I am working with the enthusiasm of a man from Marseilles eating bouillabaisse, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to you because I am busy painting huge sunflowers.
Be clearly aware of the stars and infinity on high. Then life seems almost enchanted after all.
Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.
I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it.
But you people do not understand me, and I am afraid you never will.
The Mediterranean has the color of mackerel, changeable I mean. You don’t always know if it is green or violet, you can’t even say it’s blue, because the next moment the changing reflection has taken on a tint of rose or gray.
The painter of the future will be a colorist unlike anything yet.
Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before me, I make an arbitrary use of color to express myself more forcefully.
Gauguin says that when sailors have to move a heavy load or raise an anchor, they all sing together to keep them up and give them vim. That’s just what artists lack!
God sends us pieces of art so that we may see ourselves in them.
We must not judge God from this world. It’s just a study that didn’t come off. It’s only a master who could make such a blunder.
It is the painting that makes me so happy these days.
There is a sun, a light that for want of another word I can only call yellow, pale sulphur yellow, pale golden citron. How lovely yellow is!
As long as autumn lasts, I shall not have hands, canvas and colors enough to paint the beautiful things I see.
Conscience is a man’s compass, and though the needle sometimes deviates, though one often perceives irregularities in directing one’s course by it, still one must try to follow its direction.
Painting as it is now promises to become more subtle – more like music and less like sculpture – and above all it promises color. If only it keeps this promise.
When I have a model who is quiet and steady and with whom I am acquainted, then I draw repeatedly ’til there is one drawing that is different from the rest, which does not look like an ordinary study, but more typical and with more feeling.
Seeing that I am so busily occupied with myself just now, I want to try to paint my self-portrait in writing.
To know life, one must love many things.
I work even in the middle of the day, in the full sunshine, and I enjoy it like a cicada.
Ah, Manet has come very, very close to it and Courbet – the marrying of form and colour.