Paul Gauguin Quotes

Para ver cierro los ojos

I am a great artist and I know it. It's because of what I am that I have endured so much suffering, so as to pursue my vocation, otherwise I would consider myself a rogue — which is what many people think I am, for that matter. Oh well, what difference does it make. What upsets me the most is not so much the poverty as the things that perpetually get in the way of my art, which I cannot carry out the way I feel and which I would carry out if it weren't for the poverty that is like a straitjacket. You tell me I am wrong to stay away from the artist[ic] center. No, I am right; I've known for a long time what I am doing and why I am doing it. My artistic center is in my brain and nowhere else, and I am strong because I am never thrown off-course by other people and because I do what is in me.

We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.

In my figures [of his famous painting 'Vision After the Sermon'] I have achieved a great simplicity, which is both rustic and superstitious... ..In this picture the landscape and the struggle [between Jacob wrestling with the angel ] exist only in the imagination of the people whom the sermon has moved to prayer. That's why there is a contrast between the people, depicted naturally, and the struggle in its unnatural and dis-proportioned landscape.

..so before I died I wanted to paint a large canvas that I had worked out in my head, and all month long I worked [on Tahiti] day and night at fever pitch.. .It's all done without a model.

Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.

All the joys — animal and human — of a free life are mine. I have escaped everything that is artificial, conventional, customary. I am entering into the truth, into nature.

Shut your eyes in order to see.

My eyes close and uncomprehendingly see the dream in the infinite space that stretches away, elusive, before me.

This Cézanne [a 'Still life with Compotier, Fruit and Glass', Cézanne made c. 1879-1882!!], that you ask me for is a pearl of exceptional quality and I already have refused three hundred francs for it; it is one of my most treasured possessions, and except in absolute necessity, I would give up my last shirt before the picture.

To a man who has not succeeded we say 'You made a mistake'.
To a man who ha lost at the lottery, 'You had bad luck'.

...solitude is not to be recommended to everyone, for you have to be strong in order to bear it and act alone.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Neuznávám žádnou jinou pravdu, kromě pravdy umělecké lži.

I was so bent on putting all my energy in its 'Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going' before dying [suffering from syphilis, Gauguin decided to commit suicide at the end], such painful passion amid terrible circumstances, and such a clear vision without corrections that the hastiness of it disappears and life bursts from it. It does not stink of models, professionalism, and the so-called rules that I have always disregarded.