Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The sun penetrates me soundlessly like a distant friend that stirs up my laziness, fertilizes it. We bring forth life.
There is no such thing as an amateur artist as different from a professional artist. There is only good art and bad art.
You say a new era in art is preparing; you sensed it coming; continue your studies without weakening. God will do the rest.
I am progressing very slowly, for nature reveals herself to me in very complex forms; and the progress needed is incessant.
There is a logic of colors, and it is with this alone, and not with the logic of the brain, that the painter should conform.
With a painter's temperament, all that's needed are the means of expression sufficient to be intelligible to the wide public.
When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.
One had to immerse oneself in one's surroundings and intensely study nature or one's subject to understand how to recreate it.
Here, on the river's verge, I could be busy for months without changing my place, simply leaning a little more to right or left.
The approbation of others is a stimulus of which one must sometimes be wary. The feeling of one's own strength makes one modest.
Whoever the master is whom you prefer, this must only be a directive for you. Otherwise you will never be anything but an imitator.
We must not be content to memorize the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go out and study beautiful nature.
Doubtless there are things in nature which have not yet been seen. If an artist discovers them, he opens the way for his successors.
One must see one's model correctly and experience it in the right way; and furthermore express oneself forcibly and with distinction.
I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses. I have not the magnificent richness of colouring that animates nature.
To achieve progress nature alone counts, and the eye is trained through contact with her. It becomes concentric by looking and working.
Drawing and color are by no means two different things. As you paint, you draw... When color is at its richest, form is at its fullest.
The landscape becomes human, becomes a thinking, living being within me. I become one with my picture...we merge in an iridescent chaos.
What is one to think of those fools who tell one that the artist is always subordinate to nature? Art is a harmony parallel with nature.
Nature is more depth than surface, the colours are the expressions on the surface of this depth; they rise up from the roots of the world.
What I am trying to translate to you is more mysterious, it is entwined in the very roots of being, in the implacable source of sensations.
It is necessary to introduce light vibrations, represented by reds and yellows, and a sufficient amount of blues, to obtain an airy feeling.
The strong experience of nature... is the necessary basis for all conception of art on which rests the grandeur and beauty of all future work.
Literature expresses itself by abstractions, whereas painting, by means of drawing and colour, gives concrete shape to sensations and perceptions.
Sometimes I imagine colors as if they were living ideas, being of pure reason with which to communicate. Nature is not on the surface, it is deep down.
Talks on art are almost useless. The work which goes to bring progress in one's own subject is sufficient compensation for the incomprehension of imbeciles.
The Louvre is a good book to consult, but it must only be an intermediary. The real and immense study that must be taken up is the manifold picture of nature.
If I were called upon to define briefly the word Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the senses preceive in nature, seen through the veil of the soul.
Everything in nature is formed upon the sphere, the cone and the cylinder. One must learn to paint these simple figures and then one can do all that he may wish.
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.
I wished to copy nature. I could not. But I was satisfied when I discovered the sun, for instance, could not be reproduced, but only represented by something else.
To be sure an artist wishes to raise his standard intellectually as much as possible, but the man must remain in obscurity. Pleasure must be found in the studying.
One is neither too scrupulous nor too sincere nor too submissive to nature; but one is more or less master of one's model, and, above all, of the means of expression.
I have to keep working, not to arrive at finish, which arouses the admiration of fools... I must seek completion only for the pleasure of being truer and more knowing.
I am beginning to consider myself stronger than all those around me, and you know that the good opinion I have of myself has only been reached after mature consideration.
An art which isn't based on feeling isn't an art at all... feeling is the principle, the beginning and the end; craft, objective, technique - all these are in the middle.
Under this fine rain I breathe in the innocence of the world. I feel coloured by the nuances of infinity. At this moment I am one with my picture. We are an iridescent chaos.
One can do good things without being very much of a harmonist or a colourist. It is sufficient to have a sense of art - and this sense is doubtless the horror of the bourgeois.
I'd like to combine melancholy and sunshine... There's a sadness in Provence which no one has expressed... I'd like to put reason in the grass and tears in the sky, like Poussin.
Michelangelo is a constructor, and Rafael an artist who, great as he is, is always limited by the model. When he tries to be thoughtful he falls below the niveau of his great rival.
Design and color are not distinct and separate. As one paints, one draws. The more the colors harmonize, the more the design takes form. When color is at it's richest, form is at its fullest.
See how the light tenderly love the apricots, it takes them over completely, enters into their pulp, light them from all sides! But it is miserly with the peaches and light only one side of them.
Painting, like any art, comprises a technique, a workmanlike handling of material, but the accuracy of a tone and the fictitious combination of effects depend entirely on the choice made by the artist.
Drawing and color are not separate at all; in so far as you paint, you draw. The more color harmonizes, the more exact the drawing becomes. When the color achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also
An optical impression is produced on our organs of sight which makes us classify as light, half-tone or quartertone, the surfaces represented by colour sensations. So that light does not exist for the painter.
Surely, a single bunch of carrots painted naively, just as we personally see it, is worth all the endless banalities of the Schools, all those dreary pictures concocted out of tobacco juice according to time-honored formulas?
I should have wished to possess the intellectual equilibrium that characterizes you and permits you to achieve without fail the desired end... Chance has not favoured me with an equal self-assurance, it is the only regret I have about things of this earth.
Everything vanishes, falls apart, doesn't it? Nature is always the same but nothing in her that appears to us lasts. Our art must render the thrill of her permanence, along with her elements, the appearance of all her changes. It must give us a taste of her Eternity.
The artist must scorn all judgment that is not based on an intelligent observation of character. He must beware of the literary spirit which so often causes a painting to deviate from its true path - the concrete study of nature - to lose itself all too long in intangible speculations.
Here on the edge of the river, the motifs are very plentiful, the same subject seen from a different angle gives a subject for study of the highest interest and so varied that I think I could be occupied for months without changing my place, simply bending a little more to the right or left.