With all their damned talk of modern painting, I’ve been forty years discovering that the queen of all colours is black!
I want a red to be sonorous, to sound like a bell. If it doesn’t turn out that way, I add more reds and other colors until I get it.
Why should beauty be suspect?
The purpose of painting is to decorate the walls. Therefore it has to be as rich as possible.
With a limited palette, the older painters could do just as well as today what they did was sounder.
They tell you that a tree is only a combination of chemical elements. I prefer to believe that God created it, and that it is inhabited by a nymph.
Everybody has their reasons.
The only reward one should offer an artist is to buy his work.
One must from time to time attempt things that are beyond one’s capacity.
I just keep painting till I feel like pinching. Then I know it’s right.
Nothing costs so little, goes so far, and accomplishes so much as a single act of merciful service.
An artist must eat sparingly and give up a normal way of life.
I had wrung impressionism dry and I finally came to the conclusion that I know neither how to paint nor how to draw.
If the painter works directly from nature, he ultimately looks for nothing but momentary effects; he does not try to compose, and soon he gets monotonous.
The so-called ‘discoveries’ of the Impressionists could not have been unknown to the old masters; and if they made no use of them, it was because all great artists have renounced the use of effects. And in simplifying nature, they made it all the greater.
You haven’t time to think about the composition. In working directly from nature, the painter ends up by simply aiming at an effect, and not composing the picture at all; and he soon becomes monotonous.
Out-of-doors there is a greater variety of light than in the studio, where the light is always the same. But that is just the trouble; one is carried away by the light, and besides, one can’t see what one is doing.
People will keep on taking them for theorists, when all they wanted was to paint in gay, bright colours, like the old masters.
You come to nature with all her theories, and she knocks them all flat.
What seems most significant to me about our movement is that we have freed painting from the importance of the subject. I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them flowers, without their needing to tell a story.
The simplest subjects are the immortal ones.