Top 158 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Cezanne - Page 2

It took me 40 years to find out that painting is not sculpture.

All the theories mess you up inside.

Right now a moment of time is fleeting by! Capture its reality in paint! To do that we must put all else out of our minds. We must become that moment, make ourselves a sensitive recording plate...Give the image of what we actually see, forgetting everything that has been seen before our time.

I have to keep working, not to arrive at finish, which arouses the admiration of fools... I must seek completion only for the pleasure of being truer and more knowing.

The painter unfolds that which has not been seen.

There is no model, there is only color.

May I repeat what I told you here: treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything brought into proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth... lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth. But nature for us men is more depth than surface, whence the need to introduce into our light vibrations, represented by the reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blueness to give the feel of air.

There is no light painting or dark painting, but simply relations of tones.

Get to the heart of what is before you and continue to express yourself as logically as possible.

When the color achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also.

Long live the sun which gives us such beautiful color.

If I were called upon to define briefly the word Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the senses preceive in nature, seen through the veil of the soul.

Surely, a single bunch of carrots painted naively, just as we personally see it, is worth all the endless banalities of the Schools, all those dreary pictures concocted out of tobacco juice according to time-honored formulas?

The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read. We must not, however, be satisfied with retaining the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go forth to study beautiful nature, let us try to free our mids from them, let us strive to express ourselves according to our personal temperaments. Time and reflection, moreover, little by little modify our vision, and at last comprehension comes to us.

Time and reflection change the sight little by little 'till we come to understand.

See how the light tenderly love the apricots, it takes them over completely, enters into their pulp, light them from all sides! But it is miserly with the peaches and light only one side of them.

Here on the edge of the river, the motifs are very plentiful, the same subject seen from a different angle gives a subject for study of the highest interest and so varied that I think I could be occupied for months without changing my place, simply bending a little more to the right or left.

An optical impression is produced on our organs of sight which makes us classify as light, half-tone or quartertone, the surfaces represented by colour sensations. So that light does not exist for the painter.

What I am trying to translate to you is more mysterious, it is entwined in the very roots of being, in the implacable source of sensations.

Fruits ... like having their portrait painted. They seem to sit there and ask your forgiveness for fading. Their thought is given off with their perfumes. They come with all their scents, they speak of the fields they have left, the rain which has nourished them, the daybreaks they have seen.

When I start thinking, all is lost.

You must think. The eye is not enough; it needs to think as well.

Sometimes I imagine colors as if they were living ideas, being of pure reason with which to communicate. Nature is not on the surface, it is deep down.

I have not tried to reproduce nature; I have represented it.

Monet is only an eye, but my God, what an eye!

The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness.

Under this fine rain I breathe in the innocence of the world. I feel coloured by the nuances of infinity. At this moment I am one with my picture. We are an iridescent chaos.

I am progressing very slowly, for nature reveals herself to me in very complex forms; and the progress needed is incessant.

Nature is more depth than surface, the colours are the expressions on the surface of this depth; they rise up from the roots of the world.

Shut your eyes, wait, think of nothing. Now, open them ... one sees nothing but a great coloured undulation. What then? An irradiation and glory of colour. This is what a picture should give us ... an abyss in which the eye is lost, a secret germination, a coloured state of grace ... loose conciousness. Descend with the painter into the dim tangled roots of things, and rise again from them in colours, be steeped in the light of them.

There is a logic of colors, and it is with this alone, and not with the logic of the brain, that the painter should conform.

Literature expresses itself by abstractions, whereas painting, by means of drawing and colour, gives concrete shape to sensations and perceptions.

You have to hurry up if you want to see something, everything disappears.

I wished to copy nature. I could not. But I was satisfied when I discovered the sun, for instance, could not be reproduced, but only represented by something else.

All my life I have worked to be able to earn my living, but I thought that one could do good painting without attracting attention to one's private life. Certainly, an artist wishes to raise himself intellectually as much as possible, but the man must remain obscure. The pleasure must be found in the work.

Knowledge of the means to express our emotion is essential- and is acquired only after a very long experience.

Pleasure must be found in study.

Everything is about to disappear. You've got to hurry up if you still want to see things.

Design and color are not distinct and separate. As one paints, one draws. The more the colors harmonize, the more the design takes form. When color is at it's richest, form is at its fullest.

What is one to think of those fools who tell one that the artist is always subordinate to nature? Art is a harmony parallel with nature.

Whoever the master is whom you prefer, this must only be a directive for you. Otherwise you will never be anything but an imitator.

To paint is not to copy the object slavishly, it is to grasp a harmony among many relationships.

Nature is the best instructor.

Everything vanishes, falls apart, doesn't it? Nature is always the same but nothing in her that appears to us lasts. Our art must render the thrill of her permanence, along with her elements, the appearance of all her changes. It must give us a taste of her Eternity.

I owe you the truth in painting, and I will tell it to you.

I am beginning to consider myself stronger than all those around me, and you know that the good opinion I have of myself has only been reached after mature consideration.

The landscape becomes human, becomes a thinking, living being within me. I become one with my picture...we merge in an iridescent chaos.

The contour eludes me.

All pictures painted inside in the studio will never be as good as the things done outside.

Everything in nature takes its form from the sphere, the cone and the cylinder.

The sun penetrates me soundlessly like a distant friend that stirs up my laziness, fertilizes it. We bring forth life.

Time and reflection... modify, little by little, our vision, and at last comprehension comes to us.

If I think, everything is lost.

Art first of all is optical. That's where the material of our art is: in what our eyes think.

It's not just about looking and copying, it's about feeling too

Treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point.

Personally I would like to have pupils, a studio, pass on my love to them, work with them, without teaching them anything.. ..A convent, a monastery, a phalanstery of painting where one could train together.. ..but no programme, no instruction in painting.. ..drawing is still alright, it doesn't count, but painting - the way to learn is to look at the masters, above all at nature, and to watch other people painting.

The approbation of others is a stimulus of which one must sometimes be wary. The feeling of one's own strength makes one modest.

If I think, I am lost.

Painting is founded on the heart controlled by the head.