Critic asks: 'And what, sir, is the subject matter of that painting?' - 'The subject matter, my dear good fellow, is the light.
No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.
Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.
I'm never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.
I am very depressed and deeply disgusted with painting. It is really a continual torture.
While adding the finishing touches to a painting might appear insignificant, it is much harder to do than one might suppose.
It took me time to understand my water lilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them.
I am good at only two things, and those are gardening and painting.
I think only of my painting, and if I were to drop it, I think I'd go crazy.
The real subject of every painting is light.
I would advise young artists to paint as they can, as long as they can, without being afraid of painting badly.
Manet wanted one day to paint my wife and children. Renoir was there. He took a canvas and began painting them, too. After a while, Manet took me aside and whispered, 'You're on very good terms with Renoir and take an interest in his future - do advise him to give up painting! You can see for yourself that it's not his metier at all.
I've done what I could as a painter and that seems to me to be sufficient. I don't want to be compared to the great masters of the past, and my painting is open to criticism; that's enough.
What could be said about me...a man to whom only his painting matters? And of course his garden and his flowers as well.
I intend to do a large painting of the cliff at Etretat, although it is terribly bold of me to do so after Courbet has painted it so admirably, but I will try to do it in a different way.
Ninety per cent of the theory of Impressionist painting is in . . . Ruskin's Elements.
I'm working hard with more determination than ever. My success at the Salon led to my selling several paintings and since your absence I have made 800 francs; I hope, when I have contracts with more dealers, it will be better still.
I'm in a foul mood as I'm making stupid mistakes... This morning I lost beyond repair a painting with which I had been happy, having done about twenty sessions on it; it had to be thoroughly scraped away... what a rage I was in!
Apart from painting and gardening, I'm not good at anything.
My aim is to give you only the things with which I am completely satisfied, even if it means asking you a little more [time] for them... for if I were to do otherwise I'd turn into a mere painting machine and you would be landed with a pile of incomplete work which would put off the most enthusiastic of art collectors.
I know well enough in advance that you'll find my paintings perfect. I know that if they are exhibited they'll be a great success, but I couldn't be more indifferent to it since I know they are bad, I'm certain of it.
Nothing in the whole world is of interest to me but my painting and my flowers.
I still have a lot of pleasure doing them, but as time goes by I come to appreciate more clearly which paintings are good and which should be discarded.
I've spent so long on some paintings that I no longer know what to think of them, and I am definitely getting harder to please; nothing satisfies me.
I do what I can to convey what I experience before nature and most often, in order to succeed in conveying what I feel, I totally forget the most elementary rules of painting, if they exist that is.
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