Quotes & Sayings About Painting Walls

For a few minutes I stood alone in her chambers, appreciating the light and silence and art. There was a van Gogh on one of the walls, worth more than most planets could pay. It was a painting of the artist's room at Arles. Madness is not a new invention. — Dan Simmons

The silent painting speaks on the walls and does much good. — Gregory Of Nyssa

We amuse ourselves painting our prison-walls with bright figures and brilliant landscapes. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

We lived on 82nd Street and the Metropolitan Museum was my short cut to Central Park. I wrote:
"I go into the museum
and look at all the pictures on the walls.
Instead of feeling my own insignificance
I want to go straight home and paint."
A great painting, or symphony, or play, doesn't diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of creation behind the universe. This surge of creativity has nothing to do with competition, or degree of talent. When I hear a superb pianist, I can't wait to get to my own piano, and I play about as well now as I did when I was ten. A great novel, rather than discouraging me, simply makes me want to write. This response on the part of any artist is the need to make incarnate the new awareness we have been granted through the genius of someone else. — Madeleine L'Engle

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

While Elstir, at my request, went on painting, I wandered about in the half-light, stopping to examine first one picture, then another.
Most of those that covered the walls were not what I should chiefly have liked to see of his work, paintings in what an English art journal which lay about on the reading-room table in the Grand Hotel called his first and second manners, the mythological manner and the manner in which he shewed signs of Japanese influence, both admirably exemplified, the article said, in the collection of Mme. de Guermantes. Naturally enough, what he had in his studio were almost all seascapes done here, at Balbec. But I was able to discern from these that the charm of each of them lay in a sort of metamorphosis of the things represented in it, analogous to what in poetry we call metaphor, and that, if God the Father had created things by naming them, it was by taking away their names or giving them other names that Elstir created them anew. — Marcel Proust

The baby went without a name for weeks. Mom said she wanted to study it first, the way she would the subject of a painting. We had a lot of arguments over what the name should be. I wanted to call her Rosita, after the prettiest girl in my class, but Mom said the name was too Mexican.
"I thought we weren't supposed to be prejudiced," I said.
"It's not being prejudiced," Mom said. "It's a matter of accuracy in labeling. — Jeannette Walls

We feel closer to the drawings on the walls of Chauvet than the painting of, say, an Egyptian mural. These artists are not remote ancestors; they are brothers. They saw like us; they drew like us. We wear essentially the same clothes against the cold. — Simon McBurney

I wasn't interested in going to the school dances. I wasn't interested in going to the football games. What I wanted was to be in my room painting my walls and doing weird stuff. That's what I wanted and I got to do what I wanted, so that, to me, is my high school experience. — Brie Larson

What mattered more was the feeling, a rich sweet undertow so commanding that in class, on the school bus, lying in bed trying to think of something safe or pleasant, some environment or configuration where my chest wasn't tight with anxiety, all I had to do was sink into the blood-warm current and let myself spin away to the secret place where everything was all right. Cinnamon-colored walls, rain on the windowpanes, vast quiet and a sense of depth and distance, like the varnish over the background of a nineteenth-century painting. Rugs worn to threads, painted Japanese fans and antique valentines flickering in candlelight, Pierrots and doves and flower-garlanded hearts. Pippa's face pale in the dark. — Donna Tartt

During college, when I was working full time for my father [the decorator Mark Hampton], I rented an apartment and I just couldn't take time off to paint it. So I went there one evening and stayed up all night painting the place what I thought was a lovely pale yellow. When the sun came up, I realized I'd painted the walls the color of insanity. I had to immediately mix in all my trim color to tone it down. Yellow is an electric color and wholly misleading. It becomes more yellow with the sun's yellow light on it. The moral is, even if you think your yellow is the one, go paler. — Alexa Hampton

I followed the older woman out to the foyer. Taking the stairs, I scanned each painting that lined the walls. I stilled as I found a portrait that could only have been Nathaniel. He looked young and brash, no more than fifteen. His suit was painted in a regal colour, it set off his tanned skin and sky blue eyes.
"Handsome devil was he not?" Bess chuckled. "Or should I say, 'is he not'?"
I fought the urge to blush as I trailed after the housekeeper. — Freedom Matthews

Many women are singing together of this:
one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine,
one is at the aquarium tending a seal,
one is dull at the wheel of her Ford,
one is at the toll gate collecting,
one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona,
one is straddling a cello in Russia,
one is shifting pots on the stove in Egypt,
one is painting her bedroom walls moon color,
one is dying but remembering a breakfast,
one is stretching on her mat in Thailand,
one is wiping the ass of her child,
one is staring out the window of a train
in the middle of Wyoming and one is
anywhere and some are everywhere and all
seem to be singing, although some can not
sing a note. — Anne Sexton

I always liked paintings to be walls rather than windows. When we see a painting on a wall, it's a window, so I often put my paintings in the middle of the space to make a wall. — Pierre Soulages

In my previous murals, I had tried to achieve a harmony in my painting with the architecture of the building. But to attempt such a harmony in the garden of the Institute would have defeated my purposes. For the walls here were of an intricate Italian baroque style, with little windows, heads of satyrs, doorways, and sculpturesque mouldings. It was within such a frame that I was to represent the life of an age which had nothing to do with baroque refinements
a new life which was characterized by masses, machines, and naked mechanical power. So I set to work consciously to over-power the ornamentation of the room. — Diego Rivera

Its front porch had a beautiful view of the water and invisible screening to keep the jellybugs and stinkmoths at bay. I wove mats for the floors and painted sincere, klutzy seascapes for the walls. Piece by piece I assembled chef-quality cooking equipment, learned how to use it, and achieved a state of domestic competence that would have astounded my long-suffering ex-wife, Joanna. — Julian May

Even his initial stirrings of domesticity had some quirks. He bought a proper house in the Los Gatos hills, which he adorned with a Maxfield Parrish painting, a Braun coffeemaker, and Henckels knives. But because he was so obsessive when it came to selecting furnishings, it remained mostly barren, lacking beds or chairs or couches. Instead his bedroom had a mattress in the center, framed pictures of Einstein and Maharaj-ji on the walls, and an Apple II on the floor. — Anonymous

It isn't that it's too soon, you're on the back of my bike, it ain't too soon. You can buy sheets. You cannot install blinds."
"um ... " I mumbled. "Can you explain the difference?"
"Sheets are chick territory," he said without delay. "You gotta use tools, that's dick territory."
"Oh," I whispered.
"Don't tread on dick territory," he advised.
"So, um ... is a paintbrush a tool?" I asked cautiously.
"If you're paintin' the side of the house, yeah. If you're painting mud colored paint in a room, no."
"It's terracotta," I said softly.
"Whatever," he muttered, his mouth twitching.
"Or, the paint chip called it Mexican horizon. The blue is dawn sky."
"Definitely chick territory," Tate replied, losing the fight with his grin.
"What about ... pictures for the walls?" I asked.
"Chick," he answered instantly.
"Um ... could I ask that, instead of you getting angry and being a jerk, maybe you give me a head's up when I'm doing something stupid? — Kristen Ashley

The Sleeping

I have imagined all this:
In 1940 my parents were in love
And living in the loft on West 10th
Above Mark Rothko who painted cabbage roses
On their bedroom walls the night they got married.

I can guess why he did it.
My mother's hair was the color of yellow apples
And she wore a velvet hat with her pajamas.

I was not born yet. I was remote as starlight.
It is hard for me to imagine that
My parents made love in a roomful of roses
And I wasn't there.

But now I am. My mother is blushing.
This is the wonderful thing about art.
It can bring back the dead. It can wake the sleeping
As it might have late that night
When my father and mother made love above Rothko
Who lay in the dark thinking Roses, Roses, Roses. — Lynn Emanuel

Stop looking at the walls, look out the window. — Karl Pilkington

Edward gets funky in Beverly Mitchell's (and Jessica Biel's) garage rec room by painting the walls gray, building room screens that are painted gray and chartreuse, upholstering thrift store and existing furniture...
Hildi brings a little refinement to George and Jeff Stolt'z bachelor pad living room...
(Season 3, Episode 52) — Amy Tincher-Durik

My eyes roved over the walls covered with my collages and prints of famous paintings. Magritte, Kandinsky, Kahlo. My origami shapes hung from fishing wire, dangling over my bed. They shivered in the slight breeze blowing through my open window. It was my own little escape pod, but none of it was enough tonight. — Heather Demetrios

The VIP area, which is geared to live entertainment, is a black-lit stage with a neon painting resembling New York City on the walls. It's supposed to resemble New York City, ... Look, we even have the Twin Towers on there. — Mike Wells

There's thieves among us Painting the walls All kinds of lies , and lies I never told it all — Zooey Deschanel

Beyond the iced windows the sun was sinking. Shadows bloomed across the walls and multiplied in the stairwells, and as the light died it got bluer, painting everything around me a deep-sea cobalt. — Ransom Riggs

Why spend the afternoon making a meal that will be gone in an hour," she'd ask us, "when in the same amount of time, I can do a painting that will last forever? — Jeannette Walls

Cooking a meal that would be consumed in fifteen minutes had no appeal when she could make a painting that might last forever. — Jeannette Walls

But didn't everyone get everything? Hadn't they had enough yet? Everything on earth is tailored for this everyone. Everyone gets all the TV programs, damn near all the cinema, and about eighty percent of all music. After that come the secondary medium of painting and those other visual arts that do not move. Those are generally just for someone and although you always hear people moaning that there isn't enough of them, in truth someone does all right. Galleries, museums, basements in Berlin, studio flats, journals, bare walls in urban centers - someone gets what they want and deserve, most of the time. But where are the things that no one wants? Every now and then Alex would see or hear something that appeared to be for no one but soon enough it turned out to be for someone and, after a certain amount of advertising revenue had been spent, would explode into the world for everyone. Who was left to make stuff for no one? — Zadie Smith

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 lacked the knowledge of linear perspective needed to get into the art school, so now I whitewash walls and imagine I'm heaven's landscape painter. — Bauvard

I didn't know it would get this hot," she said. "It's hot as hell."
"Hell is hotter."
"Sounds like you've been there."
"I've heard it from someone. They make it hotter and hotter till you think you'll go crazy; then they move you someplace cooler for a while. Then when you're recovered a little they move you back again."
"So hell it's like a sauna."
"Yeah, more or less. But a few can't recover and go totally bonkers."
"So what happens to them?"
"They get sent up to heaven, where they're forced to paint the walls. You see, the walls in heaven have to be kept a perfect white. As a result, they have to keep painting from dawn till dusk every day. It messes up their respiratory systems big time. — Haruki Murakami

The purpose of painting is to decorate the walls. Therefore it has to be as rich as possible — Pierre-Auguste Renoir