I am no friend of present-day Christianity, though its Founder was sublime.
I felt my energy return and that I said to myself, in any event I’ll recover from it, I’ll pick up my pencil that I put down in my great discouragement and I’ll get back to drawing, and from then on, it seems to me, everything has changed for me.
I feel a certain calm. There is safety in the midst of danger. What would life be if we didn’t dare to take things in hand?
Art is something greater and higher than our own skill or knowledge or learning. That art is something which, though produced by human hands, is not wrought by hands alone, but wells up from a deeper source, from a man’s soul.
That this awareness of my own fallibility will prevent me from making many mistakes doesn’t alter the fact that I’m bound to make a great many mistakes anyway. But if we fall, we get up again!
I shouldn’t precisely have chosen madness if there had been any choice, but once such a thing has taken hold of you, you can’t very well get out of it.
How rich art is, if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never empty of thoughts or truly lonely, never alone.
Accurate drawing, accurate colour, is perhaps not the essential thing to aim at, because the reflection of reality in a mirror, if it could be caught, colour and all, would not be a picture at all, no more than a photograph.
It is no more easy to make a good picture than it is to find a diamond or a pearl. It means trouble and you risk your life for it.
The only thing to do is to go one’s own way, to try one’s best, to make the thing live.
I hope I shall be able to make some drawings in which there is something human.
The more I become decomposed, the more sick and fragile I am, the more I become an artist.
If the storm within gets too loud, I take a glass too much to stun myself.
In a sense I’m glad that I’ve never learned how to paint.
The best pictures are always those one dreams of when one is smoking a pipe in bed, but which never get done. But still one ought to try, however incompetent one may feel before the unspeakable perfection and radiant splendour of nature.
I take great care of myself by carefully shutting myself away.
But you must love with a sublime, genuine, profound sympathy, with devotion, with intelligence, and you must try all the time to understand Him more, better and yet more. That will lead to God, that will lead to an unshakeable faith .
One must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.
As a painter I shall never signify anything of importance. I feel it Absolutely.
Perhaps someday everyone will have neurosis.