Artist Quotes

The substance of painting is light.

I do not innovate. I transmit.

Remember that a painting - before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.

All that is necessary to paint well is to be sincere.

All artists are now free to express their own personality.

Art is when things appear rounded.

I have always wanted my colours to sing.

This synchronous action then will be the Subject, which is the representative harmony.

This communication alone, by the comparison of the antagonisms, rivalries, movements which give birth to decisive moments, permits the evolution of the soul, whereby a man realizes himself on earth. It is impossible to be concerned with anything else in art.

The idea of the vital movement of the world and its movement is simultaneity.

The eye is the most refined of our senses, the one which communicates most directly with our mind, our consciousness.

The auditory perception is not sufficient for our knowledge of the world; it does not have vastness.

Simultaneity in light is harmony, the rhythm of colors which creates the Vision of Man.

Seeing is in itself a movement.

On the other hand, the artist has much to do in the realm of color construction, which is so little explored and so obscure, and hardly dates back any farther than to the beginning of Impressionism.

Light in Nature creates the movement of colors.

Light comes to us by the sensibility. Without visual sensibility there is no light, no movement.

It is this research into pure painting that is the problem at the present moment. I do not know any painters in Paris who are really searching for this ideal world.

In this movement of colors I find the essence, which does not arise from a system, or an a priori theory.

If Art relates itself to an Object, it becomes descriptive, divisionist, literary.

I say it is indispensable to look ahead of and behind oneself in the present. If there is such a thing as tradition, and I believe there is, it can only exist in the sense of the most profound movements of culture.

I am very much afraid of definitions, and yet one is almost forced to make them. One must take care, too, not to be inhibited by them.

First of all, I always see the sun! The way I want to identify myself and others is with halos here and there halos, movements of color. And that, I believe, is rhythm.

Direct observation of the luminous essence of nature is for me indispensable.

But what is of great importance to me is observation of the movement of colors.

Art in Nature is rhythmic and has a horror of constraint.

Painting is by nature a luminous language.

Our understanding is correlative to our perception.

Impressionism; it is the birth of Light in painting.

Nature engenders the science of painting.