Painting is founded on the heart controlled by the head.
Everything is about to disappear. You’ve got to hurry up if you still want to see things.
All the theories mess you up inside.
My nervous system is very much weakened – nothing but painting in oil can keep me going.
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.
Whoever the master is whom you prefer, this must only be a directive for you. Otherwise you will never be anything but an imitator.
Literature expresses itself by abstractions, whereas painting, by means of drawing and colour, gives concrete shape to sensations and perceptions.
Pleasure must be found in study.
I am not altogether displeased with the shirt-front.
There is no such thing as an amateur artist as different from a professional artist. There is only good art and bad art.
To achieve progress nature alone counts, and the eye is trained through contact with her. It becomes concentric by looking and working.
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.
One must see one’s model correctly and experience it in the right way; and furthermore express oneself forcibly and with distinction.
See nature in terms of the cone, the cylinder, and the sphere.
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.
I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature.
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.
We must not be content to memorize the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go out and study beautiful nature.
I paint as if I were Rothschild.
I am still searching for the expression of those confused sensations that we bring with us at birth.