Paul Gauguin Quotes - Page 5

I am a great artist and I know it, it is because I am that I have been able to endure so much suffering.

Beautiful colors exist, though we do not realize it, and are glimpsed behind the veil that modesty has drawn over them.

Oh mysterious world... I have become better for having understood and having loved thy human soul - a flower which has ceased to bloom and whose fragrance no one henceforth will breathe.

A hint - don't paint too much direct from nature. Art is an abstraction! study nature then brood on it and treasure the creation which will result, which is the only way to ascend towards God - to create like our Divine Master.

A great sentiment can be rendered immediately. Dream on it and look for the simplest form in which you can express it.

Sometimes people accuse me of being incomprehensible only because they look for an explicative side to my pictures which is not there.

A critic in my house sees some paintings. Greatly perturbed, he asks for my drawings. My drawings? Never! They are my letters, my secrets.

When the physical organism breaks up, the soul survives. It then takes on another body.

Look closely at the Japanese; they draw admirably and yet in them you will see life outdoors and in the sun without shadows.

Night is here. All is at rest. My eyes close in order to see without actually understanding the dream that flees before men infinite space; and I experience the languorous sensation produced by the mournful procession of my hopes.

All the joys - animal and human - of a free life are mine. I have escaped everything that is artificial, conventional, customary.

Silence! I am learning to know the silence of a Tahitian night.

A bit of advice, don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it, and concentrate on what you will create as a result.

There are tonalities which are noble and others which are vulgar, harmonies which are calm or consoling, and others which are exciting because of their boldness.

Nothing so resembles a daub as a masterpiece.

Having the certitude of a succession of days... equally free and beautiful, peace descends on me.

It is well for young men to have a model, but let them draw the curtain over it while they are painting.

It was so simple to paint things as I saw them; to put without special calculation a red close to a blue.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

My God! How terrible these money questions are for an artist!

The landscape with its violent, pure colours dazzled and blinded me. I was always uncertain.

In art there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists

I sit at my door, smoking a cigarette and sipping my absinthe, and I enjoy every day without a care in the world

Oh mysterious world of all light, thou hast made a light shine within me, and I have grown in admiration of thy antique beauty, which is the immemorial youth of nature.

A time will come when people will think I am a myth, or rather something the newspapers have made up.