I Do Not Paint Nature Quotes & Sayings

I don't want to have anything to say, it just gets in the way. I think the journey of an artist is a journey of discovery and some engagements with paint, with the nature of material, with bodily things ... One wants to open the story, not close it. — Anish Kapoor

Nature paints the best part of a picture, carves the best parts of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and speaks the best part of the oration. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

When you see an aging or a rusted bridge, you are seeing nature and man working together. If you paint over a building there is no more magic to that building. But if it is allowed to age, then man has built it and nature has added into it - it's so organic. — David Lynch

Paint with freedom. It gives you more mastery of the nature of paint. — Charles Webster Hawthorne

My paintings are titled after they are finished. I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me - and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I could certainly never mirror nature. I would more like to paint what it leaves with me. — Joan Mitchell

For an Impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject, but to realize sensations. — Paul Cezanne

I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty. — Georgia O'Keeffe

What greatly attracted me - and it was the main line of advance of Cubism - was how to give material expression to this new space of which I had an inkling. So I began to paint chiefly still lifes, because in nature there is a tactile, I would almost say a manual space ... that was the earliest Cubist painting - the quest for space. — Georges Braque

When a man paints a naked woman he gives her less than poor Nature did. I can conceive of few circumstances wherein I would have to paint a woman naked, but if I did I would not mutilate her for double the money. She is the most beautiful thing there is except a naked man, but I never saw a study of one exhibited. — Thomas Eakins

A hint - don't paint too much direct from nature. Art is an abstraction! study nature then brood on it and treasure the creation which will result, which is the only way to ascend towards God - to create like our Divine Master. — Paul Gauguin

If women were by nature what they make themselves by art; if they were to lose suddenly all the freshness of their complexion, and their faces to become as fiery and as leaden as they make them with the red and the paint they besmear themselves with, they would consider themselves the most wretched creatures on earth. — Jean De La Bruyere

Everything in nature is formed upon the sphere, the cone and the cylinder. One must learn to paint these simple figures and then one can do all that he may wish. — Paul Cezanne

Oh, God, send down fire from heaven to consume the blasphemer," said Lawson. "What has nature got to do with it? No one knows what's in nature and what isn't! The world sees nature through the eyes of the artist. Why, for centuries it saw horses jumping a fence with all their legs extended, and by Heaven, sir, they were extended. It saw shadows black until Monet discovered they were colored, and by Heaven, sir, they were black. If we choose to surround objects with a black line, the world will see the black line, and there will be a black line; and if we paint glass red and cows blue, it'll see them red and blue, and, by Heaven, they will be red and blue. — W. Somerset Maugham

From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie. — Hokusai Katsushika

But who can paint like Nature? Can imagination boast, amid its gay creation, hues like hers? — James Thomson

Protoplasm, simple or nucleated, is the formal basis of all life. It is the clay of the potter: which, bake it and paint it as hewill, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature from the commonest brick or sun-dried clod. — Thomas Huxley

I do not paint in front of but from within nature. — Arshile Gorky

I do not paint nature. I am nature. — Jackson Pollack

You will learn to paint trees only by understanding them, their growth, their nature, their movement - and realizing that they are conscious living things. A tree seldom if ever encroaches upon the liberty of another tree. It never wastes its growth in unnecessary twistings. — John F. Carlson

To paint from nature is to realize one's sensations, not to copy what is before one. — J. E. H. MacDonald

That the Hindus, absorbed in the ideal, lacked in realistic observation is evident from this. Take painting and sculpture. What do you see in the Hindu paintings? All sorts of grotesque and unnatural figures. What do you see in a Hindu temple? A Chaturbhanga Narayana or some such thing. But take into consideration any Italian picture or Grecian statue-what a study of nature you find in them! A gentleman for twenty years sat burning a candle in his hand, in order to paint a lady carrying a candle in her hand. — Swami Vivekananda

When I look at nature I feel as if I'll be able to paint it all, note it all down, and then you might as well forget it once you're working ... — Claude Monet

A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don't get it, I'm not sure why you are doing it. — Keegan-Michael Key

Although scientific revolutions in how we see the world do occur, the bulk of our scientific understanding comes from the cumulative impact of numerous incremental studies that together paint an increasingly coherent picture of how nature works. — Michael E. Mann

You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint "No Admittance" on my gate. — Henry David Thoreau

A work of art is itself an object, first of all, and so manipulation is unavoidable: it's a prerequisite. But I needed the greater objectivity of the photograph in order to correct my own way of seeing: for instance, if I draw an object from nature, I start to stylize and to change it in accordance with my personal vision and my training. But if I paint from a photograph, I can forget all the criteria that I get from these sources. I can paint against my will, as it were. And that, to me, felt like an enrichment. — Gerhard Richter

To paint nature you must be in it a long time. — Vincent Van Gogh

How I would paint happiness
Something hidden, a windfall,
A meteor shower. No-
A flowering tree releasing
all its blossoms at once,
and the one standing beneath it
unexpectedly robed in bloom ... — Lisel Mueller

Whenever anyone grows tired of the secondhand sort of existence that depends on purchased products, and wants to resume the intimate relationship with nature that man once enjoyed, the kukui-nut stands ready to furnish him with food, flavor, tannin, oil, paint, varnish, medicine, and magic. — Euell Gibbons

A heightened sense of the observation of nature is one of the chief delights that have come to me through trying to paint. — Winston Churchill

I don't paint nature. I am nature. — Jackson Pollock

The standard heroes and heroines of novels, are personages in whom I could never, from childhood upwards, take an interest, believe to be natural, or wish to imitate: were I obliged to copy these characters, I would simply
not write at all. Were I obliged to copy any former novelist, even the greatest, even Scott, in anything , I would not write
Unless I have something of my own to say, and a way of my own to say it in, I have no business to publish; unless I can look beyond the greatest Masters, and study Nature herself, I have no right to paint; unless I can have the courage to use the language of Truth in preference to the jargon of Conventionality, I ought to be silent. — Charlotte Bronte

Romance and novel paint beauty in colors more charming than nature, and describe a happiness that humans never taste. How deceptive and destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss! — Oliver Goldsmith

I have a studio in the country - in the woods - but my paintings look more real to me than what is outdoors. You walk outside; the rocks are inert; even the clouds are inert. It makes me feel a little better. But I do have a faith that it is possible to make a living thing, not a diagram of what I have been thinking: to posit with paint something living, something that changes each day. — Philip Guston

Landscapes or still-lifes I paint in between the abstract works; they constitute about one-tenth of my production. On the one hand they are useful, because I like to work from nature - although I do use a photograph - because I think that any detail from nature has a logic I would like to see in abstraction as well. — Gerhard Richter

I never use nature as a starting point. I never abstract from nature; I never consciously think of nature when I paint. — Adolph Gottlieb