Paul Gauguin

Quotes

1. At the age of ten, twenty, a hundred, very young, a little older, and very old, an artist is always an artist. Isn't he better at some times, some moments, than at others? Never impeccable, since he is a living, human being?

   p. 219

2. 

   ..color being enigmatic in itself.. ..then to be logical we cannot use it any other way than enigmatically..

   p. 145

3. 

   I do not paint by copying nature. Everything I do springs from my wild imagination.

   p. 22

4. 

   I was so bent on putting all my energy in its 'Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going' before dying [suffering from syphilis, Gauguin decided to commit suicide at the end], such painful passion amid terrible circumstances, and such a clear vision without corrections that the hastiness of it disappears and life bursts from it. It does not stink of models, professionalism, and the so-called rules that I have always disregarded.

   p. 160

5. 

   I must confess that I too am a woman and that I am always prepared to applaud a woman who is more daring than I, and is equal to a man in fighting for freedom of behavior.

6. 

   You have long known what I have tried to establish: the right to dare everything; yet the difficulty I have had finding enough money to live on has been too great, and my capacities have not produced a very big result but the mechanism has got underway nevertheless. The public does not owe me anything because the pictorial work I have done is only relatively good, but the painters who benefit from that freedom today do owe me something.

   p. 214

7. 

   Copying nature — what is that supposed to mean? Follow the masters! But why should one follow them? The only reason they are masters is that they didn't follow anybody!

   p. 108

8. 

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

   p. 125

9. 

   My eyes close and uncomprehendingly see the dream in the infinite space that stretches away, elusive, before me.

   p. 184

10. 

    Nature has mysterious infinities and imaginative power. It is always varying the productions it offers to us. The artist himself is one of nature's means.

    p. 39

11. 

    I borrow some subject or other from life or from nature, and, using it as a pretext, I arrange lines and colors so as to obtain symphonies, harmonies that do not represent a thing that is real, in the vulgar sense of the word, and do not directly express any idea, but are supposed to make you think the way music is supposed to make you think, unaided by ideas or images, simply through the mysterious affinities that exist between our brains and such arrangements of colors and lines.

    p. 109

12. 

    freely and madly; you will make progress.. .Above all, don't sweat over a painting; a great sentiment can be rendered immediately..