Painterly Quotes & Sayings

Whatever happened to "In victory, magnanimity; in defeat, defiance." So said Frederick the Great. — George Carlin

I'm a big fan of 'Woody Allen' movies, so I like all the actresses in his movies like 'Diane Keaton' and Mia Farrow. — Emily Perkins

Decades ago, Gerhard Richter found a painterly philosopher's stone. Like Jackson Pollock before him, he discovered something that had been in painting all along, always overlooked or discounted. — Jerry Saltz

Despite the fact the studio looks out of five windows onto a picture perfect view of sky, hills and wide open spaces, I work with my blinds firmly drawn, daylight filtered through their white canvas, a painterly northern light falling through two big skylights above my table, and nothing visible outside to distract me. — Debi Gliori

For the surface, I'm not interested in painterly convention. It's more interesting if it looks like it painted itself. — Wanda Koop

There is a particular quality of quietude and stillness that suffuses these painterly poems of Carol Ann Davis, so involved with loss, motherhood and the shifting tonalities of light that transform the domestic and ordinary into the strange and extraordinary that, combined with tenderness of address, approach the worshipful and make a number of these poems so moving and distinctive. — August Kleinzahler

Everything I do, it's a bit painterly. I like being surrounded by objects, mostly on paper. I like the images. I like the painting. I like good photography. It's something that makes me an emotional connection, and I feel comfortable around it. — Mikhail Baryshnikov

The voice of painterly integrity spoke to me. And the idea was that one would find this anguish, or whatever, and construct it into images that would appear. You already feel very ill and you're trying to put this riddle together because it is the prescription for health. I believe in art as a spiritual health-giving process, not just some style. — Malcolm Morley

Rip Rig + Panic that I joined, they were really influenced by jazz and blues and punk. So I think what happened from punk, which was kind of DIY, was that it created a kind of creative place that was kind of without limits, in a way. — Neneh Cherry

Willem de Kooning is generally credited for coming out of the painterly gates strong in the forties, revolutionizing art and abstraction and reaching incredible heights by the early fifties, and then tailing off. — Jerry Saltz

I invent, find, and borrow ways of making painterly statements, which reflect my person to the extent that I am able to reach into that core of my being. It's a kind of self-analysis that requires a balance between the rational and the intuited. — Thornton Willis

It is through color changes that we go forward ... all decisions come about as the picture is made and in response to painterly demands. The descriptive and anecdotal come second. — Wolf Kahn

No academy could have given me all I discovered by getting my teeth into the exhibitions, the shop windows, and the museums of Paris . Beginning with the market - where, for lack of money, I bought only a piece of a long cucumber - the workman in his blue overall, the most ardent followers of Cubism , everything showed a definite feeling for proportion, clarity, an accurate sense of form, of a more painterly kind of painting, even in the canvases of second-rate artists. — Marc Chagall

Some genealogies claimed to be able to trace the Maclean ancestry even further back, going as far as Julius Caesar, and, in some cases, admittedly more tendentiously, to the ancient Celtic god of the sun. — Alexander McCall Smith

Everything was numbered: the lenses, the painterly sky, the milligrams of my panic pills. I had prescription eyes that allowed me to see better, and prescription panic pills that allowed me to play blind. — Jalina Mhyana

To do justice to modern technology's rigid linear structure, to the lofty gridwork of cranes and bridges, to the dynamism of machines operating at one thousand horsepower - only photography is capable of that. What those who are attached to the painterly style regard as photography's defect, the mechanical reproduction of form - is just what makes it superior to all other means of expression. — Albert Renger-Patzsch

I think that technology has both introduced new sounds but also allowed an increasingly painterly approach to recording music as you can now paint over what you've done and more and more refine an existing performance. — Jerry Harrison

his view of perceiving God in Christ with the notion of looking at a painting and seeing what the artist has been doing in it.27 In Christian faith, the captivating force (the 'subjective evidence') of the artwork which is Christ takes hold of our imaginative powers; we enter into the 'painterly world' which this discloses and, entranced by what we see, come to contemplate the glory of sovereign love of God in Christ (the 'objective evidence') as manifested in the concrete events of his life, death and resurrection.28 So entering his glory, we become absorbed by it, but this very absorption sends us out into the world in sacrificial love like that of Jesus. This is — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

We can bomb the world to pieces, but we can't bomb it into peace. — Michael Franti

There are these painterly things that happen while I'm working. — Marlene Dumas

I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall. — Frank Stella

Emotional truth is the reward of digging deeply enough to find the truth about how one really feels, but in order to convey this truth with any force, or artistry, one needs to 'create' a form of expression, and this form determines its own "genuine information". — Philip Schultz

Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space. — Marshall McLuhan

Grace is within you. Grace is your self. Grace is not something to be acquired from others. If it is external, it is useless. All that is necessary is to know its existence is in you. You are never out of its operation. — Ramana Maharshi

I like to treat paint as material - to daub it, drop it, let it slide. There was Action Painting, but I also compare it to paint effects found on the streets. This approach is superimposed on a sculptural surface that is also 'painterly.' — Claes Oldenburg

When you make the U-turn to the Universal Presence and apply the Universal practices and principles, your life is changed. — Michael Beckwith

Chris Ofili's suave, stippled, visually tricked-out paintings of the nineties, with their allover fields of shimmering dots and clumps of dung, are like cave paintings of modern life. They crackle with optical cockiness, love, and massive amounts of painterly mojo. — Jerry Saltz

Putting the pastries onto a large tray, I asked Manna if she envisioned the words to her poems in colors. Nabokov writes in his autobiography that he and his mother saw the letters of the alphabet in color, I explained. He says of himself that he is a painterly writer.
The Islamic Republic coarsened my taste in colors, Manna said, fingering the discarded leaves of her roses. I want to wear outrageous colors, like shocking pink or tomato red. I feel too greedy for colors to see them in carefully chosen words of poetry. — Azar Nafisi

Computers are another tool for the creative artist - just as a flat or filbert brush is. But there was a time when I left a jar of medium open by my work station for that painterly smell. — Donald Lambert

Digital art software has empowered both the painterly side of photographers, and the photographer side of painters. — Buffy Sainte-Marie

Being a peacock is not the only way to hide yourself, Frida. A pigeon can hide.
Lacuna — Barbara Kingsolver

I'm cheap, and I'm proud of it! — Wyclef Jean

It seems as though the goal of my work has always been to dissolve myself completely into the sensations of the surroundings in order to then integrate this into a coherent painterly form. — Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Many artists, having assimilated the Conceptualists' explorations to varying degrees, have reused the painterly model and use photography, quite consciously and systematically, to produce works that stand alone and exist as photographic paintings ... — Jean-Francois Chevrier

Living is no laughing matter: you must live with great seriousness like a squirrel for example - I mean without looking for something beyond and above living, I mean living must be your whole occupation. — Nazim Hikmet

If the image was sketched onto the canvas and spontaneously drawn, colour would often be restrained and unfree ... The most important and the most difficult liberation process we went trough, the one that has distinguished our art, was the freeing of colour, the transition to a painterly spontaneity. — Asger Jorn