Emil Nolde Quotes

In the working of wood and for the determining of its character I had had enough experience in my five-year pursuit of woodcutting. I also always gladly let the various charming grainings and sometimes the knots become involved in the printing.

None of the free [ a.o. his first religious] imaginative pictures that I painted at this time [c.1909] or later, had any kind of model, or even a clearly conceived idea. It was quite easy for me to imagine a work right down to its smallest details, and in fact my preconceptions were usually far more beautiful than the painted outcome: I became the copyist of the idea. Therefore I liked to avoid thinking about a picture beforehand, all I needed was a vague idea of luminescences of colour. The work then developed of its own accord under my hands.

Nobody had made the same full use of the properties of acids and metal in this way before. Having drown on the copper-plate and left areas of it bare, I laid it in the bath of acid and achieved effects that astonished even me, full of subtle nuances.

I want so much for my work to grow forth out of the material, just as in nature the plants grow forth out of the earth, which corresponds to their character. In the print 'Lebensfreude' [Joy of living] I worked for the most part with my finger, and the effect I hoped for was achieved. There is hidden in the print a bit of wantonness, in the representation as well as in the boldness of the technique. If I were to make the "ragged and moving" contours "correctly" in the academic sense, this effect would not nearly be achieved.

It was in mid-summer . The colors of the flowers attracted me irresistibly and almost sudden I was painting. My first small gardens paintings were born.

Every true artist creates new values, new beauty.. .When you notice anarchy, recklessness, or licentiousness in works of contemporary art, when you notice crass coarseness and brutality, then occupy yourself long and painstakingly precisely with these works, and you will suddenly recognize how the seeming recklessness transforms itself into freedom, the coarseness into high refinements. Harmless pictures are seldom worth anything.

You speak of errors.. .Men who are so correct and flawless are mostly boring; small weaknesses can be loved.. .One chief characteristic of the etchings gives me much pleasure: because out of them streams forth a tremendous life.

Therefore etching produces a different result from the ten drawings of the same character.. .[The etchings are] better, in that they are fresher, bolder, and freer..

I produce a form, an impression of light, a beauty of tones.. .The etchings are now full of life, an ecstasy, a dance, a gentle motion and fluctuation in tones.

a written note of Nolde, 1903, on the island of Alsen; as quoted by , in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 77

I had innumerable visions at that time [c. 1903]; wherever I looked, Nature was alive, the sky, the clouds, on every stone and among the branches of the trees, everywhere my creatures stirred and lived their still or wild, lively lives, arousing my excitement and crying out to be painted.

It [the city Berlin] stinks of perfume, they have water on their brains and they live as food for bacilli and shamelessly like dogs.

They [his own fantasies he made in strange pencil drawings then] hover before me now in drifting color, more beautiful than I can possibly paint them.. ..I yearn for the day when I will have found my color harmonies, my harmonies.