I don't like getting out when I could be painting. And when I'm painting, I don't want anybody else around.
I kept. . . . returning to the (ancient Roman) wall paintings with their veiled melancholy and elegant plasticity.
In painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter your manner.
There is a kinship between music and painting - with the same words used to describe both, as when a musical composition is said to have color and a painting to have rhythm.
Just as I am astonished that a bank clerk never eats a cheque, so too am I astonished that no painter before me ever thought of painting a soft watch.
Sometimes I feel we express more with dancing or acting or painting than with words.
The spirit of a painting is very hard to explain and articulate. I can't say it's not intentional because that is the mark I'm trying to hit, however I don't feel I have much control over it.
I loved painting and drawing for many reasons. One of them was that all it really required was me, a pencil and a pad. It was something I was passionate about, and still am.
Try drawing or painting a scene you're working on. Often this will help free up you imagination.
Painting pictures didn't make me a lot of money. I have to eat.
All painting, no matter what you are painting, is abstract in that it's got to be organized.
I think about women and their thoughts and ideas, and I suppose when I'm painting them I'm getting to be them, in a sense. That is why I plainly paint women.
Painting is the same kind of problem as unfolding a long, sustained interlocked argument. . . It is a proposition commanded by a single unity of conception.
I was always a little bit of a collector and a hoarder. And whenever I got involved in anything, whatever it was - even when I was a kid and I collected cigarette cards - I really got into it and had the most. So when it came to paintings, once I got the bug, I always wanted to buy something. But I really knew nothing about art.
I'm trying to paint a picture of what I have seen and what moved me, as well as I can. That's all.
Maybe poets express more directly a sense of sympathy for other human beings. Painting is a little bit more of a retreat from human beings in real life; painting is more about the extreme moments when speech doesn't help anymore.
It has been difficult to hold onto many paintings but I have retained a few.
I like setting up problems for the viewer, like how do you visually deal with a ring when what’s usually in the center of a painting is very important? It's like the main course isn't there and you're having to deal with everything around what would normally be the main course.
Remember the enemy of all painting is gray: a painting will almost always appear grayer than it is, on account of its oblique position under the light.
I've always seen process of crafting as part of the thinking process. It really forms the gestation of the work. I'll get an idea; I want to express this idea, sometimes I'll start it, but during the process of making the object - if it's an object or a painting - it changes. It never goes in a linear progression from A to Zed. It's always this kind of circuitous, stumbling, groping in the dark kind of process of evolving.