The residuum of another's expression can never be related to one's own feeling.
I never retouch a sketch: I take a canvas the same size, as I may change the composition somewhat. But I always strive to give the same feeling, while carrying it on further.
I simply try to put down colors which render my sensation
Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul.
I have simply wished to assert the reasoned and independent feeling of my own individuality within a total knowledge of tradition.
Don't wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working.
My curves are not crazy.
Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us.
I don't paint women, I paint pictures. . . What I am after above all is expression. If in a portrait I put eyes, a nose, a mouth, there isn't much use; on the contrary it paralyses the imagination of the spectator, and obliges us to see the person in a certain way.
With greater completeness and abstraction, I have attained a form filtered to its essentials.
Starting to paint, I felt gloriously free, quiet, and alone.
There are flowers everywhere, for those who bother to look.
I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.
An artist is an explorer. He has to begin by self-discovery and by observation of his own procedure. After that he must not feel under any constraint.
An artist must not feel under any constraint.
My pictures are made up of four or five colors that collide with one another.
It has always bothered me that I don't paint like everyone else
To draw is to make an idea precise. Drawing is the precision of thought.
Seeing is in itself a creative act which requires effort.
The energy within you is stronger than ever for being held back, compressed, and said No to.
A certain blue enters your soul. A certain red has an effect on your blood-pressure.
Exactitude is not truth.
It is not enough to place colors, however beautiful, one beside the other; colors must also react on one another. Otherwise, you have cacophony.
Drawing is . . . not an exercise of particular dexterity, but above all a means of expressing intimate feelings and moods.
An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language.
Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say.
There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.
You want to paint? First of all you must cut off your tongue because your decision takes away from you the right to express yourself with anything but your brush.
Creative people are curious, flexible, and independent with a tremendous spirit and a love of play.
Cezanne, you see, is a sort of God of painting.
Exactitude is not truth. [Fr., L'exactitude n'est pas la verite.]
An artist is an explorer.
I have always sought to be understood and, while I was taken to task by critics or colleagues, I thought they were right, assuming I had not been clear enough to be understood. This assumption allowed me to work my whole life without hatred and even without bitterness toward criticism, regardless of its source. I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends. Hatred, rancor, and the spirit of vengeance are useless baggage to the artist. His road is difficult enough for him to cleanse his soul of everything which could make it more so.
To arrive is to be in prison.
Truth and reality in art begin at the point where the artist ceases to understand what he is doing and capable of doing - yet feels in himself a force that becomes steadily stronger... and more concentrated.
When you're out of will power you call on stubbornness, that's the trick.
...I am driven on by an idea that I really only grasp as it grows with the picture.
I cannot copy nature in a servile way; I am forced to interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture. From the relationship I have found in all the tones there must result a living harmony of colors, a harmony analogous to that of a musical composition.
One gets into a state of creativity by conscious work.
When I started to paint I felt transported into a kind of paradise... In everyday life I was usually bored and vexed... Starting to paint I felt gloriously free.
If I close my eyes, I see things better than with my eyes open.
When I put a green, it is not grass. When I put a blue, it is not the sky.
I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colors is black.
A picture must possess a real power to generate light and for a long time now I've been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light.
One must, of course, have one's entire experience behind one and not have lost the freshness of instinct.
Don't try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out.
...for whether we want to or not, we belong to our time and we share in its opinions, its feelings, even its delusions.
When an artist or student draws a nude figure with painstaking care, the result is drawing, and not emotion.
I wouldn't mind turning into a vermilion goldfish.
If people knew what Matisse, supposedly the painter of happiness, had gone through, the anguish and tragedy he had to overcome to manage to capture that light which has never left him, if people knew all that, they would also realize that this happiness, this light, this dispassionate wisdom which seems to be mine, are sometimes well-deserved, given the severity of my trials.
Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium.
There is no interruption between my older paintings and my cutouts. Just that with an increasing sense of the absolute, and more abstraction, I have achieved a form that is simplified to its essence.
Seek for the boldest color possible, content is irrelevant.
He who loves, flies, runs, and rejoices; he is free and nothing holds him back.
All my efforts go into creating an art that can be understood by everyone.
When I paint green, it doesn't mean grass; when I paint blue, it doesn't mean sky.
The whole arrangement of my picture is expressive. The place occupied by the figures or objects, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything plays a part.
Simple colours can affect the intimate feelings with all the more force because they are simple.
The essential thing is to spring forth, to express the bolt of lightning one senses upon contact with a thing. The function of the artist is not to translate an observation but to express the shock of the object on his nature; the shock, with the original reaction.
Truth and reality in art do not arise until you no longer understand what you are doing and are capable of but nevertheless sense a power that grows in proportion to your resistance.
I didn't expect to recover from my second operation but since I did, I consider that I'm living on borrowed time. Every day that dawns is a gift to me and I take it in that way. I accept it gratefully without looking beyond it. I completely forget my physical suffering and all the unpleasantness of my present condition and I think only of the joy of seeing the sun rise once more and of being able to work a little bit, even under difficult conditions.
The artist begins with a vision - a creative operation requiring effort. Creativity takes courage.
Color was not given to us in order that we should imitate Nature. It was given to us so that we can express our emotions.
Everything that we see in our daily lives is more or less distorted by acquired habits and this is perhaps more evident in an age like ours when cinema posters and magazines present us every day with a flood of ready-made images which are to the eye what prejudices are to the mind. The effort to see things without distortion demands a kind of courage; and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he were seeing it for the first time.
Art should be something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.
Color exists in itself, possessing its own beauty.
There's nothing clinically wrong with me, only an emotional imbalance - I pass too quickly from the wildest enthusiasm to the blackest despair.
Nothing can be accomplished without love.
Ever since there have been men, man has given himself over to too little joy. That alone, my brothers, is our original sin. I should believe only in a God who understood how to dance.
Drawing is of the Spirit and color of the Senses.
I am curious about color as one would be visiting a new country, because I have never concentrated so closely on color expression. Up to now I have waited at the gates of the temple.
A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful.
Creation begins with vision.
I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.
With color one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft.
The artist has to look at life as he did when he was a child. If he loses that faculty, he cannot express himself in an original, that is, a personal way.
Colours have their own distinctive beauty that you have to preserve, just as in music you try to preserve sounds. It is a question of organization, of finding the arrangement that will keep the beauty and freshness of the colour
Love wants to rise, not to be held down by anything base... He who loves flies, runs, and rejoices; he is free and nothing holds him back. Derive happiness from yourself, from a good day's work, from the clearing that it makes in the fog that surrounds us.
A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man.
The truly original artist invents his own signs.
A young painter who cannot liberate himself from the influence of past generations is digging his own grave.
Above all, an artist must never be too easily satisfied with what he has done.
All art worthy of the name is religious.
You study, you learn, but you guard the original naivete. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.
You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.
Another word for creativity is courage.
All that is not useful in a picture is detrimental. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety; for superfluous details would, in the mind of the beholder, encroach upon the essential elements.
To look at something as though we had never seen it before requires great courage.
Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.
I want to reach that condensation of sensations that constitutes a picture.
Art is an escape from reality.
The artists must see all things as if he were seeing them for the first time. All his life he must see as he did when he was a child.
I don't know whether I believe in God or not. I think, really, I'm some sort of Buddhist. But the essential thing is to put oneself in a frame of mind which is close to that of prayer.
It would be a mistake to ascribe this creative power to an inborn talent. In art, the genius creator is not just a gifted being, but a person who has succeeded in arranging for their appointed end, a complex of activities, of which the work is the outcome. The artist begins with a vision — a creative operation requiring an effort. Creativity takes courage.
Would not it be best to leave room to mystery?
The essential thing is to work in a state of mind that approaches prayer.
It is my dream to create an art which is filled with balance, purity and calmness, freed from a subject matter that is disconcerting or too attention-seeking. In my paintings, I wish to create a spiritual remedy, similar to a comfortable armchair which provides rest from physical expectation for the spiritually working, the businessman as well as the artist.
What I am after, above all, is expression.
The effort to see things without distortion takes something like courage and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he saw it for the first time.
Beauty comes from the balance between two and three dimensions, between abstraction and representation - I seek the equilibrium behind changing appearances.
The portrait is one of the most curious art forms. It demands special qualities in the artist, and an almost total kinship with the model.
Drawing is putting a line around an idea.
For my part I have never avoided the influence of others. I would have considered it cowardice and a lack of sincerity toward myself.
Work cures everything.
Never ruin a good painting with the truth.
Hatred is a parasite that devours all. One doesn't build upon hatred, but upon love.
Purer colors... have in themselves, independently of the objects they serve to express, a significant action on the feelings of those who look at them.
There are always flowers for those who want to see them.
An artist must never be a prisoner. Prisoner? An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc.
When a painting is finished, it's like a new born child, and the artist himself must have time for understanding. How then do you expect an amateur to understand that which the artist dos not yet comprehend.
A painting in an interior spreads joy around it by the colors, which calm us.
My choice of colors does not rest on any scientific theory, it is based on observation, on feeling, on the experience of my sensibility.
The things that are acquired consciously permit us to express ourselves unconsciously with a certain richness.
If drawing belongs to the world of spirit and color to that of the senses, you must draw first to cultivate the spirit.
A certain blue enters your soul
In love, the one who runs away is the winner.
When I eat a tomato I look at it the way anyone else would. But when I paint a tomato, then I see it differently.
We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we study a tree, the sky or a thought, because we too are linked to the entire universe.
My choice of colors does not rest on any scientific theory; it is based on observation, on feeling, on the experience of my sensibility. Inspired by certain pages of Delacroix, an artist like Signac is preoccupied with complementary colors, and the theoretical knowledge of them will lead him to use a certain tone in a certain place. But I simply try to put down colors which render my sensation.
I'm growing old, I delight in the past.
What's so astonishing about not understanding? There are so many things in art, beginning with art itself, that one doesn't understand. A painter doesn't see everything that he has put in his painting.
It is with color that you render light, though you must also feel this light, have it within yourself.
I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have a light joyousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost me.
Color, even more than drawing, is a means of liberation.
...The more a picture has to give, the greater it is.
