My eyes were finally opened and I understood nature. I learned at the same time to love it.
Most people think I paint fast. I paint very slowly.
The older I become the more I realize of that I have to work very hard to reproduce what I search: the instantaneous. The influence of the atmosphere on the things and the light scattered throughout.
One’s better off alone, and yet there are so many things that are impossible to fathom on one’s own. In fact it’s a terrible business and the task is a hard one.
Work is nearly always a torture. If I could find something else I would be much happier, because I could use this other interest as a form of relaxation. Now I cannot relax.
I’m in fine fettle and fired with a desire to paint.
I am very depressed and deeply disgusted with painting. It is really a continual torture.
My work is always better when I am alone and follow my own impressions.
If only the weather would improve, there’d be hope of some work, but every day brings rain.
I would love to do orange and lemon trees silhouetted against the blue sea, but I cannot find them the way I want them.
Apart from painting and gardening, I’m not good at anything.
I am enslaved to my work, always wanting the impossible, and never, I believe, have I been less favoured by the endlessly changeable weather.
For me, the subject is of secondary importance: I want to convey what is alive between me and the subject.
What is it that’s taken hold of me, for me to carry on like this in relentless pursuit of something beyond my powers?
I have made tremendous efforts to work in a darker register and express the sinister and tragic quality of the place, given my natural tendency to work in light and pale tones.
The Thames was all gold. God it was beautiful, so fine that I began working a frenzy, following the sun and its reflections on the water.
These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. It’s quite beyond my powers at my age, and yet I want to succeed in expressing what I feel.
No, I’m not a great painter. Neither am I a great poet.
I think only of my painting, and if I were to drop it, I think I’d go crazy.
Nature won’t be summoned to order and won’t be kept waiting. It must be caught, well caught.