Claude Monet Quotes about Art

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, house, a field....Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you.

I would like to paint the way a bird sings.

My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece

For me, the subject is of secondary importance: I want to convey what is alive between me and the subject.

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

Techniques vary, art stays the same; it is a transposition of nature at once forceful and sensitive.

My aim is to give you only the things with which I am completely satisfied, even if it means asking you a little more [time] for them... for if I were to do otherwise I'd turn into a mere painting machine and you would be landed with a pile of incomplete work which would put off the most enthusiastic of art collectors.

Nothing in the whole world is of interest to me but my painting and my flowers.

No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.

I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

Despite my extremely modest prices, dealers and art lovers are turning their backs on me. It is very depressing to see the lack of interest shown in an art object which has no market value.

The creditors are proving impossible to deal with and short of a sudden appearance on the scene of wealthy art patrons, we are going to be turned out of this dear little house where I led a simple life and was able to work so well. I do not know what will become of us.

By the single example of this painter devoted to his art with such independence, my destiny as a painter opened out to me.