Figure Painting Quotes & Sayings

The irony is that the more we fight age, the more it shows. Paint on a 50-year-old face brings to mind a Gilbert and Sullivan comic figure. Smooth the cheeks, and suddenly the ear lobes and hands look out of place. Do we run around in October, painting the gold leaves green? — Karen DeCrow

When I paint figures it's never the idea of painting the beauty of the figure, it is using the figure to get across how I feel. — Jason Shawn Alexander

Grip's favorite painting didn't contain a single figure. 'Seven A.M.' showed distant trees on one side, and on the other a storefront that time had passed by. So still. Some kind of story could probably be told, but one refrained from asking questions. The light and shadows convinced the viewer to exist in the moment. Hopper had drawn sharp lines where the sun cast shadows on the white walls inside the window, while outside the ground gleamed like warm sand. The hands of an old wall clock suggested that the time was seven. Someone who should have been there was somewhere else. Yet nothing was missing. With the morning light streaming down on the ground and in through the window, time might as well have stopped - so the clock always stood at seven.
Just like that, a place where nothing ever changes. — Robert Karjel

The artist does not exist except as a personification, a figure of speech that represents the sum total of art itself. It is painting that is the genius of the painter, poetry of the poet, and a person is a creative artist to the extent that he participates in that genius. — Harold Rosenberg

When I go to an art gallery and stand in front of a painting, I don't want someone telling me what I should be seeing or thinking; I want to feel whatever I feel, see whatever I see, and figure out what I figure out. — James Frey

I think there is a total equality for me between painting a literary figure or Kate Moss or my Mum or a dog or a bird. To me, they are all absolutely equal. — Stella Vine

For me, painting is that magical material, that beautiful stuff that was invented, the ground-up pigments in oil which makes it very malleable. It can be manipulated and changed, darkened, lightened, given different hues and colors, so that by manipulating this material somehow I can find that figure I'm looking for, that figure that represents all the issues I'm bringing up and addressing. — Nathan Oliveira

Dad took moving pictures of us children washing dishes, so that he could figure out how we could reduce our motions and thus hurry through the task. Irregular jobs, such as painting the back porch or removing a stump from the front lawn, were awarded on a low-bid basis. Each child who wanted extra pocket money submitted a sealed bid saying what he would do the job for. The lowest bidder got the contract. — Frank B. Gilbreth Jr.

Rowena Clark and I had met on the first day of our mixed media class. I'd sat down at her table and said, "Mind if I join you? Figure the best way to learn about art is to sit with a masterpiece." Maybe I was in love, but I was still Adrian Ivashkov.
Rowena had fixed me with a flat look. "Let's get one thing straight. I can see through crap a mile away, and I like girls, not guys, so if you can't handle me telling you what's what, then you'd better take your one-liners and hair gel somewhere else. I don't go to this school to put up with pretty boys like you. I'm here to face dubious employment options with a painting degree and then go get a Guinness after class."
I'd scooted my chair closer to the table. "You and I are going to get along just fine. — Richelle Mead

Painting embraces and contains within itself all the things which nature produces or which results from the fortuitous actions of men ... he is but a poor master who makes only a single figure well. — Leonardo Da Vinci

I am going to do some drawings or paintings ... in the mirror of my wardrobe..with myself as a figure doing something. — Gwen John

I was struggling to figure out how to combine the abstract and the representational. Painting, I suddenly understood how that aesthetic could fit together. That was a really fun game to figure out how that worked. — Margaux Williamson

I had the desire to paint the figure without actually painting the figure. — Nathan Oliveira

Maybe the given person, cup, or landscape is lost before one gets to painting. A figure exerts a continuing and unspecified influence on a painting as the canvas develops. The represented forms are loaded with psychological feeling. It can't ever just be painting. — Richard Diebenkorn

In the entr'acte Levin and Pestsov fell into an argument upon the merits and defects of music of the Wagner school. Levin maintained that the mistake of Wagner and all his followers lay in their trying to take music into the sphere of another art, just as poetry goes wrong when it tries to paint a face as the art of painting ought to do, and as an instance of this mistake he cited the sculptor who carved in marble certain poetic phantasms flitting round the figure of the poet on the pedestal. "These phantoms were so far from being phantoms that they were positively clinging on the ladder," said Levin. [ ... ] Pestsov maintained that art is one, and that it can attain its highest manifestations only by conjunction with all kinds of art. — Leo Tolstoy

I paint the way I do because I can keep on putting more and more things in - like drama, pain, anger, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas of space. It doesn't matter if it differs from mine, as long as it comes from the painting, which has its own integrity and intensity. — Willem De Kooning

The inner life has its soft and gentle beauty; an abstract formlessness as well as a subtle charm. I often consider myself as a figure in a foggy painting: faltering lines, insecure distances, and a merging of greys and blacks. An emotion or a mood - a mere wisp of color - is shaded off and made to spread until it becomes one with all that surrounds it. — Virginia Woolf

My app is the same juicy paint used by Vincent Van Gogh; my screen is the woven canvas of Titian. Painting by hand, I've come to figure, is a certain kind of love. — Robert Genn

In painting, the most brilliant colors, spread at random and without design, will give far less pleasure than the simplest outline of a figure. — Aristotle.

To Buddha, the second figure in the painting, life on earth was bitter, filled with attachments and desires that led to suffering. — Benjamin Hoff

In 1958 I finally found a large enough apartment on the Lower East Side, where I reverted to figure painting. I drew and painted quite a lot of figures and nudes. People would come and pose for me. — Claes Oldenburg

Painting figures is the hardest, certainly the most taxing genre, and you have to be the most on your game. If you have significant drawing problems, the figure will fall apart and it will read wrong emotionally. — Jacob Collins

When I think of it as happening to somebody else, it seems that the idea of me soaked to the skin, surrounded by countless driving streaks of silver, and moving through when I completely forget my material existence, and view myself from a purely objective standpoint, can I, as a figure in a painting, blend into the beautiful harmony of my natural surroundings. The moment, however, I feel annoyed because of the rain, or miserable because my legs are weary because of the rain, or miserable because my legs are weary with walking, then I have already ceased to be a character in a poem, or a figure in a painting, and I revert to the uncomprehending, insensitive man in the street I was before. I am then even blind to the elegance of the fleeting clouds; unable even to feel any bond of sympathy with a falling petal or the cry of a bird, much less appreciate the great beauty in the image of myself, completely alone, walking through the mountains in spring. — Soseki Natsume

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s. — Camille Paglia

I'm not interested in 'abstracting' or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it - drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea. — Willem De Kooning

A romantic painting shows a heap of icy debris in a polar light; no man, no object inhabits this desolate space; but for this very reason, provided I am suffering an amorous sadness, this void requires that I fling myself into it; I project myself as a tiny figure, seated on a block of ice, abandoned forever. "I'm cold," the lover says, "Iet's go back"; but there is no road, no way, the boat is wrecked. There is a coldness particular to the lover, the chilliness of the child (or of any young animal) that needs maternal warmth. — Roland Barthes

If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms. — Dorothy Day

In my paintings, the question on whether figures are similar or not is not of any importance, the slightest change of figure or color can create a new painting and it doesn't really matter if a subject is revisited by an artist repeatedly. With enough time in between paintings, an artist can always bring to it something new. — Guity Novin

I wondered if I would appear on a temple wall painting someday. A blonde Egyptian girl with purple highlights running sideways through the palm trees, screaming "Yikes!" in hieroglyphics as Neith chased after me. The thought of some poor archaeologist trying to figure that out almost lifted my spirits. — Rick Riordan

I figure I'm still good for painting until 95 or thereabouts. — Bern Will Brown

Otherwise he stayed in the background, a small figure in a painting, while life was played out in the foreground. However, — Nina George

Would he love the house as much if his cat burglar didn't come back for the painting? He pushed that thought away, telling himself he was in the market for a house long before he'd laid eyes on the dark-clad figure running along the rooftop. Long before the kiss. — B. J. Daniels

This is a perfectly good picture. And if I didn't know you, I would be impressed and charmed. But I do know you."
He thought some more, wondering whether he dared say precisely what he felt, for he knew he could never explain exactly why the idea came to him. "It's the painting of a dutiful daughter," he said eventually, looking at her cautiously to see her reaction. "You want to please. You are always aware of what the person looking at this picture will think of it. Because of that you've missed something important. Does that make sense?"
She thought, then nodded. "All right," she said grudgingly and with just a touch of despair in her voice. "You win."
Julien grunted. "Have another go, then. I shall come back and come back until you figure it out."
"And you'll know?"
"You'll know. I will merely get the benefit of it. — Iain Pears

A contemporary painting is worth what someone is prepared to pay for it and not a predetermined figure. — Stuart Pearson Wright

Neither is there figurative and non-figurative art. All things appear to us in the shape of forms. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by forms. Well then, think how absurd it would be to think of painting without the imagery of forms. A figure, an object, a circle, are forms; they affect us more or less intensely. — Pablo Picasso

I don't make a lot of distinctions between things like landscape or figure painting, because to me the problems are inherently the same - lighting, color, structure, and so on - certainly traditional and ordinary problems. — Wayne Thiebaud

I want to give my compliments to Australia. Ever since your government paid a few million dollars for a Jackson Pollack painting, I figure that it must be a marvellous country. — Morton Feldman

The problem with Matisse is that I can't ever figure out when he's done a good painting or a bad painting because I don't know how to analyse him. I just know that I like the way he put it on and I like his airs and forms. — Susan Rothenberg

In fact, the figure in The Last Supper is not a woman: only the most partisan reading can place Mary Magdalene in the scene. Viewers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would have read the painting quite differently. — Ross King

Ye examined Feng. The kerosene lamp was a wonderful artist and created a classical painting with dignified colors and bright strokes: Feng had her coat draped over her shoulders, exposing her red belly-band, and a strong, graceful arm. The glow from the kerosene lamp painted her figure with vivid, warm colors, while the rest of the room dissolved into a gentle darkness. Close attention revealed a dim red glow, which didn't come from the kerosene lamp, but the heating charcoal on the ground. The cold air outside sculpted beautiful ice patterns on the windowpanes with the room's warm, humid air. — Liu Cixin

In figure painting, the type of all painting, I have endeavoured to set forth that the principal if not sole source of life enchantments are Tactile Values, Movement and Space Composition. — Bernard Berenson

I like radically cutting into the painting, inserting these paper birds, and then trying to figure out how to believe in it. — Ellen Gallagher

Oh! I must somehow manage to do a figure in a few strokes. — Vincent Van Gogh

True, but there was a plaque depicted in the painting, hung around the figure's neck, and on it was writing in Sumerian cuneiform. As you know, in addition to my other studies, I am an amateur necrolinguist - "

"It means the likes to lick the dead," explained Henri.

"It means he studies dead languages," corrected Lucien. — Christopher Moore

Monet's work would have been even greater if he had not abandoned figure-painting. — Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec

The figure in the icon is not meant to represent literally what Peter or John or any of the apostles looked like, or what Mary looked like, nor the child, Jesus. But, the orthodox painter feels, Jesus of Nazareth did not walk around Galilee faceless. The icon of Jesus may not look like the man Jesus two thousand years ago, but it represents some *quality* of Jesus, or his mother, or his followers, and so becomes an open window through which we can be given a new glimpse of the love of God. — Madeleine L'Engle

When I'm not painting, I'm Oujia-boarding with my photos. I'll sort through my pictures, put them in different folders, and come back months later to one in particular and try to figure out why I took it. — Damian Loeb