88 Inspirational Painting Quotes

Art has the unrivaled ability to touch our hearts, ignite our imaginations, and inspire us to see the world through a brighter lens. Whether you're an artist searching for a spark of inspiration or a lover of creativity seeking to deepen your appreciation for painting, quotes about art can offer profound insights. We've compiled a curated collection of 88 inspirational painting quotes from renowned artists, thinkers, and visionaries. These quotes not only celebrate the beauty and power of painting but also encourage us to reflect on its enduring role in shaping our perspectives and emotions. Dive into these words of wisdom and let them invigorate your artistic journey.

1. “I dream my painting and I paint my dream.” - Vincent Willem van Gogh

2. “If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.” - Vincent Willem van Gogh

3. “Painting something that defies the law of the land is good. Painting something that defies the law of the land and the law of gravity at the same time is ideal.” - Banksy

4. “Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.” - Orhan Pamuk

5. “You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.” - Rick Riordan

6. “The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting.” - Vincent Willem van Gogh

7. “If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.” - Edward Hopper

8. “Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.” - Pablo Picasso

9. “Dr Sass…maintained that in paradise, until the time of the fall, the whole world was flat, the back-curtain of the Lord, and that it was the devil who invented a third dimension. Thus are the words ‘straight’, ‘square’, and ‘flat’ the words of noblemen, but the apple was an orb, and the sin of our first parents, the attempt at getting around God. I myself much prefer the art of painting to sculpture” - Isak Dinesen

10. “Little deer, I've stuffed all the world's diseases inside you. / Your veins are thorns // and the good cells are lost in the deep dark woods / of your organs.” - Pascale Petit

11. “You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.” - Henri Matisse

12. “It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.” - Albert Camus

13. “Que hablen de uno, aunque sea bien” - Salvador Dali

14. “To draw something is to try to capture it FOREVER, if you really love something, you never try to keep it the way it is forever. You have to let it be free to change” - Cassandra Clare

15. “The painter is not simply someone who looks and who sees. Above all, the artist is someone who exposes a personal vision by rendering it visible. The painter shows or allows the seeing of "something" that without him, without his intervention, would not be seen. He manifests through his work a possibility of seeing that would otherwise remain latent. In other words, painting is an art that reveals or unveils the world from an angle that the world itself does not present to us. Painting creates. It does not limit itself to imitation or reproduction. Any desire to confine painting within the limits of déjà vu would be a gross misunderstanding of the essence of what painting is. Painting allows us to see that which without it would never be seen.” - Marcel Paquet

16. “Painting reflects. It kills you in a colourful shower of emptiness. Flatness. Randomness. And beauty. Yes, it is the most pure beauty I have ever felt in my life.” - Nigel Tomm

17. “I visit him a few times downtownwhile he paints.We talk about how he's going to Spainfor the fall semesterand he shows me a painting he didand points to this one part,a bridge, and tells me he thought of mewhen he painted it.It is so sadhow knowing somethingso smallcan make me so happy.” - Samantha Schutz

18. “I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.” - Miguel De Cervantes (Author)

19. “I wanted to paint a picture some day that people would stand before and forget that it was made of paint. I wanted it to creep into them like a bar of music and mushroom there like a soft bullet.” - O. Henry

20. “How do you even know I'm someone you'll want to remember? We've only seen each other once before.'(Amber)'Have you ever looked at a painting and known you had something in common with it? Have you ever seen something so beautiful you feel like crying? When I see you, I feel that way. I feel like the deepest part of me understands something vital about you.'(Virgil Daly)” - Christina Westover

21. “Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.” - Pablo Picasso

22. “The painting has a life of its own” - Jackson Pollock

23. “I'm painting color squares. Onesquare - one color. That's what I paint.” - Nigel Tomm

24. “both you and paintings are layered… first, ephemera and notations on the back of the canvas. Labels indicate gallery shows, museum shows, footprints in the snow, so to speak. Then pencil scribbles on the stretcher, usually by the artist, usually a title or date. Next the stretcher itself. Pine or something. Wooden triangles in the corners so the picture can be tapped tighter when the canvas becomes loose. Nails in the wood securing the picture to the stretcher. Next, a canvas: linen, muslin, sometimes a panel; then the gesso - a primary coat, always white. A layer of underpaint, usually a pastel color, then, the miracle, where the secrets are: the paint itself, swished around, roughly, gently, layer on layer, thick or thin, not more than a quarter of an inch ever -- God can happen in that quarter of an inch -- the occasional brush hair left embedded, colors mixed over each other, tones showing through, sometimes the weave of the linen revealing itself. The signature on top of the entire goulash. Then varnish is swabbed over the whole. Finally, the frame, translucent gilt or carved wood. The whole thing is done.” - Steve Martin

25. “The figure in the icon is not meant to represent literally what Peter or John or any of the apostles looked like, or what Mary looked like, nor the child, Jesus. But, the orthodox painter feels, Jesus of Nazareth did not walk around Galilee faceless. The icon of Jesus may not look like the man Jesus two thousand years ago, but it represents some *quality* of Jesus, or his mother, or his followers, and so becomes an open window through which we can be given a new glimpse of the love of God. ” - Madeleine L'Engle

26. “All you need to paint is a few tools, a little instruction, and a vision in your mind.” - Bob Ross

27. “Literature is painting, architecture, and music.” - Yevgeny Zamyatin

28. “I am trying like Klee, to create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real danger, a danger which I willingly take on myself.” - William S. Burroughs

29. “Hans then asked him about painting from nature; Jackson...bluntly offered a phrase that entered Village lore, “I am nature.” - Ross Wetzsteon

30. “[I]t was [Barnett] Newman who made the famously wry remark, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds,” - Ross Wetzsteon

31. “Finally, when someone asked [Pollack] how he knew when a painting was finished, he replied, “How do you know when you’ve finished making love?” - Ross Wetzsteon

32. “Who are you, Martin Eden? he demanded of himself in the looking- glass, that night when he got back to his room. He gazed at himself long and curiously. Who are you? What are you? Where do you belong? You belong by rights to girls like Lizzie Connolly. You belong with the legions of toil, with all that is low, and vulgar, and unbeautiful. You belong with the oxen and the drudges, in dirty surroundings among smells and stenches. There are the stale vegetables now. Those potatoes are rotting. Smell them, damn you, smell them. And yet you dare to open the books, to listen to beautiful music, to learn to love beautiful paintings, to speak good English, to think thoughts that none of your own kind thinks, to tear yourself away from the oxen and the Lizzie Connollys and to love a pale spirit of a woman who is a million miles beyond you and who lives in the stars! Who are you? and what are you? damn you! And are you going to make good?” - Jack London

33. “Writing, music, sculpting, painting, and prayer! These are the three things that are most closely related! Writers, musicians, sculptors, painters, and the faithful are the ones who make things out of nothing. Everybody else, they make things out of something, they have materials! But a written work can be done with nothing, it can begin in the soul! A musical piece begins with a harmony in the soul, a sculpture begins with a formless, useless piece of rock chiseled and formed and molded into the thing that was first conceived in the sculptor's heart! A painting can be carried inside the mind for a lifetime, before ever being put onto paper or canvass! And a prayer! A prayer is a thought, a remembrance, a whisper, a communion, that is from the soul going to what cannot be seen, yet it can move mountains! And so I believe that these five things are interrelated, these five kinds of people are kin.” - C. JoyBell C.

34. “The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine.” - Thomas Hardy

35. “I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.” - Oscar Wilde

36. “I lacked the knowledge of linear perspective needed to get into the art school, so now I whitewash walls and imagine I’m heaven’s landscape painter.” - Bauvard

37. “The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the works of others as his standard.” - Leonardo da Vinci

38. “Once, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm. Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner intended to paint. What he intended to paint was a representation of the storm. One's language is frequently imprecise in that manner, I have discovered.” - David Markson

39. “She felt about a love set as a painter does about his masterpiece; each ace serve was a form of brushwork to her, and her fantastically accurate shot-placing was certainly a study in composition.” - Janet Flanner

40. “I paint the way some people write their autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages of my journal, and as such they are valid. The future will choose the pages it prefers. It's not up to me to make the choice. I have the impression that the time is speading on past me more and more rapidly. I'm like a river that rolls on, dragging with it the trees that grow too close to its banks or dead calves one might have thrown into it or any kind of microbes that develop in it. I carry all that along with me and go on. It's the movement of painting that interests me, the dramatic movement from one effort to the next, even if those efforts are perhaps not pushed to their ultimate end. In some of my paintings I can say with certainty that the effort has been brought to its full weight and its conclusion, because there I have been able to stop the flow of time around me. I have less and less time, and yet I have more and more to say, and what I have to say is,increasingly, something about what goes on in the movement of my thought. I've reached the moment, you see, when the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself.” - Francoise Gilot

41. “You see, for me a painting is a dramatic action in the course of which the reality finds itself split apart. For me, that dramatic action takes precedence over all other considerations. The pure plastic act is only secondary as far as I'm concerned. What counts is the drama of that plastic art, the moment at which the universe comes out of itself and meets its own destruction.” - Francoise Gilot

42. “A force de peindre la vie des autres, il avait oublié de peindre la sienne."On ne se tue pas pour une femme (2000)” - Olivier Weber

43. “To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing-- what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.” - Gerhard Richter

44. “A painted surface is a real, living form.” - Kazimir Severinovich Malevich

45. “The secret to so many artists living so long is that every painting is a new adventure. So, you see, they're always looking ahead to something new and exciting. The secret is not to look back.” - Norman Rockwell

46. “Boomer had asked her once, in a telephone call from Virginia, “Why does this stuff, these hand-painted hallucinations that don’t do nothin’ but confuse the puddin’ out of a perfectly reasonable wall, why does it mean so much to you?” It was a poor connection, but he could have sworn he heard her say, “In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn’t creak.” - Tom Robbins

47. “I don't paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.” - Frida Kahlo

48. “Like the sundial, my paint box counts no hours but sunny ones.” - Arthur Rackham

49. “In the medieval tradition, Beksinski seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh– whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish– thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing struggle for life. They hold within them a secret poetry, stained with blood and rust.” - Guillermo Del Toro

50. “I spray the sky fast. Eyes ahead and behind. Looking for cops. Looking for anyone I don't want to be here. Paint sails and the things that kick in my head scream from can to brick. See this, see this. See me emptied onto a wall.” - Cath Crowley

51. “For all the pain you suffered, my mama. For all the torment of your past and future years, my mama. For all the anguish this picture of pain will cause you. For the unspeakable mystery that brings good fathers and sons into the world and lets a mother watch them tear at each other’s throats. For the Master of the Universe, whose suffering world I do not comprehend. For dreams of horror, for nights of waiting, for memories of death, for the love I have for you, for all the things I remember, and for all the things I should remember but have forgotten, for all these I created this painting—an observant Jew working on a crucifixion because there was no aesthetic mold in his own religious tradition into which he could pour a painting of ultimate anguish and torment.” - Chaim Potok

52. “yes, i have dated Salvador Dali guy when i was a high school girl. he was a great lover. but i had to dump him because he stole my inspiration of bent clock*~* .... who cares...” - Hiroko Sakai

53. “In every motions to put colors on my canvas, I feel like I am screaming, "I AM HERE"... To whom?.. To where?... Where am I going to...?” - Hiroko Sakai

54. “The more I drive myself into the depth of my inside, the more things come up to my vision, visibly or invisibly... I even do not know if I am seeing them with my eye or with my mind. I just need to copy them on my canvases. But this mental process is always overwhelming. I often have hard time to deal with my emotion on this state. You could call this depression on surface? But actually, so many 're-birth' and 'reform' are going on on my thoughts, inspiration, philosophy...etc in the underwater. I believe this struggle make my art real. My art always comes from my emotion.” - Hiroko Sakai

55. “When you paint late at night, drinking beer or wine or both, you gotta be very careful to watch what you are doing...” - Hiroko Sakai

56. “With cold eyes and indifferent mind the spectators regard the work. Connoissers admire the "skill" (as one admires a tightrope walker), enjoy the "quality of painting" (as one enjoys a pasty). But hungry souls go hungry away. The vulgar herd stroll through the rooms and pronounce the pictures "nice" or "splendid." Those who could speak have said nothing, those who could hear have heard nothing.” - Wassily Kandinsky

57. “'Paint only what you see,' his hero Millet had admonished.'Imagination is a burden to a painter,' Auguste Renoir had told him. 'Painters are craftsmen, not storytellers. Paint what you see.'Ah, but what they hadn't said, hadn't warned him about, was how much you could see.” - Christopher Moore

58. “I have been in love with painting ever since I became conscious of it at the age of six. I drew some pictures I thought fairly good when I was fifty, but really nothing I did before the age of seventy was of any value at all. At seventy-three I have at last caught every aspect of nature–birds, fish, animals, insects, trees, grasses, all. When I am eighty I shall have developed still further and I will really master the secrets of art at ninety. When I reach a hundred my work will be truly sublime and my final goal will be attained around the age of one hundred and ten, when every line and dot I draw will be imbued with life. - from Hokusai’s ‘The Art Crazy Old Man” - Hokusai Katsushika

59. “Painting is a great outlet for those inner emotions you cannot get out any other way.” - Carol Brearley

60. “They will come, not to paint the bay and the sea and the boots and the moors, but the warmth of the sun and the colour of the wind. A whole new concept. Such stimulation. Such vitality.” - Rosamunde Pilcher

61. “This is a familiar syndrome. There is a stage with every drawing or painting when it looks banal and clumsy. It's worth pushing through that, working through the cliché to find out what made it a cliché in the first place.” - Antony Sher

62. “Glezniecība ir tik sasodīti grūta lieta, ka pietiek ko nomocīties jau ar krāsām, eļļu un terpentīnu un tāpēc modeļi sen patriekti no darbnīcām, lai nemaisās pa kājām! Modeļi nenozīmē neko citu kā vien kafijas plencēšanu, nebeidzamu muldēšanu un vazāšanos apkārt pa krogiem. Kad dienas darbs ir beidzies, tad krāsotājs ir tik nobeidzies, ka labi ja var ierāpties gultā. Un rītā ir atkal darba diena, kas prasa visus spēkus un briesmīgu uzmanību!” - Anšlavs Eglītis

63. “Painting is marvelous; it makes you happier and more patient. Afterwards you do not have black fingers as with writing, but blue and red ones.” - Hermann Hesse

64. “We must have design in a picture even at the expense of truth. You are using nature for your artistic needs.” - John F. Carlsons

65. “You have to work with the paint and work with whatever the day brings you. If it's a wee bit dreary out, you paint it. But paint it so it makes you glad to be inside near a cozy fire.” - Kieran Kramer

66. “It was strange walking through the empty apartment. My battered purple room was gone, Brittany’s bruised blue was gone. Two coats covered everything. It was like none of it had ever happened.” - Kimberly Novosel

67. “A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.” - Robert McKee

68. “Love is an art, Berk. Just like painting or music. Some painters draw mere lines, scratches on the canvas and call them art; some paint stars studded skies like van Gogh; or Chopin’s music conquers the hearts of millions while the execrable disco music blaring out of the open windows of a car have also their audience. Some describe love in high-flown flowery language and you identify yourself with the hero and the heroine and feel yourself in the seventh heaven while some give such a lamentable picture of it that you almost curse it!” - T. Afsin Ilgar

69. “She preferred the quiet solitary atmosphere, to create in her own world of paint and colour, the thrill of anticipating how her works would turn out as she eyed the blank sheets of paper or canvas before starting her next masterpiece. How satisfying it was to mess around in paint gear, without having to worry about spills, starch or frills, that was the life!” - E.A. Bucchianeri

70. “In painting, three things must be considered - the position of the viewer, the position of the object viewed, and the position of the light that illuminates the object.” - Lynn Cullen

71. “I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams.” - Zdzisław Beksiński

72. “I sat back and looked at it. It was ugly, dark, uncontrolled. Like a monster's face. Or maybe what I saw there was my own face. I couldn't quite tell. Was the face the image of something evil or the image of myself?"Both," Bea muttered, as if I'd spoken my question out loud. "Of course, it's both. But it shouldn't be. Goodness, no.” - Jennifer Brown

73. “Alma is in a painting phase, and the people she paints are all the color of mold, look like they've just been dredged from the bottom of a lake. Her last painting was of you, slouching against the front door: only your frowning I-had-a-lousy-Third-World-childhood-and-all-I-got-was-this-attitude eyes recognizable.” - Junot Diaz

74. “Fortunately for me, I know well enough what I want, and am basically utterly indifferent to the criticism that I work to hurriedly. In answer to that, I have done some things even more hurriedly theses last few days.” - Vincent Van Gogh

75. “I am the wood frame, the bundle of ox hair, and the creative spark... my value unhangable.” - Marina Leigh Duff

76. “All great art is praise.” - John Ruskin

77. “What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born. Her face, at once innocent and feral, soft and wild! Her mouth voluptuous. Eyes deep as oceans, her eyes as wide as planets. I likened her to the slender Psyché and judged that the perfection of her face ennobled everything unclean around her: the dusty hems of her bunched-up skirt, the worn straps of her nightshirt; the blackened soles of her tiny bare feet, the coal-stained balcony bricks upon which she sat, and that dusty wrought-ironwork that framed her perch. All this and the pungent air!—almost foul, with so many odors. Ô, that and the spicy night! …Pungency, spice, filth and night, dust and light; all things dark did blossom in sight; flower and bloom, the night has its pearl too—the moon! And once a month it will make the face of this tender girl bloom.” - Roman Payne

78. “Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception... as film is able to do today... And while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons, this mode of reception gives the masses no means of organizing and regulating their response. Thus, the same public which reacts progressively to a slapstick comedy inevitably displays a backward attitude toward Surrealism.” - Walter Benjamin

79. “... the house is on fire, but go ahead - finish painting the verandah...” - John Geddes

80. “Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity.” - Damien Hirst

81. “Whether I'm painting or not, I have this overweening interest in humanity. Even if I'm not working, I'm still analyzing people.” - Alice Neel

82. “Above all, he encourages her to paint, nodding with approval at even her most unusual experiments with color, light, rough brushwork [...]. She explains to him that she believes painting should reflect nature and life [...]. He nods, although he adds cautiously that he wouldn't want her to know too much about life - nature is a fine subject, but life is grimmer than she can understand. He thinks it is good for her to have something satisfying to do at home; he loves art himself; he sees her gift and wants her to be happy. He knows the charming Morisots. He has met the Manets, and always remarks that they are a good family, despite Édouard's reputation and his immoral experiments (he paints loose women), which make him perhaps too modern - a shame, given his obvious talent. In fact, Yves takes her to many galleries. They attend the Salon every year, with nearly a million other people, and listen to the gossip about favorite canvases and those critics disdain. Occasionally they stroll in the museums in the Louvre, where she sees art students copying paintings and sculpture, even an unchaperoned woman here and there (surely Americans). She can't quite bring herself to admire nudes in his presence, certainly not the heroic males; she knows she will never paint from a nude model herself. Her own formal training was in the private studios of an academican, copying from plaster casts with her mother present, before she married.” - Elizabeth Kostova

83. “Regarding the creative: never assume you're the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you're masterful.” - Don Roff

84. “...A painting was a translation of the language of my heart.” - Amy Tan

85. “Will you teach me how to paint?”“Just paint.”“I’m not any good.”“Do it for therapy. You can go to art school later.” - Benjamin Alire Saenz

86. “Paintings. Or the collapse of time in images.” - Paul Auster

87. “I see it, Jack. Your muse is back. The thing that gave you passion, tormented you, and haunted you is back. You're reeling in ecstasy and dread. It's something you want, but can't ever have. And the one that brings the pain is pure, white as snow... and standing in front of you.” - H.M. Ward

88. “Everyone who has any talent at all in sketching, painting, sculpturing or carving, should have the opportunity to use that talent. The expression is important for the person, and can tremendously enrich the lives of other people. What can you do?” - Edith Schaeffer