PAINTING QUOTES

Abstract art is only painting. What about drama?

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else. After all, what is a painter? He is a collector who gets what he likes in others by painting them himself. 

I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

It is my misfortune - and probably my delight - to use things as my passions tell me. What a miserable fate for a painter who adores blondes to have to stop himself putting them into a picture because they don't go with the basket of fruit!

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.

Nature does many things the way I do, but she hides them! 

Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us.

There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence transform a yellow spot into a sun.

When I don't have red, I use blue.