Art Quotes

“The flesh I paint is not polite. It's real, and it moves.”

“One must learn to see the beauty in ordinary things before one can paint it.”

“Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.”

“When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture.”

“I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may — light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.”

“The sound of water escaping from mill dams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork — I love such things.”

“There is no such thing as an ugly colour.”

“Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.”

“A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.”

“You can't do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh.”

“Colour is an inborn gift, but appreciation of value is merely training of the eye, which everyone ought to be able to acquire.”

“The thicker you paint, the more colour flows.”

“To draw is to learn to see.”

“The skills of drawing and painting are learnable, and learning them changes the way you see the world.”

“Art is about changing what we see in our everyday lives and representing it in such a way that it gives us hope.”

“Painting is about the world that we live in. Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them.”

“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.”

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

“The painter has the universe in his mind and hands.”

“A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.”

“Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.”

“Art is never finished, only abandoned.”

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

“I like paintings that fight with themselves.”

“Colour is where a painting's real decisions get made.”

“I paint people not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be.”

“The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.”

“I would wish my pictures to look of the flesh, not of the eye.”

“As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does.”

“If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.”