Quote

The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.

— Annie Dillard

Sentiment: NEGATIVE

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✓Similar Perspectives

There does not exist a painter who knows himself or knows what he is doing.

— Marcel Duchamp

A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure.

— Lucian Freud

Every good painter paints what he is.

— Jackson Pollock

What the artist owes the world is his work; not a model for living.

— Harry Crews

A painter's tastes must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what it is suitable for him to do in art.

— Lucian Freud

✗Opposing Perspectives

I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason.

— Jasper Johns

The painter should paint not only what he has in front of him, but also what he sees inside himself.

— Caspar David Friedrich

I work as an artist, and I think the audience of one, which is the self, and I have to satisfy myself as an artist. So I always say that I write for the same people that Picasso painted for. I think he painted for himself.

— August Wilson

Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

— Jackson Pollock

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

— Henry Ward Beecher