When an artist or student draws a nude figure with painstaking care, the result is drawing, and not emotion.
The artist has to look at life as he did when he was a child. If he loses that faculty, he cannot express himself in an original, that is, a personal way.
When you’re out of willpower you call on stubbornness, that’s the trick.
Color exists in itself, possessing its own beauty.
Drawing is putting a line around an idea.
Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting should begin by cutting out his own tongue.
Exactitude is not truth.
An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language.
Truth and reality in art do not arise until you no longer understand what you are doing and are capable of but nevertheless sense a power that grows in proportion to your resistance.
You study, you learn, but you guard the original naivete. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.
What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter – a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.
I don’t know whether I believe in God or not. I think, really, I’m some sort of Buddhist. But the essential thing is to put oneself in a frame of mind which is close to that of prayer.
Nothing can be accomplished without love.
Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.
I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.
Seeing is in itself a creative act which requires effort.
The essential thing is to spring forth, to express the bolt of lightning one senses upon contact with a thing. The function of the artist is not to translate an observation but to express the shock of the object on his nature; the shock, with the original reaction.
I wouldn’t mind turning into a vermilion goldfish.
An artist is an explorer.
Above all, an artist must never be too easily satisfied with what he has done...