In general it can be said that a nation’s art is greatest when it most reflects the character of its people.
So much of every art is an expression of the subconscious that it seems to me most of all the important qualities are put there unconsciously, and little of importance by the conscious intellect. But these are things for the psychologist to untangle.
The only real influence I’ve ever had was myself.
The question of the value of nationality in art is perhaps unsolvable.
Yes, linseed oil. I used to use poppy oil, but I have heard that poppy oil is given to cracking pigment too, so I use it no longer.
The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.
I use a retouching varnish which is made in France, Libert, and that’s all the varnish I use.
If I had the energy, I would have done it all over the county.
I have tried to present my sensations in what is the most congenial and impressive form possible to me.
In its most limited sense, modern, art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period.
Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature’s phenomena before it can again become great.
Well, I have a very simple method of painting.
After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.
If the technical innovations of the Impressionists led merely to a more accurate representation of nature, it was perhaps of not much value in enlarging their powers of expression.
I find in working always the disturbing intrusion of elements not a part of my most interested vision, and the inevitable obliteration and replacement of this vision by the work itself as it proceeds.
It’s to paint directly on the canvas without any funny business, as it were, and I use almost pure turpentine to start with, adding oil as I go along until the medium becomes pure oil. I use as little oil as I can possibly help, and that’s my method.
I trust Winsor and Newton and I paint directly upon it.
To me the most important thing is the sense of going on. You know how beautiful things are when you’re traveling.
Methods are transient: personality is enduring.
I once got a little camera to use for details of architecture and so forth but the photo was always so different from the perspective the eye gives, I gave it up.
Maybe I am not very human – all I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.