It took me time to understand my water lilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them.
My life has been nothing but a failure.
I’ve spent so long on some paintings that I no longer know what to think of them, and I am definitely getting harder to please; nothing satisfies me...
I say that whoever claims to have finished a canvas is terribly arrogant.
As for myself, I met with as much success as I ever could have wanted. In other words, I was enthusiastically run-down by every critic of the period.
Gardening was something I learned in my youth when I was unhappy. I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
I don’t think I’m made for any earthly kind of pleasure.
I get madder and madder on giving back what I feel.
No one but myself knows the anxiety I go through and the trouble I give myself to finish paintings which do not satisfy me and seem to please so very few others.
The point is to know how to use the colours, the choice of which is, when all’s said and done, a matter of habit.
For almost two months now I’ve been struggling away with no result.
I let a good many mistakes show through when fixing my sensations. It will always be the same and this is what makes me despair.
I’m going to get down to a still life on a size 50 canvas of rayfish and dogfish with old fishermen’s baskets. Then I’m going to turn out a few pictures to send wherever possible, given that now, first and foremost – unfortunately – I have to earn some money.
Despite my exhaustion I have a devil of a time getting to sleep because of the rats above my bed and a pig who lives beneath my room...
Getting up at 4 in the morning, I slave away all day until by the evening I’m exhausted, and I end by forgetting all my responsibilities, thinking only of the work I’ve set out to do.
It is only too easy to catch people’s attention by doing something worse than anyone else has dared to do it before.
What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence.
Water Lilies’ is an extension of my life. Without the woter the lilies cannot live, as I am without art.
When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field or whatever. Merely think here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape.
The essence of the motif is the mirror of water, whose appearance alters at every moment.
I am installed in a fairylike place. I do not know where to poke my head; everything is superb, and I would like to do everything, so I use up and squander lots of color, for there are trials to be made.