93 Inspiring Painting Quotes

Painting is not just about brushes and colors; it's a profound expression of the soul. Art has the power to transcend language, evoke emotions, and inspire individuals in countless ways. Whether you're an aspiring artist or simply someone who appreciates the beauty and depth of visual expression, quotes about painting can offer a unique perspective and motivation. In this collection, we've curated 93 of the most inspiring painting quotes to ignite your creativity and provide insight into the minds of renowned artists and thinkers. Let these words guide you on your artistic journey, encouraging you to see beyond the canvas and into the heart of human expression.

1. “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.” - Oscar Wilde

2. “Without atmosphere a painting is nothing.” - Rembrandt Harmenszoon Van Rijn

3. “I believe that art has a kind of rightness, as in music, when we hear whether or not a note is false” - Gerhard Richter

4. “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

5. “On and on they flew, over the countryside parceled out in patches of green and brown, over roads and rivers winding through the landscapes like strips of matte and glossy ribbon.” - J.K. Rowling

6. “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

7. “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

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

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

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. “If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.” - Grandma Moses

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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

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

18. “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

19. “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

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

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

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

23. “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

24. “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

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

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

27. “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

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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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.

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

33. “All real works of art look as though they were done in joy.” - Robert Henri

34. “It has been my personal experience that as I allow the painting to speak I become lost, it is delicious and at the same time frightening. The best ones, to me, have a life of their own.” - Luther E. Vann

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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “Being a painter, I ought to say why in pictures people's faces are painted green and red.” - Kazimir Severinovich Malevich

41. “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

42. “When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don't. I have a knack for disturbing.” - Jean Cocteau

43. “I haven't the slightest idea what art is, but to be a painter is something of which you have to prove.” - Wayne Thiebaud

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

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

46. “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

47. “The Dutch customs once thought my pictures were photos. Where on earth did they think I could have photographed my subjects? In Hell, perhaps?” - H.R. Giger

48. “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

49. “When you want to make the main color pure and bright, don't just keep adding bright colors on it. Just make the colors around the spot darker and dull. It will give the scene dramatical effects.I think the life is the same.” - Hiroko Sakai

50. “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

51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

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

56. “Writing, painting, singing- it cannot stop everything. Cannot halt death in its tracks. But perhaps it can make the pause between death’s footsteps sound and look and feel beautiful, can make the space of waiting a place where you can linger without as much fear. For we are all walking each other to our deaths, and the journey there between footsteps makes up our lives.” - Ally Condie

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “I intend to destroy, destroy everything that exists in painting. I have utter contempt for painting.” - Juan Miro

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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “It's often about the simple things, isn't it? Painting and photography are first about seeing, they say. Writing is about observing. Technique is secondary. Sometimes the simple is the most difficult.” - Linda Olsson

66. “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

67. “I must continue to follow the path I take now. If I do nothing, if I study nothing, if I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it — keep going, keep going come what may.But what is your final goal, you may ask. That goal will become clearer, will emerge slowly but surely, much as the rough draught turns into a sketch, and the sketch into a painting through the serious work done on it, through the elaboration of the original vague idea and through the consolidation of the first fleeting and passing thought.” - Vincent Van Gogh

68. “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

69. “He said, one has to learn that painting well - in the academic and technical sense - comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you've got that ability. So have thousands.” - John Fowles

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. “Now you are walking in Paris all alone in the crowd As herds of bellowing buses drive by Love's anguish tightens your throat As if you were never to be loved again If you lived in the old days you would enter a monasteryYou are ashamed when you discover yourself reciting a prayerYou make fun of yourself and like the fire of Hell your laughter crackles The sparks of your laugh gild the depths of your lifeIt's a painting hanging in a dark museumAnd sometimes you go and look at it close up” - Guillaume Apollinaire

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 don't like to make a distinction between the writer and the painter , finally , because I do both things anyway . Everybody's dreaming and trying to put down their dreams in the way that their hand knows best . I feel as much a unity , as much comradeship , with painters as I do writers .” - Clive Barker

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

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. “The biggest spur to my interest in art came when I played van Gogh in the biographical film Lust For Life. The role affected me deeply. I was haunted by this talented genius who took his own life, thinking he was a failure. How terrible to paint pictures and feel that no one wants them. How awful it would be to write music that no one wants to hear. Books that no one wants to read. And how would you like to be an actor with no part to play, and no audience to watch you. Poor Vincent—he wrestled with his soul in the wheat field of Auvers-sur-Oise, stacks of his unsold paintings collecting dust in his brother's house. It was all too much for him, and he pulled the trigger and ended it all. My heart ached for van Gogh the afternoon that I played that scene. As I write this, I look up at a poster of his "Irises"—a poster from the Getty Museum. It's a beautiful piece of art with one white iris sticking up among a field of blue ones. They paid a fortune for it, reportedly $53 million. And poor Vincent, in his lifetime, sold only one painting for 400 francs or $80 dollars today. This is what stimulated my interest in buying works of art from living artists. I want them to know while they are alive that I enjoy their paintings hanging on my walls, or their sculptures decorating my garden” - Kirk Douglas

83. “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

84. “He had been a boy who liked to draw, according to my friend, so he became an architect. Children who drew,I learned, became architects; I had thought they became painters. My friend explained that it was not proper to become a painter; it couldn’t be done. I resigned myself to architecture school and a long life of drawing buildings. It was a pity, for I disliked buildings, considering them only a stiffer and more ample form of clothing, and no more important.” - Annie Dillard

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

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

87. “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

88. “Stop looking at the walls, look out the window.” - Karl Pilkington

89. “I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime.” - Van Gogh on "The Night Cafe" painting

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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it means nothing. I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist. Why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?" -Pablo Picasso.” - Pablo Picasso