One of my favorite people to quote when it comes to art, is Winston Churchill:
When I die and go to heaven, I want to spend the first million years painting – so I can get to the bottom of the subject.
Painting is a companion with whom one may walk a great part of life’s journey.
Painting a picture is like trying to fight a battle.
A heightened sense of the observation of nature is one of the chief delights that have come to me through trying to paint.
There is no better exercise than to study and devour a picture, and then, without looking at it again, to attempt the next day to reproduce it.
Light and colour, peace and hope, will keep painters company to the end of the day.
The painter wanders and loiters contentedly from place to place, always on the lookout for some brilliant butterfly of a picture which can be caught and carried safely home.
Happy are the painters, for they shall not be lonely.
(when trying to paint a pale blue sky) My hand seemed arrested by a silent veto.
Armed with a paint-box, one cannot be bored, one cannot be left at a loose end, one cannot ‘have several days on one’s hands.’
The first one is from Claude Monet:
"… not to paint the subject, but to paint what´s between me and the subject…"
The second one I do not know who said this, or where I read it, sorry, but I find it so liberating:
“A perfect (executed) painting may not be good (“alive”) and a good painting may not be perfect”.
To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.
Pablo Picasso
Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.
Pablo Picasso