and intentions people who claim to love me have upon me.
I just wanna get off the hook,
Either with dusty clothes
Or muddy face
But i just wanna let go....
And look back with a canvas of pride on my face
And say
It was worth it!! — Bandile M. Matsenjwa