Seek the strongest color effect possible... the content is of no importance.
I am curious about color as one would be visiting a new country, because I have never concentrated so closely on color expression. Up to now I have waited at the gates of the temple.
I have always sought to be understood and, while I was taken to task by critics or colleagues, I thought they were right, assuming I had not been clear enough to be understood. This assumption allowed me to work my whole life without hatred and even without bitterness toward criticism, regardless of its source. I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends. Hatred, rancor, and the spirit of vengeance are useless baggage to the artist. His road is difficult enough for him to cleanse his soul of everything which could make it more so.
Photographs will always be impressive because they show us nature, and all artists will find in them a world of sensations. The photographer must therefore intervene as little as possible, so as not to cause photography to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses, notwithstanding its defects.
A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man.
My models, my human figures, are never like extras in an interior. They are the main theme of my work. I depend absolutely on my model.
It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color - not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.
After a half-century of hard work and reflection the wall is still there.
What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter - a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.
Put a colour upon a canvas - it not only colours with that colour the part of the canvas to which the colour has been applied, but it also colours the surrounding space with the complementary.
The importance of an artist is to be measured by the quantity of new signs which he has introduced to the language of art.
I would like to recapture that freshness of vision which is characteristic of extreme youth when all the world is new to it.
I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends.
Color helps to express light, not the physical phenomenon, but the only light that really exists, that in the artist's brain.
I was very embarrassed when my canvases began to fetch high prices. I saw myself condemned to a future of nothing but Masterpieces.
I have to create an object which resembles the tree. The sign for a tree, and not the sign that other artists may have found for the tree.
Did not the artists of the great age of Japanese art change names many times during their careers? I like that; they wanted to safeguard their freedom.
A work of art must carry in itself its complete significance and impose it upon the beholder even before he can identify the subject-matter.
The splitting up of color [as Impressionists did] brought the splitting up of form and contour . . . Everything is reduced to a mere sensation of the retina, but one which destroys all tranquility of surface and contour. Objects are differentiated only by the luminosity that is given them.
What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape, but the human figure.
The role of the artist, like that of the scholar, consists of seizing current truths often repeated to him, but which will take on new meaning for him and which he will make his own when he has grasped their deepest significance.
Cutting straight into color reminds me of the direct carving of the sculptor.
An artist who wants to transpose a composition onto a larger canvas must conceive it over again in order to preserve its expression; he must alter its character and not just fill in the squares into which he has divided his canvas.
If it is practiced by a man of taste, the photograph will have the appearance of art (but) the photographer must...intervene as little as possible, so as not to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses.
I was driven on by.. A force which I see today as something alien to my normal life... so I have been no more than a medium as it were.
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