Quote

I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.

— Samuel Johnson

Sentiment: NEGATIVE

←Previous Next→

✓Similar Perspectives

My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.

— Agnes Martin

I'm never interested in the painting being a mirror to culture. I think that's really boring. What I'm interested in is painting as an affective space. The place where the hierarchies of the world can be rearranged within the space of a painting. And they can be articulated in different ways.

— Dana Schutz

When I paint a person, his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness.

— Edvard Munch

I have got pictures all around the rooms I sit in. I have got a very mad picture of a dog standing on a black thing on a piece of rope. It was drawn and painted by a Romanian poet who was under house arrest, and it is terrific.

— Jennifer Johnston

Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

— Max Ernst

The dog is the perfect portrait subject. He doesn't pose. He isn't aware of the camera.

— Patrick Demarchelier

✗Opposing Perspectives

I will always find even the worst paintings that attempt some kind of representation better than the best invented paintings.

— Balthus

I've had encounters with animals that have been really mystical. I've always been really into animals. But the way they appear in the paintings, they come from my mind's eye more than: 'I'm gonna draw a dog now.' It isn't thought out: 'Now I'm gonna draw a bird.' They just appear.

— John Lurie

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.

— Brian Eno

I like the idea that paintings are not representations of an artist's psyche. Making the paintings is what gives the artist her psyche in the first place.

— Shea Hembrey