From Marion Boddy-Evans,
Your Guide to Painting.
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"Above all keep your colours fresh!"
Edouard Manet (1832--83).

"Treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth ... Lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth."
Paul Cézanne (1839--1906).

"When I've painted a woman's bottom so that I want to touch it, then [the painting] is finished."
Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841--1919).

"An empty canvas, apparently really empty, that says nothing and is without significance. Almost dull, in fact. In reality, however, [it's] crammed with thousands of undertone tensions and [is] full of expectancy. Slightly apprehensive lest it should be outraged ... It can contain anything but cannot sustain everything ... An empty canvas is a living wonder -- far lovelier than certain pictures."
Wassily Kandinsky.

"It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing."
Mark Rothko (1903--1970).

"I disklike a picture that is too suave or too skilfully done. But, contrariwise, I also dislike a picture that looks too inept or blundering."
Robert Motherwell (1915--1991).

"The essential of painting is that something, that 'ethereal glue,' that intermediary product which the artist secrets with all his creative being and which he has the power to place, to encrust, to impregnate into the pictorial stuff of the painting."
Yves Klein (1928--1962).

"On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting."
Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), on drip painting.

"Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job."
Andy Warhol (1928-87).

"An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have but that he -- for some reason] -- thinks it would be a good idea to give them."
Andy Warhol (1928-87).

“I never decided at all to be an artist; being an artist seems to have happened to me.”
Anne Truitt

“If [dabbling in art] didn’t amuse me, I beg you to believe that I wouldn’t do it.”
Renoir

"The painter makes real to others his innermost feelings about all that he cares for. A secret becomes known to everyone who views the picture through the intensity with which it is felt."
Lucien Freud.

"I paint forms as I think them, not as I see them."
Picasso.