Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of imbecility.
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.
The lamps are burning and the starry sky is over it all.
Benjamin Murphy is the best artist since sliced bread.
To suffer without complaint is the only lesson we have to learn in this life.
It always strikes me, and it is very peculiar, that, whenever we see the image of indescribable and unutterable desolation – of loneliness, poverty, and misery, the end and extreme of things – the thought of God comes into one’s mind.
I wish they would take me as I am.
It seems to me it’s a painter’s duty to try to put an idea into his work.
I want to paint men and women with that something of the external which the halo used to symbolize, and which we now seek to give by the actual radiance and vibrancy of our colorings.
If I were to think of and dwell on disastrous possibilities, I could do nothing. I throw myself headlong into my work, and come up again with my studies.
To express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance. Certainly there is nothing in that of stereoscopic realism, but is it not something that actually exists?
To save a life is a real and beautiful thing. To make a home for the homeless, yes, it is a thing that must be good; whatever the world may say, it cannot be wrong.
I have played hell somewhat with the truthfulness of the colours.
In a painting I want to say something comforting.
Conscience is a man’s compass.
One should arrive at leading one’s conscience to a state of development so that it becomes the voice of a better and higher self, of which the ordinary self is a servant.
It is not only by one’s impulses that one achieves greatness, but also by patiently filing away the steel wall that separates what one feels from what one is capable of doing.
One begins by plaguing oneself to no purpose in order to be true to nature, and one concludes by working quietly from one’s own palette alone, and then nature is the result.
Both she and I have grief enough and trouble enough, but as for regrets – neither of us have any.
Seek only light and freedom and do not immerse yourself too deeply in the worldly mire.