Color is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment.
Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.
Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it.
For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life – the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.
To see we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at.
Light is the most important person in the picture.
I want the unobtainable. Other artists paint a bridge, a house, a boat, and that’s the end. They are finished. I want to paint the air which surrounds the bridge, the house, the boat, the beauty of the air in which these objects are located, and that is nothing short of impossible.
Paint what you really see, not what you think you ought to see; not the object isolated as in a test tube, but the object enveloped in sunlight and atmosphere, with the blue dome of Heaven reflected in the shadows.
The light constantly changes, and that alters the atmosphere and beauty of things every minute.
I must have flowers, always, and always.
I haven’t many years left ahead of me and I must devote all my time to painting, in the hope of achieving something worthwhile in the end, something if possible that will satisfy me.
All I did was to look at what the universe showed me, to let my brush bear witness to it.
It’s on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.
It is better to have done something than to have been someone.
I didn’t become an impressionist. As long as I can remember I always have been one.
I’ve done what I could as a painter and that seems to me to be sufficient. I don’t want to be compared to the great masters of the past, and my painting is open to criticism; that’s enough.
Zaandam has enough to paint for a lifetime.
It is a tragedy that we live in a world where physical courage is so common, and moral courage is so rare.