When a figure painter executes a landscape he treats it as if it were a face; Degas' landscapes are unparalleled because they are visionary landscapes.
A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.
I have heard painters acknowledge, though in that acknowledgment no degradation of themselves was intended, that they could do better without nature than with her; or as they express themselves, 'that it only put them out.
By the single example of this painter devoted to his art with such independence, my destiny as a painter opened out to me.
The highest praise we can attribute to any writer, painter, sculptor, builder, is, that he actually possessed the thought or feeling with which he has inspired us.
I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.
Every good composition is above all a work of abstraction. All good painters know this. But the painter cannot dispense with subjects altogether without his work suffering impoverishment.
"Work" does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.
The modern painter…is an excellent couturier
It's possible to have more than one interest. I've been a painter and did summer stock.
A thousand painters ought to be killed yearly. Say what you like: I'm every inch a painter.
If you're a painter, you're not alone. There's no way to be alone.
I thought, oh, I'm going to be a painter. And eventually my family had moved near Chicago, and when I graduated from high school, I went to the Chicago Art Institute, and it was there that I thought, well, now I'm going to be a painter.
No one can be a painter unless he cares for painting above all else.
As for borrowing Mr. Whistler's ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have heard him express have had reference to his own superiority as a painter over painters greater than himself.
You have understood what all great painters understand: in order to forget the rules, you must know them and respect them.
The Canadian painter A. Y. Jackson noted that 'failure of sight' was a tiresome problem. He meant we should be able to look at our work-in-progress as if it were previously unseen.
You haven't time to think about the composition. In working directly from nature, the painter ends up by simply aiming at an effect, and not composing the picture at all; and he soon becomes monotonous.
Good painter imitates nature, bad ones spews it up.
A true photographer is as rare as a true poet or a true painter.