50 Canvas Quotes for Your Inspiration

By Norbert Juma | Published December 15, 2022

Looking for the best canvas quotes to inspire you?

The quotes below will motivate you to live your dream of painting on a canvas.

If you are interested in creating a piece of art with a canvas, we have also discussed what canvas is and how to use it.

Follow these tips to start using a canvas.

What is Canvas?

Canvas is a type of fabric, which is created for painting purposes.

It’s a plain and durable piece of fabric made of hemp yarn or cotton.

Artists use canvas to create paintings and crafts.

Nearly every popular painting that you have seen around the world is made on canvas.

Types of Canvases for Painting

When it comes to types of canvases, there are numerous.

The first difference relates to the thickness of the fabric.

Most beginners prefer cheaper canvases.

However, these canvases don’t offer the best possible results.

Experienced artists prefer a high-quality canvas, as it provides the required texture and finishes to their paintings.

Here are the different types of canvases.

Oil Canvas
Absorbent Canvas
Universal Canvas
Stretched and Unstretched Canvas

Oil Canvas

Oil canvas is a preferred choice for oil painting.

To create an oil canvas, zinc white is used as a primer.

Then it is bounded with the linseed oil.

The canvas is then dried in a drying room.

It takes three days for the oil canvas to dry.

Absorbent Canvas

These types of canvases are made of chalk (two primer layers).

Then, it is glued to the rabbit skin.

The canvas can be dried in an oven.

Absorbent canvas can be used for different paints, including acrylic and water-based.

Universal Canvas

This type of canvas is made by a similar procedure used for creating an absorbent canvas.

However, instead of chalk, titanium white is used as a base.

Stretched and Unstretched Canvas

There are two other types of unpainted canvases, depending on their structure.

These include stretched and unstretched canvas panels.

The unstretched canvas can be cut into the desired size.

For this purpose, this type of canvas isn’t fixed to a wooden frame.

On the other hand, stretched canvas comes in a specific size.

These panels are easy to work with, as they are properly stretched to give a perfect surface for painting.

If you are looking for a ready-to-use canvas, stretched canvas is the option to consider.

If you enjoy this article, check out our collection of graffiti quotes to enhance life’s canvas.

Top 10 Canvas Quotes

Our top ten section brings the best canvas quotes for you. These quotes might appear short, but they are powerful enough to inspire you.

1. “An empty canvas is full.” — Robert Rauschenberg

2. “This world is but a canvas to our imagination.” — Henry David Thoreau

3. “Life is a great big canvas; throw all the paint you can at it.” — Danny Kaye

4. “The animation of the canvas is one of the hardest problems of painting.” — Alfred Sisley

Related 20 Hilarious Idiocracy Quotes

5. “All I try to do is put as many colors as I can on the canvas every night.” — Leslie Odom, Jr

6. “I love putting paint on canvas, getting lost in the process of painting.” — Paul Simonon

7. “The colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas.” — Edvard Munch

8. “I am but a blank canvas, because everyone interprets you in a different way, and I think that’s quite nice.” — Davina McCall

9. “Your life is your canvas, and you are the masterpiece. There are a million ways to be kind, amazing, fabulous, creative, bold, and interesting.” — Kerli

10. “Even though I know who I am, musically I’m a blank canvas. I know what colors I want to use, but I don’t know what picture I want to paint yet.” — Becky G

Canvas Quotes for the True Artists

The canvas quotes listed below are specifically compiled for the artists. So, artists are gonna love these quotes.

11. “You should treat your body like a canvas.” — Theophilus London

12. “Star Trek’ ushered in the end of the Westerns. Then the canvas switched to the sci-fi canvas.” — John de Lancie

13. “And I usually use myself as a model, posing in front of a mirror as I dab the strokes on the canvas.” — Cleo Moore

14. “When I’m stressed or I have some things I have to get off my mind, I go to the canvas and I paint.” — Vernon Davis

15. “Women are not in love with me but with the picture of me on the screen. I am merely the canvas on which women paint their dreams.” — Rudolph Valentino

16. “Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.” — Ed Koch

17. “I love to create, and to me, the ultimate freedom of expression is a blank canvas or a block of clay to capture whatever emotions your imagination gives it.” — Daniel Boulud

18. “I sometimes have a horrible fear of turning up a canvas of mine. I’m always afraid of finding a monster in place of the precious jewels I thought I had put there.” — Camille Pissarro

19. “My philosophy is that I’m an artist. I perform an art not with a paint brush or a camera. I perform with bodily movement. Instead of exhibiting my art in a museum or a book or on canvas, I exhibit my art in front of the multitudes.” — Steve Prefontaine

20. “Fashion is kinda a joke. I don’t get too bogged down in the clothes. For me, it’s one big art project, just a canvas to show that fashion should have a brand which has someone behind it who cares about different contexts. Social things.” — Virgil Abloh

Canvas Quotes to Encourage Creativity

A canvas serves as a medium to exhibit one’s creativity. The canvas quotes are listed here compiled mainly to encourage your creativity.

21. “I put on the canvas whatever comes into my mind.” — Frida Kahlo

22. “It’s so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas.” — Paul Cezanne

23. “Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.” — Voltaire

24. “An empty canvas is a living wonder… far lovelier than certain pictures.” — Wassily Kandinsky

25. “I’m doing the shows. The stage is my canvas; I’ll put whatever up there for the visible eye.” — MF Doom

26. “A revised schedule is to business what a new season is to an athlete or a new canvas to an artist.” — Norman Ralph Augustine

27. “As free and crazy as we want to be, and how much we want to make the world a canvas, there’s also a part of us that doesn’t want to make any mark.” — Gerard Way

28. “Winners have the ability to step back from the canvas of their lives like an artist gaining perspective. They make their lives a work of art – an individual masterpiece.” — Denis Waitley

29. “I believe that the great painters with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions.” — Edward Hopper

30. “It’s a marvelous life, a gregarious life that we’ve had. We’re very lucky in that way. Unlike writers or painters, we don’t sit down in front of a blank canvas and say, ‘How do I start? Where do I start?” — Albert Finney

Canvas Quotes with Beautiful Meanings

There are some canvas quotes that are easy to understand and beautiful. A few such canvas quotes are listed below.

31. “A great artist can paint a great picture on a small canvas.” — Charles Dudley Warner

32. “Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper the photographer begins with the finished product.” — Edward Steichen

33. “Preliminary drawings or sketches in oil or pastel often have an immediacy and emotional appeal far greater than the final canvas.” — Paul Mellon

34. “The mobile-first, cloud-first is a very rich canvas for innovation – it is not the device that is mobile, it is the person that is mobile.” — Satya Nadella

35. “If you put a blank canvas in front of Matisse and say, ‘This has to be a success,’ who’s going to pick up a paintbrush.” — Marianne Elliott

36. “With this film, ‘Need For Speed,’ with this, we had a blank canvas to work with. What we had to do was have fast cars, and that’s it.” — Aaron Paul

37. “When I begin, theoretically and practically I can smear anything I want on the canvas. Then there’s a condition I have to react to, by changing it or destroying it.” — Gerhard Richter

38. “My philosophy through all my work, be it on canvas or on the street, is about pushing boundaries and not going with the flow because everyone else is doing something a certain way.” — Ben Eine

39. “Perfect isn’t normal, nor is it interesting. I have no features without makeup. I am pale. I have blond lashes. You could just paint my face – it’s like a blank canvas. It can be great for what I do.” — Amy Adams

40. “When you do a pop album, the canvas is completely yours. There is no story situation forced on to your songs – you have the freedom to develop it right from the concept.” — Shankar Mahadevan

Canvas Quotes that are on Another Level

Reading these canvas quotes is so amazing that you would find yourself in another world. If you think it’s an exaggeration, just see for yourself by reading the quotes below.

41. “Shapewear is the canvas and the clothes are the art.” — Sara Blakely

42. “In film, you’re painting a canvas. I got really excited about that.” — Alice Lowe

43. “Cover the canvas at the first go, then work at it until you see nothing more to add.” — Camille Pissarro

44. “I want to do just, like, regular art. Whatever is made today on canvas goes up against all of art history. It’s the most radical thing.” — Barry McGee

45. “By itself, tofu is like wet foam rubber, but you’d no more eat it by itself and expect fine dining than you would stare at a blank canvas and expect to see fine art.” — Victoria Moran

46. “I think when you work alone – the way I do it, anyway – you could sort of liken it to painting, where there’s sort of a one-on-one with the canvas.” — Lindsey Buckingham

47. “Life is a canvas of many strokes where shades from different palettes meet into a picture so concrete that some forget it is their own, so become framed themselves.” — Vanna Bonta

48. “It’s like suddenly the canvas of my life has been cleared, and a completely new picture is painted. That’s how I’ve been feeling ever since ‘Sacred Games’ was streamed.” — Kubra Sait

49. “But it’s like the horror of being in a studio with a blank canvas. I used to always run out of ideas because there are so many possibilities and I would just think, well what am I going to do now.” — Damien Hirst

50. “You know when you take the paint off an old canvas and you discover that something’s been painted underneath it? That’s what I feel like – that part of the old is coming through the new.” — Carly Simon