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.
But by fighting the difficulties in which one finds oneself, an inner strength develops from within our heart, which improves in life’s fight.
I am a man of passions, capable of and subject to doing more or less foolish things- which I happen to regret, more or less, afterwards.
One of the hardest things to do is to paint darkness which nonetheless has light in it.
Oh! I must somehow manage to do a figure in a few strokes.
One must spoil as many canvases as one succeeds with.
Art demands constant observation.
I devour nature ceaselessly. I exaggerate, sometimes I make changes in the subject; but still I don’t invent the whole picture. On the contrary, I find it already there. It’s a question of picking out what one wants from nature.
No, no thought to the winnings. One loves because one loves.
Just dash something down if you see a blank canvas staring at you with a certain imbecility. You do not know how paralyzing it is, that staring of a blank canvas which says to the painter: you don’t know anything.
Painters understand nature and love it, and teach us to see.
Drawing is the root of everything, and the time spent on that is actually all profit.
Painting it was hard graft. There are one and a half large tubes of white in the ground – yet that ground is very dark...