Painting That Looks Quotes & Sayings

Everyone looks like they've just stepped out of a Dante Gabriel Rossetti painting that he never got around to finishing because even he knew it was too over the top. It — Joe Queenan

You're like a witness. You're the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you're in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I'm a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you're in the room but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room. — Julio Cortazar

I started out making $4 for my first fight, but imagine paying $25,000 for a painting ... look at me! — Muhammad Ali

We look at the mountain to see the painting, then we look at the painting to see the mountain. — Mark Tobey

Few people can look at a painting longer than it takes to peel an orange and eat it. — Kenneth Clark

Make a painting you can work on for a long period, and make it look like it doesn't show any effort. — Alex Katz

Drip and fling and pour color onto the glass. Then I push the paint around. You have to have some faith. If it looks like nothing, if you think you've destroyed what might have been a good painting, keep at it. If you've scraped all but a few streaks away, chances are those streaks will suggest something else. Don't give up. Don't be afraid of the mess. — Abigail Thomas

We look at a painting to know the painter; it's his company we are after, not his skill. — James Whistler

Painting should never look as if it were done with difficulty, however difficult it may actually have been. — Robert Henri

I look at nature, I see myself. Paintings are mirrors, so is nature. — Arthur Dove

On painting and fighting looke aloofe.
[On painting and fighting look aloof.] — George Herbert

In the landscape, colors are more neutral than you may think. Pay close attention to this. Small areas of rich color can make the whole painting look colorful. — Matt Smith

When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else. — Howard Hodgkin

You don't talk about paintings, you look at them. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir

The media ... is like an oil painting. Close up, it looks like nothing on Earth. Stand back and you get the drift. — Bernard Ingham

What's that supposed to be anyway?" said Fred squinting at Dobby's painting. "Looks like a Gibbon with two black eyes!" "It's Harry," said George pointing at the back of the picture. "Says so on the back." "Good likeness," said Fred grinning. Harry threw his new homework diary at him. — J.K. Rowling

And David and Goliath I have done before, but this time there is a difference. David holds the head at arm's length and looks disgusted. And onto Goliath's severed head, I put my own features. The head hangs in darkness so that the black hair and beard framing the face blend off into the shadows, and there are four thin ropes of dark blood trailing down into space from the neck. And in one eye of the freshly severed head, there is still the faint glimmer of life.
That's me and that's the last painting I ever did.
Spectator, viewer, audience, however you care to call yourself; I address you here, with this, my final picture.
Cast a cold eye on it all, and on my work. I am still alive. — Christopher Peachment

He never looks you straight in the eye; or if he does, it is somehow vaguely, indefinitely; he does not pierce you with the hawk's eye or the falcon's gaze of a cavalry officer. The reason for that is that he sees, at one and the same time, both your features and those of some plaster Hercules standing in his room, or else he imagines a painting of his own that he still means to produce. That is why his responses are often incoherent, not to the point, and the muddle of things in his head increases his timidity all the more. — Nikolai Gogol

I see paintings everywhere. I look at stuff and it looks like painting to me. — Julian Schnabel

People constantly describe me as a formalist or even a minimalist, but I'm not really bothered with the rules of painting or the history of painting. My approach is that everything is mine. I take what I can use from wherever, and then I forget where I've taken it from. But there is no point me making anything that looks like anyone else's. — Gary Hume

Doc lowers the gun and stares at the man he just shot. "See, regret eliminated." When he looks at me, I see blood painting his face. His expression is that of a madman. "Welcome to hell, Ryler, a place where the evil thrive and the weak die. This man was weak. My son was weak. And now they're both paying for their sins." Having no idea how to react, I just stand there, staring at the gory scene, the scene I helped cause. Doc snatches a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his face off. Then he throws it to me. "Clean yourself up." I — Jessica Sorensen

Devlin's disarming blue eyes were set in a face of such perfect masculine beauty that it should have come from a painting or a sculpture. Yet there was nothing aristocratic about his looks. He possessed an earthiness, a sensuality, that was impossible to ignore. If he resembled an angel, it was a fallen one. — Lisa Kleypas

She was as unused to seeing tenderness in a man's eyes as she was to being caught off guard. Admiration? Amusement? Yes. Even desire. But those looks could be leveled at any inanimate object: a beautiful painting, a political cartoon, a French postcard. Tenderness was far more intimate, reserved for beings, not things. — Connie Brockway

If I go to the National Gallery and I look at one of the great paintings that excite me there, it's not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me which return me to life more violently. — Francis Bacon

Having a great golf swing helps under pressure, but golf is a game about scoring. It's like an artist who can get a two-inch brush at Wal-Mart for 20 cents or a fine camel-hair brush from an art store for 20 dollars. The brush doesn't matter - how the finished painting looks is what matters. — Jerry Pate

Too much sparkle can detract from the focal point of the painting, so I blend some areas to tone down the look of the pastels in less important areas. — Paul Murray

Generally, I am opposed to painting which is concerned with conceptions of simplicity. Everything looks busy to me. — Jasper Johns

One of the surest evidences of an elevated taste is the power of enjoying works of impassioned terrorism, in poetry, and painting. The man who can look at impassioned subjects of terror with a feeling of exultation may be certain he has an elevated taste. — Benjamin Haydon

I think it's an American curse that most of us think we are special ... everyone believes themselves to be superior to the majority of the population in some way. Sometimes it's their looks, other times their perceived sex appeal (often in obvious defiance of their looks), and other times it is their real or imagined talent for acting, writing, painting or banging on the drums. And because people are so susceptible to flattery, there exists an entire industry made up of scam artists whose sole goal is to fleece the flatterable. — Fay Faron

There's nobody living who couldn't stand all afternoon in front of a waterfall ... Anyone who can sit on a stone in a field awhile can see my painting. Nature is like parting a curtain, you go into it ... as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean. — Agnes Martin

I wanted to actually make people look at a painting. We don't look at paintings that much. We glance at them. — Peter Webber

The principal difference between her "seductive" and her other self-portraits was the absence of self-awareness in the former and its strong presence in the latter. With time, she became brutally direct. In her later self-portraits she was no longer beautiful, merely odd-looking. She did not seduce, she simply drew attention to herself. Her face became hard, serious. The pronounced cheekbones and heavy eyebrows looks as if they had been carved out of stone. The stern black eyes looked either straight through or straight past the viewer. She deliberately exaggerated the brutality of her self-portraits. She was saying: Look at me, I'm alive and it hurts. These self-portraits were like attestations to her existence: one, two, three, four...Exhibitionism, they said. But for her, painting self-portraits was a kind of magical rite, a kind of exorcism. — Slavenka Drakulic

In a painting no one complains that the subject is posed, but everybody complains about what looks posed in a photograph. Except, I've found that if I go very close in to the face, then the posed expression no longer exists. The face becomes a landscape of the lakes of the eyes and the hills of the nose and the valley of the cleft of the chin. — John Loengard

Any work done with love - be it a photo or a meal or a painting - always looks so pretty, because love is a master of creating magical beauties! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Describing beauty is almost impossible because we perceive it, rather than describe it. If you look at a Rembrandt painting and start to try and describe what the beauty is you see, your words sound absolutely pathetic. — John Lennox

There are a lot of artists in Gowanus, and certain things come into your visual vocabulary from living there - the scale of the subway and the canal, sometimes it almost looks like a de Chirico painting, with the intense angles of the shadows and everything. — Dana Schutz

The reason for my painting large canvases is that I want to be intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn't something you command. — Mark Rothko

People in the future look back on primitive machinery or technology or painting, and in some ways, it always seems amazingly intricate and finely wrought. — Robyn Hitchcock

When we look at a painting, listen to a piece of music, read a novel, or watch a movie we are taking in the artist's composition. The composition is the totality of the work. — Mike Svob

If photos can reproduce the world more perfectly than any painter, can capture an instant, a look, a gesture, then what makes a painting good anymore? Painting subverts this subversion of its traditional nature by redefining itself - art is idea, not simply skillful execution. So, a work can be crudely made, or even machine made - but it has to be practically and functionally useless. — David Byrne

Look, it's my misery that I have to paint this kind of painting, it's your misery that you have to love it, and the price of the misery is thirteen hundred and fifty dollars. — Mark Rothko

Being in the studio, it's more of a controlled environment, where you can be Salvador Dali and sit back and look at the painting. And you can go, 'Ah, you know what? Maybe a little bit more red over here ... maybe add some blue over here.' You can sit back and look at the painting. — Zakk Wylde

Evie is our beautiful, dark-haired, green-eyed child,' I say. I can hear the tremor in my voice. 'Like many seven-year-old girls, she's obsessed with princesses. We think she looks more like a fairy. She loves Lego and painting. She laughs easily. She has pretend tea parties in a tree in our garden and invites all her dolls. She wants to be an artist when she grows up. Please find her. Please bring her back to us. We miss her beyond measure. She is the love of our life. — Sanjida Kay

I am anxious that the world should be inclined to look to painters for information about painting. I hope to show that ours is a regularly taught profession; that it is scientific as well as poetic; that imagination alone never did, and never can, produce works that are to stand by a comparison with realities. — John Constable

Once I found these sticker things for your nails - Sally Hansen - those were really fun to do. They're really fun to do when you're bored, and it's better than painting your nails because you don't mess up. It looks really good, very professional. I tried a zebra one that was really pretty, but I always get a little bored of it. — Gia Coppola

In Isaac Newton's lifetime, no more than a few thousand people had any idea what he looked like, though he was one of England's most famous men, yet now millions of people have quite a clear idea - based on replicas of copies of rather poorly painted portraits. Even more pervasive and indelible are the smile of Mona Lisa, The Scream of Edvard Munch, and the silhouettes of various fictional extraterrestrials. These are memes, living a life of their own, independent of any physical reality. "This may not be what George Washington looked like then," a tour guide was overheard saying of the Gilbert Stuart painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "but this is what he looks like now." Exactly. — James Gleick

I want my paintings to look like what's going on outside my window rather than what's inside my studio. — Robert Rauschenberg

A window looks outside, but a painting should do the opposite - it should look inside of us. When I put them in the middle of the room, I attach the paintings at the top to the ceiling and on the bottom to the floor. I prefer this to just hanging them from the ceiling because it creates a place in a space, like a wall. — Pierre Soulages

I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly. — Pablo Picasso

There are three forms of visual art: Painting is art to look at, sculpture is art you can walk around, and architecture is art you can walk through — Dan Rice

Some realizations can only come from truly looking into the mirror. However, the only thing that the mirror can show one of a false face is the moment before death. Who truly looks into the mirror and sees the painting within it? Who looks into the reflection beyond the looking-glass and see the truth hidden within it? All it takes is one look into the mirror, to come to a realization of truth. But those that do not see the truth, simply falls into another illusion - within an endless refrain. — Lionel Suggs

Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself. — Roy Lichtenstein

You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things. — A.S. Byatt

If you ask me what the world looks like to me, it looks like a painting by Pissarro. — Ernst Gombrich

It's a shock for me to go through and see all those years of painting my life, which is very personal for me. It's a very difficult thing for an artist to look back at his work. — Andrew Wyeth

The one thing you can rely on is if you get disturbed halfway through a painting and it looks a bit naff, then someone will preserve that piece, remove it and a few months later it'll be paraded round Sotheby's by people wearing white gloves. — Banksy

I think you do kind of slip into a trance when you look at a painting. At least I do. — Joe Bradley

The muscularity in my paintings is only an expression of the spirit within. When I paint Nephi, I'm painting the interior, the greatness, the largeness of spirit. Who knows what he looked like? I'm painting a man who looks like he could actually do what Nephi did. — Arnold Friberg

So painting your nails tonight, desperately alone?" Lucky guess on his part?
"Yes. Masturbating and crying into your pillow, Doctor Joshua?" He looks at the top button of my shirt.
"Yes. And don't call me that. — Sally Thorne

Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture. — Michelangelo

When I look at a painting it isn't only the painting I see but the thing that I am. If there is more in the painting that I am, then I won't see it. — Ivan Eyre

Are you an artist?
I ask this question a lot. Generally, this question is met with a pause and a slightly blank look. In that moment I can almost hear the inner dialogue: "Um, Artist? Well, no. I make stuff. Sometimes. But an "Artist" with a capital A? I want to say yes, but that would be terrifying". What actually comes out of the person's mouth is usually, "Oh. Uh, not really". I should mention that this answer, and those blank looks, are always from adults. When I ask kids the same question, I get a very different response. It goes a little something like this: "Are you an artist?" "Yes". No hesitation. No thinking it over first. They have never sold a painting, or published a story, but they have absolutely no problem answering me with a loud, resounding yes. — Danielle Krysa

Looks like I've found myself a handy man," I smiled.
"Oh yeah," he grinned, "I'm as handy as they come."
"I can see it now," I fantasized, "leaky faucets, fixing lights, painting walls."
Caeden's laugh filled the woodshop classroom. "And let me guess, you're not going to help me, you'll just watch."
"It's what I do best," I laughed.
Caeden stood the cabinet upright and grabbed some trim pieces for detailing. "That's okay, at least I'll have something pretty to look at," he winked.
"And I'll always be there to hand you tools," I said.
"Just not the power ones," he grinned crookedly. — Micalea Smeltzer

I think of Terrence Malick's movie Days of Heaven - one of Richard Gere's first movies - you can push pause on almost any image in the movie and it looks like a painting. — Owen Wilson

Do not let it look as if you reasoned too much. Painting must be impulsive to be worth while. — Charles Webster Hawthorne

We walked the length of Jackson Square, stopping to look at the work of a couple of artists who'd set up their sidewalk shops for the day.
"Look." Eugenie stopped in front of an acrylic painting of a mustached man with curly dark hair, hooded eyes, and a big hooked nose. He looked like he'd steal the hubcaps off your grandmother's Cadillac.
"It's Jean Lafitte, our most famous pirate," the artist said. "He was quite a character."
She had no idea. She also had badly missed the mark on his looks. His hair wasn't that curly, he'd been clean-shaven the whole time I'd known him, his nose was straight and in perfect proportion to the rest of his features, and he didn't have hooded black eyes. Still, he might find it entertaining. "How much?" I asked. — Suzanne Johnson

Even Proust - there's a famous passage where Odette opens the door with a cold, she's sulky, her hair is loose and undone, her skin is patchy, and Swann, who has never cared about her until that moment, falls in love with her because she looks like a Botticelli girl from a slightly damaged fresco. Which Proust himself only knew from a reproduction. He never saw the original, in the Sistine Chapel. But even so - the whole novel is in some ways about that moment. And the damage is part of the attraction, the painting's blotchy cheeks. Even through a copy Proust was able to re-dream that image, re-shape reality with it, pull something all his own from it into the world. Because - the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox machine a hundred times. — Donna Tartt

I might work on a painting for a month, but it has too look like I painted it in a minute. — Willem De Kooning

I use the gallery as if it were a doctor. I come for ideas and help - to look at situations within painting, rather than paintings. — Lucian Freud

When everything looks like a magical oil painting, you know you are in Autumn! — Mehmet Murat Ildan