Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914), The Devil's Dictionary

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt (1822 - 1896)

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward¹ Beecher (1813 - 1887), Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock (1912 - 1956)

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin, Northern Exposure, Fish Story, 1994

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent (1856 - 1925), quoted in Bentley and Esar, Treasury² of Humorous Quotations³ (1951)

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475 - 1564)

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited⁴ it.

Miguel de Cervantes (1547 - 1616), Exemplary Novels (1613)

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)

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

Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides (556 BC - 468 BC)

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes