When using colors to recreate a general harmony of tones in nature, one loses it by painfully exact imitation. One keeps it by recreating in an equivalent color range, and that may not be exactly, or far from exactly, like the model.
What preys on my mind is simply this one question: what am I good for, could I not be of service or use in some way?
How right it is to love flowers and the greenery of pines and ivy and hawthorn hedges; they have been with us from the very beginning.
We are surrounded by poetry on all sides...
Fortunately for me, I know well enough what I want, and am basically utterly indifferent to the criticism that I work to hurriedly. In answer to that, I have done some things even more hurriedly theses last few days.
But are not this struggle and even the mistakes one may make better, and do they not develop us more, than if we kept systematically away from emotions?
If we study Japanese art, we see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time doing what? He studies a single blade of grass.
It is the language of nature to which one has to listen.
We spent our whole lives in unconsous excercise of the art of expressing our thoughts with the help of words.
If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?
The victory one would gain after a whole life of work and effort is better than one that is gained sooner.
Ah! Portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.
Love a friend, love a wife, something, whatever you like, but one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence, and one must always try to know deeper, better, and more.
Everywhere we look, complex magic of nature blazes before our eyes.
I want to paint what I feel, and feel what I paint.
But on the road that I’m on I must continue; if I do nothing, if I don’t study, if I don’t keep on trying, then I’m lost, then woe betide me. That’s how I see this, to keep on, keep on, that’s what’s needed.
An artist need not be a minister or a collector in church, but he must have a warm heart for people, and I find it a noble thing that, for example, no winter passed without The Graphic doing something to keep alive sympathy for the poor.
It is good to love many things.
To try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another, in a picture.
For me work is an absolute necessity, indeed I can’t really drag it out, I take no more pleasure in anything than in work, that’s to say, pleasure in other things stops immediately and I become melancholy if I can’t get on with the work.