Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The Barnes Foundation is the only sane place to see art in America.
With color one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft.
It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.
A colourist makes his presence known even in a simple charcoal drawing.
I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colors is black.
To draw is to make an idea precise. Drawing is the precision of thought.
I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends.
I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.
The essential thing is to work in a state of mind that approaches prayer.
When you're out of will power you call on stubbornness, that's the trick.
After a half-century of hard work and reflection the wall is still there.
When I put a green, it is not grass. When I put a blue, it is not the sky.
All my efforts go into creating an art that can be understood by everyone.
I want to reach that condensation of sensations that constitutes a picture.
The artist begins with a vision - a creative operation requiring an effort.
Seek the strongest color effect possible... the content is of no importance.
A painting in an interior spreads joy around it by the colors, which calm us.
My pictures are made up of four or five colors that collide with one another.
Cutting straight into color reminds me of the direct carving of the sculptor.
The chief function of color should be to serve expression as well as possible.
Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.
Above all, an artist must never be too easily satisfied with what he has done.
The residuum of another's expression can never be related to one's own feeling.
He who loves, flies, runs, and rejoices; he is free and nothing holds him back.
What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape, but the human figure.
To look at something as though we had never seen it before requires great courage.
When I paint green, it doesn't mean grass; when I paint blue, it doesn't mean sky.
Creation is the artist's true function; where there is no creation there is no art.
...I am driven on by an idea that I really only grasp as it grows with the picture.
I dream of an art of balance, of quietness, something analogous to a good armchair.
Art should be something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.
A certain blue enters your soul. A certain red has an effect on your blood-pressure.
Hatred is a parasite that devours all. One doesn't build upon hatred, but upon love.
Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting should begin by cutting out his own tongue
I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have for life and my way of expressing it.
The energy within you is stronger than ever for being held back, compressed, and said No to.
If my story were ever to be written truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone.
With greater completeness and abstraction, I have attained a form filtered to its essentials.
Instinct must be thwarted just as one prunes the branches of a tree so that it will grow better.
Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us.
Simple colours can affect the intimate feelings with all the more force because they are simple.
The artist begins with a vision - a creative operation requiring effort. Creativity takes courage.
Creative people are curious, flexible, and independent with a tremendous spirit and a love of play.
Do remember that one line does nothing; it is only in relation to another that it creates a volume.
It is with color that you render light, though you must also feel this light, have it within yourself.
Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium.
One must, of course, have one's entire experience behind one and not have lost the freshness of instinct.
There are wonderful things in Jazz, the improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.
When an artist or student draws a nude figure with painstaking care, the result is drawing, and not emotion.
A young painter who cannot liberate himself from the influence of past generations is digging his own grave.