Pablo Picasso

But there is one very odd thing - to notice that basically a picture doesn't change, that the first 'vision' remains almost intact, in spite of appearances. I often ponder on a light and a dark when I have put them into a painting; I try hard to break them up by interpolating a color that will create a different effect. When the work is photographed, I note that what I put in to correct my first vision has disappeared, and that, after all, the photographic image corresponds with my first vision before the transformation I insisted on. [Boisgeloup, winter 1934]

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

Everything you can imagine is real.

When I was a kid I drew like Michelangelo. It took me years to learn to draw like a kid.

It's like God's. God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.

What is a face really? It's own photo? It's makeup? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.

If you know exactly what you are going to do, why do it?

Are we to paint what's on the face, what's inside the face, or what's behind it?

We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.

An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought

The painter goes through states of fullness and evacuation. That is the whole secret of art. I go for a walk in the forest of Fontainebleau. I get 'green' indigestion. I must get rid of this sensation into a picture. Green rules it. A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions. People seize on painting to cover up their nakedness. They get what they can wherever they can. In the end I don't believe they get anything at all. They've simply cut a coat to the measure of their own ignorance. They make everything, from God to a picture, in their own image. That is why the picture-hook is the ruination of a painting. [Boisgeloup, winter 1934].

The first half of life is learning to be an adult-the second half is learning to be a child.

I was a painter and became Picasso.