To Canvas Quotes & Sayings

Writing is one means to investigate the mystique of life. Each fresh page is an unsullied canvas that an inquisitive writer employs to explore the poetic transience behind their existence. — Kilroy J. Oldster

It was love, she thought, pretending to move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain. — Virginia Woolf

This time I read the title of the painting: Girl Interrupted at Her Music. Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that? — Susanna Kaysen

My instinct is to keep people guessing. I think as an actor your greatest strength is your versatility, I suppose. The blanker the canvas, the easier it is to project the illusion of a character onto it. I think there are many actors who do that very successfully. — Tom Hiddleston

I often use an old canvas and I particularly enjoy painting over something I've already done, allowing bits to come jumping through accidentally. — Myfanwy Pavelic

The eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way it moves over nature. It should feel caressed and soothed, experience frictions and ruptures, glide and drift. One moment, there will be nothing to look at and the next second the canvas seems to refill, to be crowded with visual events. — Bridget Riley

The measure of a man comes down to moments, spread out like dots of pain on the canvas on life. Everything you were, everything you'll someday be, resides in the small, seemingly ordinary choices of everyday life ... Each decision seems as insignificant as a left turn on an unfamiliar road when you have no destination in mind. But the decisions accumulate until you realize one day that they've made you the man that you are. — Kristin Hannah

A revised schedule is to business what a new season is to an athlete or a new canvas to an artist. — Norman Ralph Augustine

Goethe's Faust risks all if he should cry to the moment, the 'augenblick', "Verweile doch!" "Last forever!" Who hasn't prayed that prayer? But the 'augenblick' isn't going to 'verweile'. You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying; it is a canvas, nevertheless. — Annie Dillard

Exactly. The dots guy. I've always thought getting older was a bit like looking at those paintings. You're born, and that's when you're standing right up next to the canvas. Nothing makes any sense. There's just a lot of light and color. But as you get older, you begin to back away, and that's when the image starts to cohere. All those little spots of color turn into flowers, or people, or dogs. You gain perspective. — Tommy Wallach

The key role of entrepreneurs, like the most crucial role of scientists, is not to fill in the gaps in an existing market or theory, but to generate entirely new markets or theories ... They stand before a canvas as empty as any painter's; a page as blank as any poet's. — George Gilder

Graffiti is a lot easier than the canvas actually, because it's such a large format, so when you're going to such a thin detail, it's not that thin in the realm of things because it's such a big wall. This would take a small paint brush of detail, but on a huge wall, if that's the size of a building, the thinnest detail is still that big, it's a quick spray. Spray paint is easiest for me. I love spray paint. — Alec Monopoly

The wife of a junior officer cooped up in a horrible canvas partition in steerage for five months wrote:
"I had enjoyed much peace there in the absence of every comfort, even of such as are now enjoyed in jail. I used to say that there were four privations in my situation - fire, water, earth and air. No fire to warm oneself on the coldest day, no water to drink but what was tainted, no earth to set the foot on, and scarcely any air to breathe. Yet, with all these miserable circumstances, we spent many a happy hour by candlelight in that wretched cabin whilst I sewed and he read the Bible to me. — Stephen Taylor

Every parent is an artist, for the bared canvas of a newborn's soul begs for the artist's touch. And because this is so, a parent must prepare the palette with the utmost care, choose the brushes with poised caution, and mindfully attend to every brushstroke regardless of how slight. And such caution is utterly imperative for the emerging rendering will be both a legacy borne of the parent, and a life lived by the child. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Is it an inspiring sight to see a man commit a heroic gesture, and then learn that he goes to vaudeville shows for relaxation? Or see a man who's painted a magnificent canvas - and learn that he spends his time sleeping with every slut he meets?"
"What do you want? Perfection?"
" - or nothing. So, you see, I take the nothing. — Ayn Rand

They were taken from Anacortes on a train to a transit camp - the horse stables at the Puyallup fairgrounds. They lived in the horse stalls and slept on canvas army cots; at nine p.m. they were confined to their stalls; at ten p.m. they were made to turn out their lights, one bare bulb for each family. The cold in the stalls worked into their bones, and when it rained that night they moved their cots because of the leaks in the roof. The next morning, at six A.M., they slogged through mud to the transit camp mess hall and ate canned figs and white bread from pie tins and drank coffee out of tin cups. — David Guterson

Darkness does something to a place, doesn't it? It distorts. It becomes a canvas for the imagination. The good news is that shadows are only the deflection of light. They can frighten, but they can do no harm. — David Jeremiah

People are much like those stars up there. Some burn faintly for millions of years, barely visible to us on earth. They're there, but you'd hardly know it. They blend in, like a speck on a canvas. But others blaze with such intensity, they light up the sky. You can't help but notice them, marvel at them. Those are the ones that never last long. They can't. They use up all their energy quickly — Sarah Jio

If I do anything, I have to start over, but all I have is fragments of ideas. Just pieces. Like a germ of an idea for this, and a germ of an idea for that. Nothing whole or concrete" - Violet

" 'Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.' Pearl S. Buck. Maybe a germ is enough. Maybe it's all you need. We can start small. Open up a new document or pull out a black piece of paper. We'll make it our canvas. Remember what Michelangelo said about the sculpture being in the stone - it was there from the beginning, and his job was to bring it out. Your words are in there too" -Finch — Jennifer Niven

I faced the gaudy sunflower on her canvas bag
it looked hand-painted and at last my eyes fell into hers. I said, 'Thanks for the card.' Her smile put the sunflower to shame. She walked off. — Jerry Spinelli

The love of the painter standing alone and staring, staring at the great coloured surface he is making. Standing with him in the room the rearing canvas stares back with tentative shapes halted in their growth, moving in a new rhythm from floor to ceiling. The twisted tubes, the fresh paint squeezed and smeared across the dry upon his palette. The dust beneath the easel. The paint has edged along the brushes' handles. The white light in a northern sky is silent. The window gapes as he inhales his world. His world: a rented room, and turpentine. He moves towards his half-born. He is in love. — Mervyn Peake

Art is free, but of course you have to be alert to catch it when it comes onto the canvas. I don't choose the ideas, they choose me. I don't wait for them. They come without my permission! — Mirka Mora

People speak of the fear of the blank canvas as though it is a temporary hesitation, a trembling moment of self-doubt. For me it was more like being abducted from my bed by a clown, thrust into a circus arena with a wicker chair, and told to tame a pissed-off lion in front of an expectant crowd. — Hannah Kent

The thoughts we choose to think are the tools we use to paint the canvas of our lives. — Louise Hay

I am not concerned with simply surviving. I am very concerned about improving. I start each day by examining yesterday's work and looking for areas where I can improve. I am always trying to draw the characters better, and trying to design each panel somewhat in the manner a painter would treat his canvas. — Charles M. Schulz

Stop complainin." Jess climbed up to the cab and leaned down to pull me up beside him. "I'm not complaining." His fingers clung to my wrists as the soles on my gray, canvas shoes slipped up the worn steps. "It's hot. I'm sweatin'. I don't want to go campin'," his voiced pitched high to mock me. — S.D. Hendrickson

When they reached her she stood on the path holding a pair of moths. Her eyes were wide with excitement , her cheeks pink, her red lips parted, and on the hand she held out to them clung a pair of delicate blue-green moths, with white bodies, and touches of lavender and straw colour. All about her lay flower-brocaded grasses, behind a deep green background of the forest, while the sun slowly sifted gold from heaven to burnish her hair. Mrs. Comstock heard a sharp breath behind her.
Oh, what a picture!" Exulted Ammon over sher shoulder. "She is absolutely and altogether lovely! Id give a small fortune for that faithfully set on canvas! — Gene Stratton-Porter

The great difficulty with large canvases is that they should by right be painted as fast as a sketch. By speed only can you gain an appearance of fleeting effect. But to paint a three yard canvas with the same dispatch as one of ten inches is well-nigh impossible. — Joaquin Sorolla

... the cylinder itself has only just begun its revolutions ... as it gathers speed the objects grouped around its fulcrum assume, collectively ... no ... as it gathers speed the whole intricate system of cords, weights, metal spikes and rods, brass plates engraved with labyrinthine patterns, bricks, scraps of fabric, paper, canvas, unmarked sheets ... the entire elaborate network of components begins to shudder into wild spasmodic motion, rattling almost farcically within the framework of the machine. — Martin Vaughn-James

Because I expected so little, Gaines's painting is startlingly powerul. A lank-haired blond woman with a hard face sits at akitchen table in the harsh light of a bare bulb. She's surrounded by dirty cereal bowls and fast-food bags, and her shirt is open to the waist, revealing small sagging breasts. Her hollow eyes look out from the canvas with the sullen resignation of an animal that has helped build its own cage. — Greg Iles

BEANNACHT For Josie On the day when the weight deadens on your shoulders and you stumble, may the clay dance to balance you. And when your eyes freeze behind the gray window and the ghost of loss gets in to you, may a flock of colors, indigo, red, green and azure blue come to awaken in you a meadow of delight. When the canvas frays in the curach of thought and a stain of ocean blackens beneath you, may there come across the waters a path of yellow moonlight to bring you safely home. May the nourishment of the earth be yours, may the clarity of light be yours, may the fluency of the ocean be yours, may the protection of the ancestors be yours. And so may a slow wind work these words of love around you, an invisible cloak to mind your life. — John O'Donohue

I think ... it is somehow very useful, and maybe even essential, for a fine artist to have to somehow make his peace on the canvas with all the things he cannot do. That is what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call 'personality,' or maybe even 'pain.' — Kurt Vonnegut

I was a masterpiece; a painting in itself. He was changing me, molding me, and making me into something brand new. I was a blank canvas when I came to him, ready to absorb all the paint he would slather on me. He kept going, adding layer upon layer, sometimes even shedding them just so I could turn out beautiful. And he was done now, ready to let me leave and display me on a wall for people to see. — Evelyn Deshane

If it's a pure expression of yourself no matter what it is or what medium, it's going to shine. It's going to resonate. You could look inside of yourself and you could have a canvas and you could paint a dot in it, but if that is where your creative purpose is taking you then it needs to be that dot. — Rainn Wilson

I used to flirt with fundamentalism, and I had this idea that creation was something that happened. Now I see creation as something that is happening. Hundreds of millions of stars are still being born every day. Creation is an ongoing process. The Artist has not yet cleaned out the brushes. The paint is still wet. Human beings are the small clumps of clay and breath, and we have been handed brushes of our own, like young artist apprentices. The brushes aren't ours, nor the paint or canvas, but here they are in our hands, on loan. What shall we make? — Michael Gungor

Was a soldier's tent of heavy canvas, dyed the dark yellow that sometimes passed for gold. Only the royal banner that streamed atop the center pole marked it as a king's. That, and the guards without; queen's men leaning on tall spears, with the badge of the fiery heart sewn over their own. Grooms came up to help them dismount. One of the guards relieved Melisandre of her cumbersome standard, driving the staff deep into the soft ground. Devan stood to one side of the door, waiting to lift the flap for — George R R Martin

I left the house at around midnight and crept up the driveway to the road. I wore canvas sneakers, athletic socks, safari shorts, a tee-shirt, and had the bright purple knapsack containing Jim's cold, hard foot, a garden trowel, a box of candles and matches to light them, a library copy of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, and some fig bars for a snack. — Donald Antrim

The whales always fell silent when the throbbing hum of humanity grew overwhelming. Whenever a ship of any size came near, I had to take off the headset to protect my ears. I wondered if a species that had taken millennia to evolve such a delicate and sophisticated sense of hearing could adapt to humanity's sonic onslaught. My notes from the time bear witness to the effect on my own primitive ears: "I have been listening to boats all day; my head is throbbing; the silence of my canvas tent feels good tonight - poor whales." That — Alexandra Morton

It's to paint directly on the canvas without any funny business, as it were, and I use almost pure turpentine to start with, adding oil as I go along until the medium becomes pure oil. I use as little oil as I can possibly help, and that's my method. — Edward Hopper

However," he continued, "this canvas is preferable to the paintings of that varlet Rubens, with his mountains of Flemish flesh sprinkled with vermilion, his waves of red hair and his medley of colors. — Honore De Balzac

I didn't have a perfect model, but I wanted to try to blend my own personal reflections and experiences with this broader canvas to see how a lot of the narratives we have about economy and foreign policy got stuck. Because we have these categories of liberal, conservative, free marketer, open government - all these stereotypes about our politics and the categories we try to put things in are inadequate to this sort of complex, ambiguous, sometimes contradictory experience we have as ordinary people and that I have as an elected official. — Barack Obama

I consider my painting finished when my eyes goes to a particular spot on the canvas. But if I put the picture away about thirty feet on the wall and the movements keep returning to me and the eye seems to be responding to something living, then it is finished. — William Baziotes

Whether you create, or you observe an objective piece of creativity, meditation should be the key. Without it, mind can only spread on the canvas its nightmares. Most of the paintings of the great painters like Paul Gaugin or Picasso are almost like vomit. They could not contain their agony and suffering - it was so much they threw it on the canvas to get relief. The real objective art is not a relief; it is not a sickness that you want to get rid of. It is a blissfulness that you want to share. And by sharing, it grows; you have more of it, the more it is shared. — Rajneesh

Kissed me like he had all the time in the world. Slowly at first, just a brushing of his mouth against mine, and then deeper, parting my lips with his tongue. It wasn't just a kiss. Not when his tongue danced over mine or the way he tasted me. Reece turned kissing into an art form, and if I had to attach a color to it, to get it on canvas, it would be supple shades of reds and purples. — J. Lynn

I always told my team, "You have to believe that you are not in front of a computer, but that your canvas is a piece of paper. You have to believe this even if you have a computer in front of you." — Alex Abreu

I find that it is important to work slowly. Anyone who looks at such a canvas will follow the same path the artist took, and he will experience that it is the path which counts more than the outcome of it, and that the route taken has been the most interesting part. — Georges Braque

I was confused by this sudden glare of attention; it was as if the characters in a favorite painting, absorbed in their own concerns, had looked up out of the canvas and spoken to me. — Donna Tartt

It was my own human mind. I needed to understand it. Why? It's the writer's landscape. Imagine that a painter has that wild animal to capture on canvas: arresting its fangs, the raging color of its eyes, the blue of it's hump, the flash of its hoofs, the rugged shadow that it casts. We writers have that beast inside us: how we feel, think, hope, dream, perceive. — Natalie Goldberg

The artist is now giving a first coat of paint to that tautly stretched canvas which the scientist has been so busy stretching that he has forgotten the use he intended to put it to. — Henry Miller

She hesitated: "Do you love your wife?"
Mersault smiled: "That's not essential."
"You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters - all that matters, really - is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever present consciousness. The rest - women, art, success - is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries."
"What matters to me is a certain quality of happiness. I can only find it in a certain struggle with its opposite - a stubborn and violent struggle ... — Albert Camus

Memories are peculiar...You think the past is there, all fixed and stable, but it is really chock full of surprises and endlessly susceptible to change...So maybe it is true that we are constantly rewriting our past; they are not something fixed and unchangeable for all time. There is a basic structure, of course, a canvas stretched across boards, which cannot be remodeled at will, but the surface of that canvas can be shaded, rearranged, touched up, continually worked on to correspond to the needs of the present. In fact, the present moment is largely the focal point from which you shape the direction of your future and juggle the implications of your past. — Elizabeth Arthur

Art deals with profound and simple moods ... Let us suppose that the artist - in this instance (the artist )Picabia - gets a certain impression by looking at our skyscrapers, our city, our way of life, and that he tries to reproduce it ... he will convey it in plastic ways on the canvas, even though we see neither skyscrapers nor city on it. — Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

You know, a landscape painter's day is delightful. You get up early, at three o'clock in the morning, before sunrise; you go and sit under a tree; you watch and wait. At first there is nothing much to be seen. Nature looks like a whitish canvas with a few broad outlines faintly sketched in; all is misty, everything quivers in the cool dawn breeze. The sky lights up. The sun has not yet burst through the gauze veil that hides the meadow, the little valley, the hill on the horizon ... Ah, a first ray of sunshine! — Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

One of my favorite beauty products is Vincent Longo Water Canvas creamy blush. I have it in every color and I've been using it for 5 years and that's all I put on when I leave the house. It looks so natural I just put a little bit on my cheeks to give them some color. — Alessandra Ambrosio

If you will observe, it doesn't take A man of giant mould to make A giant shadow on the wall; And he who in our daily sight Seems but a figure mean and small, Outlined in Fame's illusive light, May stalk, a silhouette sublime, Across the canvas of his time. — John Townsend Trowbridge

Fowls are to the kitchen what his canvas is to the painter. — Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

A paint brush is the only tool I use extensively in my works, to push paint on canvas and conduct melodies. And that's exactly what Garden Avenue is, and all of my projects after that. — Shawn Lukas

I turned my thoughts to a still more novel mode ... to compose pictures on canvas similar to representations on the stage ... my picture is my stage, and men and women my players exhibited in a 'dumb' show. — William Hogarth

And yet viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way," Leibniz said. "Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle
all in the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe
for he sees it from every point of view at once. By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient. — Neal Stephenson

What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace. they would defile it, and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It would be always alive. (Dorian Gray regarding his portrait) — Oscar Wilde

The thing for me is, what if one returns to these maxims, these rather simplistic maxims "Be the change you want to see in the world." Because what canvas have we but the self for these kind of explorations, ultimately. — Russell Brand

It is for that moment when I might steady you so you don't fall, I have added my blood to an inkwell. Indelible now will be my mark on history's canvas and upon any sincere debate of God where reason finally prevails. And when you have the strength, you too may find another to hold up. They lean against each other in a storm, those cypresses grown tall together ... through the years. If they had not trusted and protected one another the way they do, they would not have survived and given us their grace and shade - a place for our eyes to meet. Our friendship can be like this: a needed lift, a sail, a pillar, a springboard to taste the unfathomable. It is to tend you as you come into being, like a new world, that causes me to stay, gives me a purpose. Of course I thank you for that ... for letting me help. — Rumi

Gardening is like landscape painting to me. The garden is the canvas. Plants, containers and other garden features are the colors. I paint on the garden of canvas hoping to create a master piece with my colors. — Ama H. Vanniarachchy

I can't wait to escape the dilapidated/ crippled thoughts, feelings and intentions people who claim to love me have upon me.
I just wanna get off the hook,
Either with dusty clothes
Or muddy face
But i just wanna let go....
And look back with a canvas of pride on my face
And say
It was worth it!! — Bandile M. Matsenjwa

I stand in the sacred human presence. As I do now, so should you stand some day. I pray to your presence that this be so. Let the future remain uncertain for that is the canvas to receive our desires. Thus the human condition faces its perpetual tabula rasa. We possess no more than this moment where we dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence we share and create. — Frank Herbert

But Hannah's friend didn't understand the volatile balancing act between art and sanity, that the act of creation was like walking a tightrope during an earthquake. She didn't understand Hannah's stupid need for validation, or that the size of the audience increased the stakes and multiplied the fear. She didn't understand that creativity was dangerous, that, yes, there were some people who could stand before a canvas, paint a sunset that would bring the world to its knees, and return to their loved ones as a complete person who didn't hurt, didn't cry, didn't spill blood to appease the host of fickle muses. But Hannah did. Hannah's best ideas - sometimes her only ideas - were buried beneath the skin. — Jake Vander Ark

It takes more time to rework a painting than it takes to fill in the canvas in the first place. I wish I could get them all right with the first coat like many of the old masters could, but seem destined to have to rework to make them even passable. — E. J. Hughes

Death, like fiction, is brutal in its symmetry. Take this story and strip it down -all the way back- until you are left with two points. Two dots on a vast, blank canvas, separeted by a sea of white. Here, we have come to the first point, where the batj is drawn and the hand is reachinh for the razor blade. I will meet you at the next, by the axle of a screaming wheel, the revolution of a clock, the closing of an orbit. — Lang Leav

Put a colour upon a canvas - it not only colours with that colour the part of the canvas to which the colour has been applied, but it also colours the surrounding space with the complementary. — Henri Matisse

I have tried to preserve in my relationship to the film the same closeness and intimacy that exists between a painter and his canvas. — Norman McLaren

Painter"
"I said you are only keeping me here
in the hospital, lying to my parents
and saying I am madder than I am,
because you only want to keep me here,
squeezing my last dollar to the pennies
I'm saner than anyone in the hospital.
I had to say what every madman says
a black phrase, the sleep of reason mothers monsters ...
When I am painting the canvas is a person;
all I do, each blot and line's alive,
when I am finished, it is shit on the canvas ...
But in his sketches more finished than his oils,
sketches made after he did those masterpieces,
constable can make us see the breeze ... — Robert Lowell

Salem"

In salem seasick spindrift drifts or skips
to the canvas flapping on the seaward panes
until the knitting sailor stabs at ships
nosing like sheep of Morpheus through his brain's
asylum. Seaman, seaman, how the draft
lashes the oily slick about your head,
beating up whitecaps! Seaman, Charon's raft
dumps its damned goods into the harbor-bed,--
There sewage sickens the rebellious seas.
Remember, seaman, Salem fisherman
Once hung their nimble fleets on the Great Banks.
Where was it that New England bred the men
who quartered the Leviathan's fat flanks
and fought the British Lion to his knees? — Robert Lowell

Subject becoming less relevant, each painting having a life of its own, each stroke leading to the next. It is more about the connection of body and spirit to canvas, over mind to canvas. — Ken Gillespie

Cold exactitude is not art ... The so-called consciousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring. People like that, if they could, would work with the same minute attention on the back of their canvas. — Eugene Delacroix

By itself, tofu is like wet foam rubber, but you'd no more eat it by itself and expect fine dining than you would stare at a blank canvas and expect to see fine art. — Victoria Moran

Speak, breathe, prophesy, get behind a pulpit and preach, mark exam papers, run a company or a nonprofit, clean your kitchen, put paint on a canvas, organize, rabble-rouse, find transcendence in the laundry pile while you pray in obscurity, deliver babies for Haitian mothers in the midwifery clinic - work the Love out and in and around you however God has made you and placed you to do it. Just do it. Don't let the lies fence you in or hold you back. — Sarah Bessey

No; for instead of delivering myself up to the full enjoyment of them as others do, I am always troubling my head about how I could produce the same effect upon canvas; and as that can never be done, it is more vanity and vexation of spirit. — Anne Bronte

The canvas you are working on modifies the previous ones in an unending, baffling chain which never seems to finish. What sympathy is demanded of the viewer? He is asked to 'see' the future links. — Philip Guston

I think that writers have natural canvases, and my canvas, even in short stories, often seems to be the scope of a life. — Lauren Groff

Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to ...
How different everything is for the craftsman who ... can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object
whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug
and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see. — Alain De Botton

But it's like the horror of being in a studio with a blank canvas. I used to always run out of ideas because there are so many possibilities and I would just think, well what am I going to do now! — Damien Hirst

When I begin, theoretically and practically I can smear anything I want on the canvas. Then there's a condition I have to react to, by changing it or destroying it. — Gerhard Richter

We're trying to do what Miles Davis would have wanted us to do, which is approach it as artists with his life as the canvas. — Don Cheadle

Ultimately, we are all products of the experiences we have and the decisions we make as children, and it remains a peculiar detail of human condition that something as precious as the future is entrusted to us when we possess so little foresight. Perhaps that's what makes hindsight so intriguing. When you're young the future is a blank canvas, but looking back you are always able to see the big picture. — Simon Pegg

There is some other form that you contain within yourself that is not will or purpose and, when applied to art, serves you best. If you systematically apply to the art that you create the aggression of the world that turned you towards art in the first place; if you, in turn, become the aggressor towards your canvas, the thing that you're doing; if you, in turn, work your will upon this thing that you want - you will then cause a dissatisfaction in this life that you create. — Milton Resnick

Words are your paintbrush, and your life is the canvas. You can paint whatever you want to paint; you can even copy another artist's work - but what you express with your paintbrush is the way you see yourself, the way you see the entire reality. — Miguel Ruiz

The geometry of landscape and situation seems to create its own systems of time, the sense of a dynamic element which is cinematizing the events of the canvas, translating a posture or ceremony into dynamic terms. The greatest movie of the 20th century is the Mona Lisa, just as the greatest novel is Gray's Anatomy. — J.G. Ballard

One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be - though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain - because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone. — Oswald Spengler

I'm a blank canvas that I can paint however I desire. For the first time ever, I get to be the character in my own fantasy land. — E.K. Blair

This could be your big ticket," he said. "You know what happens to you at art school?"
I shook my head.
"All that good natural technique you have? All that detail? They'll beat it right out of you. They'll be so threatened by it, they'll make you start throwing paint at the canvas like a monkey. By the time you graduate, the only thing you'll be able to do is teach art to high school kids."
Okay, I thought. I'm glad he's excited for me.
"On the plus side, you'll probably get laid a lot."
I gave him a nod and a quick thumbs-up. He patted me on the shoulder and then left me alone. — Steve Hamilton

My belief is that it is most important for an artist to develop an approach and philosophy about life - if he has developed this philosophy, he does not put paint on canvas, he puts himself on canvas. — Jacob Lawrence

I'm ... getting there. I'm beginning to think that maybe it's okay to be a blank canvas. Maybe it's okay that my future is unknown. And maybe," I say with another smile, "it's okay to be inspired by the people who do know their future." "It goes both ways, you know." I link his icicle fingers through mine. "What does?" "Artists are inspired by blank canvases." My smile grows wider. — Stephanie Perkins

The artist invites the spectator to take a journey within the realm of the canvas ... Without taking the journey, the spectator has really missed the essential experience of the picture. — Mark Rothko

Hands are difficult. You would think they would be just five quick lines, but no, they have personalities as intimate as faces. Elizabeth's hands, for instance - they are fine hands, with long fingers that remind me of tapered candles. A person one has loved - the memory of their hands. Did they flutter or sit still? Dry? Moist? Cool on a hot forehead? What? That is what I wish to express in my paintings. The memory - of the movement - of very particular hands, even though they appear to be unmoving on canvas. — Sarah Ruhl

My room is cheerfully located between the sixth-floor elevators. The springs of my bed wheeze. The elevator dings. The ice machine right outside my door rumbles forth its icy bounty, a steady tattoo that beats "Stay up! Stay up!" I am in a canvas that Edward Hopper never felt bummed out enough to paint. — David Rakoff

Every day is a blank canvas to use our free will to create something beautiful for our Creator. — Alisa Hope Wagner

Whether I'm at home and researching online or whether I'm in the studio just drawing, I think I'm more interested in practical research - discussing with other people, trying to find the exact formula of putting things on the canvas, what is the consistency of paint that works best. — Camille Henrot

When I work alone, it can be like dabbling with a canvas. Maybe you paint over bits, and it starts to form its own life and lead you off in a direction. It becomes an intuitive, subconscious process. — Lindsey Buckingham

Life itself, too, is forever turning an infinitely vacant, dispiriting blank side towards man on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. But no matter how vacant and vain, how dead life may appear to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, who knows something, will not be put off so easily. — Vincent Van Gogh

It was as if I was in a picture, a flat canvas, and everything around me was flat, me painted on like everything else: no colour, nothing in front and nothing behind me, not even earlier today or tomorrow, nothing to look back or forward to, just this moment. — Tim Relf