My pictures are made up of four or five colors that collide with one another.
Simple colours can affect the intimate feelings with all the more force because they are simple.
I don't paint women, I paint pictures. . . What I am after above all is expression. If in a portrait I put eyes, a nose, a mouth, there isn't much use; on the contrary it paralyses the imagination of the spectator, and obliges us to see the person in a certain way.
Exactitude is not truth.
I wouldn't mind turning into a vermilion goldfish.
Never ruin a good painting with the truth.
The things that are acquired consciously permit us to express ourselves unconsciously with a certain richness.
When an artist or student draws a nude figure with painstaking care, the result is drawing, and not emotion.
When you're out of will power you call on stubbornness, that's the trick.
In love, the one who runs away is the winner.
There is no interruption between my older paintings and my cutouts. Just that with an increasing sense of the absolute, and more abstraction, I have achieved a form that is simplified to its essence.
A painting in an interior spreads joy around it by the colors, which calm us.
The effort to see things without distortion takes something like courage and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he saw it for the first time.
When I eat a tomato I look at it the way anyone else would. But when I paint a tomato, then I see it differently.
I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have a light joyousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost me.
Art should be something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.
If drawing belongs to the world of spirit and color to that of the senses, you must draw first to cultivate the spirit.
If people knew what Matisse, supposedly the painter of happiness, had gone through, the anguish and tragedy he had to overcome to manage to capture that light which has never left him, if people knew all that, they would also realize that this happiness, this light, this dispassionate wisdom which seems to be mine, are sometimes well-deserved, given the severity of my trials.
There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.
To arrive is to be in prison.
...The more a picture has to give, the greater it is.
You study, you learn, but you guard the original naivete. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.
I simply try to put down colors which render my sensation
It has always bothered me that I don't paint like everyone else
I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.
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