Abstract painting seeks to be a pure pictorial language, and thus attempts to escape the essential impurity of all languages: the recourse to signs or forms that have meanings shared by everyone. – Octavio Paz
It’s not about perfection. What’s a perfect painting? What’s interesting about a perfect painting? – Peter Doig
I was painting sets, working in editorial as an assistant, driving their trucks, lying that I knew how to drive a truck, and doing commercials and documentaries. – Richard Donner
I sometimes use a lot of light greens and greys when I feel there is sadness in the painting. – Robert Ryan
I’d always loved writing, in the same way that I’d loved painting. I wouldn’t have seen it as a career. – Robyn Davidson
There was a point after the whole intensity of the Clash finally subsided when I just found that painting grounded me in a way that music didn’t. – Paul Simonon
I try to vote as left as I can. I hope that my paintings will coincide and be far left, but frequently… the painting rebels and goes fascist on me. – Peter Saul
I’m not knocking conceptual art; it’s another department, but it doesn’t move me like painting. – Paul Simonon
I don’t think money can help you become a better painter, for sure. You can have all the studios you want; it won’t help you make a better painting. – Peter Doig
With rare exceptions, I respond most to painting that cuts across grain rather than following it. I think the artist here can get in touch with that grain rather than simply feel its flow. And he really can’t cut right across it anyway. – Richard Diebenkorn
It’s still an escape for me, painting, so it also takes me elsewhere. I don’t think I would do it otherwise. – Peter Doig
I’m a classically trained painter, and I was an illustrator in New York working with Fortune 500s companies as well as the NBA and the Olympics. I first got into sculpting when I created a sculpture based on a painting I had done for the 1984 Olympics. – Richard MacDonald
All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing. – Salman Rushdie
In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don’t know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? – Philip Guston
When I am in New York, you know, my studio is big, about 20,000 to 25,000 square feet, and I have painting rooms and rooms I do etching in, rooms I do lithographs. – Peter Max
Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn’t look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself. – Roy Lichtenstein
Well, I’ve been painting for years. I just started doing a lot more in the last couple. – Robyn Hitchcock
What is the use of good painting? We want a spell cast upon the optical part of our existence! We seldom really see the world, but when we do, we become as still as a picture. – Robert Musil
Painting is seen as picture making, the making of an art object, something that can stand on its own. – Peter Wright
The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so that what you see is not what you see. – Philip Guston
I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza. – Robert Indiana
I don’t know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere. – Philip Guston
But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it. – Roy Lichtenstein
Painting was a problem – you produce a thing, and then you sell it and get money, and that was quickly considered totally uncool. – Rachel Kushner