Yquotes.com

 

A painter paints his pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. We provide the music, and you provide the silence.
--
Addressing an audience at Carnegie Hall, as quoted in The New York Times (11 May 1967); often this is quoted without the humorous final sentence.

 

Leopold Stokowski

» Leopold Stokowski - all quotes »

Similar quotes

 

You get pictures in pre-season. You get pictures of fitness, you get pictures of attitude, you get pictures of mentality, you get pictures of systems and the way players play and you also get pictures of whether people can step up to the plate in the Premier League. I was getting all those pictures in the first half

 

Phil Brown

 

Silence can shatter the trivialized deity that has occupied our imaginations and provide God the canvas to begin a new work in our souls.

 

Skye Jethani

 

Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter "repented," changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again. That is all I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.

 

Lillian Hellman

 

I considered that the painter’s personality should be kept out of things, and therefore pictures should be anonymous. It was I who decided that pictures should not be signed, and for a time Picasso did the same. I thought that from the moment someone else could do the same as myself, there was no difference between the pictures and they should not be signed. Afterwards I realized it was not so and began to sign my pictures again. Picasso had begun again anyhow. I realized that one cannot reveal oneself without mannerism, without some evident trace of one’s personality. But all the same one should not go too far in that direction..

 

Georges Braque

 

I paint very large pictures. I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them however, - I think it applies to other painters I know -, is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the lager picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command.

 

Mark Rothko