Paul Gauguin Quotes

With what is he concerned? Drawing was at its lowest ebb; it had to be restored. Looking at these nudes, I exclaim, 'Drawing has come back again!'
As a man and painter he sets an example. 'Degas' is one of those rare masters who could have had anything he wanted, yet he scorned decorations, honors, fortune, without bitterness, without jealousy.

Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge — and has to content oneself with dreaming.

If we observe the totality of Camille Pissarro's works, we find there, despite the fluctuations, not only an extreme artistic will which never lies, but what is more, an essentially intuitive pure-bred art.. .He looked at everybody, you say! Why not? Everyone looked at him, too, but denied him. He was one of my masters and I do not deny him.

Many people say that I don't know how to draw because I don't draw particular forms. When will they understand that execution, drawing and color (in other words, style) must be in harmony with the poem?

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

Life at Papeete soon became a burden. It was Europe, the Europe which I had thought to shake off — and that under the aggravating circumstances of colonial snobbism, and the imitation, grotesque even to the point of caricature, of our customs, fashions, vices, and absurdities of civilization. Was I to have made this far journey, only to find the very thing which I had fled?

Nature has mysterious infinities and imaginative power. It is always varying the productions it offers to us. The artist himself is one of nature's means.

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.

I love Brittany; I find wildness and primitiveness there. When my wooden shoes ring on this granite, I hear the muffled, dull, and powerful tone which I try to achieve in painting.

I borrow some subject or other from life or from nature, and, using it as a pretext, I arrange lines and colors so as to obtain symphonies, harmonies that do not represent a thing that is real, in the vulgar sense of the word, and do not directly express any idea, but are supposed to make you think the way music is supposed to make you think, unaided by ideas or images, simply through the mysterious affinities that exist between our brains and such arrangements of colors and lines.

A great sentiment can be rendered immediately. Dream on it and look for the simplest form in which you can express it.

Don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amide nature, extrapolate art from it and concentrate on what you will create as a result.

freely and madly; you will make progress.. .Above all, don't sweat over a painting; a great sentiment can be rendered immediately..

With this painting, I tried to make everything breathe faith, quiet suffering, religious and primitive style and great nature with its scream.

Comment voyez-vous cet arbre? Il est bien vert? Mettez donc du vert, le plus beau vert de votre palette; — et cette ombre, plutôt bleue? Ne craignez pas la peindre aussi bleue que possible.