Painters and poets have liberty to lie.
An aged painter cannot help but accept the fact that his work belongs in the past. Younger painters have leaped into the phenomenon called contemporary, where it would be foolish of me to try to enter. But I can claim my own phenomenon.
In recent times, Surrealist painters have used descriptive illusionistic academic methods.
During the Renaissance, women were not allowed to attend art school. Everyone asks, where are the great women painters of the Renaissance?
Most painters have painted themselves. So have most poets: not so palpably indeed, but more assiduously. Some have done nothing else.
The names of great painters are like passing-bells: in the name of Velasquez you hear sounded the fall of Spain;. in the name of Titian, that of Venice; in the name of Leonardo, that of Milan; in the name of Raphael, that of Rome. And there is profound justice in this, for in proportion to the nobleness of the power is the guilt of its use for purposes vain or vile; and hitherto the greater the art, the more surely has it been used, and used solely, for the decoration of pride or the provoking of sensuality.
Today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source. They work from within.
I feel that I am much freer if I'm on my own, but I'm sure that there are a lot of painters who would perhaps be even more inventive if they had people round them. . . I find that if I am on my own I can allow the paint to dictate to me. So the images that I'm putting down on the canvas dictate the thing to me and it gradually builds up and comes along.
I didn’t know that painters and writers retired. They’re like soldiers – they just fade away.
Most male painters have historically admired the female form. It's got a lot going for it.
Abstract and conceptual painters face different demons than representational painters, but neither group has a monopoly on either authenticity or originality.
Two of the most frustrated trades are dentists and photographers - dentists because they want to be doctors, and photographers because they want to be painters.
My paintings have an ongoing dialogue with photography. There are many painters who would say the same, I'm sure. The difference is that I'm thinking more about the temporal aspect of photography, rather than the visual.
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.
We are the two great painters of this era; you are in the Egyptian style, I in themodern style. (to Pablo Picasso)
One of the interesting things I discovered is that in the late 19th century, painters actually had black-and-white copies made of their own paintings. They chose it even over photographs because they knew the photographic medium would distort their work.
Playwrights have texts, composers have scores, painters and sculptors have the residue of those activities, and dance is traditionally an ephemeral, effervescent, here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of thing.
My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms.
We'll be potters, we'll be painters, we'll be textile designers, we'll be jewelers, we'll be a little this, a little of that. We were going to be the renaissance people [when we were young].