Simple colours can affect the intimate feelings with all the more force because they are simple.
I want to reach that condensation of sensations that constitutes a picture.
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.
Never ruin a good painting with the truth.
Exactitude is not truth.
I wouldn't mind turning into a vermilion goldfish.
When an artist or student draws a nude figure with painstaking care, the result is drawing, and not emotion.
When you're out of will power you call on stubbornness, that's the trick.
In love, the one who runs away is the winner.
The things that are acquired consciously permit us to express ourselves unconsciously with a certain richness.
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.
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.
A painting in an interior spreads joy around it by the colors, which calm us.
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.
Art should be something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.
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.
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.
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.
If drawing belongs to the world of spirit and color to that of the senses, you must draw first to cultivate the spirit.
To arrive is to be in prison.
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.
...The more a picture has to give, the greater it is.
It has always bothered me that I don't paint like everyone else
Hatred is a parasite that devours all. One doesn't build upon hatred, but upon love.
I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: