Joaquin Sorolla Quotes

• All the mistakes committed by artists are due to their having separated themselves from truth, believing that their imagination is stronger. There is nothing stronger than nature. With nature in front of us we can do everything well.

  Joaquin Sorolla

  Mistake, Believe, Artist

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• I could not paint at all if I had to paint slowly. Every effect is so transient, it must be rapidly painted.

  Joaquin Sorolla

  Paint, Effects, Ifs

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• My only ambition was to create an honest picture that would interpret nature as she really is, as she ought to be seen.

  Joaquin Sorolla

  Ambition, Honest, Ought

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• The older I become, the more I realize that drawing is the most important of all the problems of picture-making.

  Joaquin Sorolla

  Drawing, Important, Problem

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• I hate darkness. Claude Monet once said that painting in general did not have light enough in it. I agree with him. We painters, however, can never reproduce sunlight as it really is. I can only approach the truth of it.

  Joaquin Sorolla

  Hate, Light, Darkness

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• Nature, the sun itself, produces color effects... instantaneously. The impression of these evanescent visions is what we make desperate attempts to catch and fix by any means at hand. At such moments I am unconscious of materials, of style, of rules, of everything that intervenes between my perception and the object or idea perceived.

  Joaquin Sorolla

  Mean, Hands, Color

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• When an artist begins to count strokes instead of regarding nature he is lost. This preoccupation with technique, at the expense of truth and sincerity, is the principal fault I find in much of the work of modern painters.

  Joaquin Sorolla

  Artist, Technique, Faults

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• Go to nature with no parti pris. You should not know what your picture is to look like until it is done. Just see the picture that is coming.

  Joaquin Sorolla

  Looks, Done, Should

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• All inspired painters are impressionists, even though it be true that some impressionists are not inspired.

  Joaquin Sorolla

  Inspired, Being True, Painter

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• With all its excesses, the modern impressionistic movement has given us one discovery, the color violet. It is the only discovery of importance in the art world since Velazquez.

  Joaquin Sorolla

  Art, Discovery, Color

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• If ever a painter wrought a miracle of illusion with brush and pigment that painter was Velazquez in his Las Meninas, at the Prado in Madrid.

  Joaquin Sorolla

  Miracle, Madrid, Illusion

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• The great difficulty with large canvases is that they should by right be painted as fast as a sketch. By speed only can you gain an appearance of fleeting effect. But to paint a three yard canvas with the same dispatch as one of ten inches is well-nigh impossible.

  Joaquin Sorolla

  Fleeting, Gains, Yards

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• I do not care to paint portraits indoors. I cannot feel sympathetic.

  Joaquin Sorolla

  Portraits, Portraiture, Care

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• As far as outdoor work is concerned, a studio is only a garage; a place in which to store pictures and repair them, never a place in which to paint them.

  Joaquin Sorolla

  Paint, Stores, Garage

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• How long did it take me to delimit this art? Twenty years! ... It was a laborious process, but a methodical and rational one; gradually the hesitations were ironed out, but not all of a sudden.

  Joaquin Sorolla

  Art, Years, Long

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• No, mes amis, impressionism is not charlatanry, nor a formula, nor a school. I should say rather it is the bold resolve to throw all those things overboard.

  Joaquin Sorolla

  School, Overboard, Should

  "Current Literature, Volume 46". Book by Edward Jewitt Wheeler, Current Literature Publishing Company, p. 192, 1909.

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• A studio is a good place to smoke your pipe.

  Joaquin Sorolla

  Pipe, Good Place, Studios

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