Paul Gauguin quotes - page 2

.. so before I died I wanted to paint a large canvas that I had worked out in my head, and all month long I worked [on Tahiti] day and night at fever pitch... It's all done without a model. (Paul Gauguin)
freely and madly; you will make progress... Above all, don't sweat over a painting; a great sentiment can be rendered immediately.. View quote
Paul Gauguin
Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them. View quote
Paul Gauguin
There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite. View quote
Paul Gauguin
We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves. View quote
Paul Gauguin
Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge. View quote
Paul Gauguin
I love Brittany; I find wildness and primitiveness there. When my wooden shoes ring on this granite, I hear the muffled, dull, and powerful tone which I try to achieve in painting. View quote
Paul Gauguin
How do you see this tree? Is it really green? Use green, then, the most beautiful green on your palette. And that shadow, rather blue? Don't be afraid to paint it as blue as possible. View quote
Paul Gauguin
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. View quote
Paul Gauguin
.. color being enigmatic in itself.... then to be logical we cannot use it any other way than enigmatically.. View quote
Paul Gauguin
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. (Paul Gauguin)
Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed, at its aspect everyone may create romance at the will of his imagination, and at a glance have his soul invaded by the most profound memories, no efforts of memory, everything summed up in one moment. Complete art which sums up all the others and completes them. Like music, it acts on the soul through the intermediary of the senses, the harmonious tones corresponding to the harmonies of sounds, but in painting, a unity is obtained which is not possible in music, where the accords follow one another, and the judgement experiences a continuous fatigue if one wants to reunite the end and the beginning. In the main, the ear is an inferior sense to the eye. The hearing can only grasp a single sound at one time, whereas the sight takes in everything and at the same time simplifies at its will. View quote
Paul Gauguin
[In] painting...all sensations are condensed, everyone...with a single glance [has] his soul invaded by the most profound recollections...everything is summed up in one instant. Like music, it acts on the soul through the intermediary of the senses: harmonious colors correspond to the harmonies of sound. View quote
Paul Gauguin
Your Nordic blue eyes looked attentively at the paintings hanging on the walls. I felt stirrings of rebellion: a whole clash between your civilization and my barbarism. Civilization from which you suffer. Barbarism which for me is a rejuvenation. View quote
Paul Gauguin
Art is either revolution or plagiarism. View quote
Paul Gauguin
Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge - and has to content oneself with dreaming. View quote
Paul Gauguin
I do not paint by copying nature. Everything I do springs from my wild imagination. View quote
Paul Gauguin
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! View quote
Paul Gauguin
As I wanted to suggest a luxuriant and untamed type of nature, a tropical sun that sets aglow everything around it, I was obliged to give my figures a suitable setting.It is indeed the outdoor life - yet intimate at the same time, in the thickets and the shady streams, these women whispering in an immense palace decorated by nature itself, with all the riches that Tahiti has to offer. This is the reason behind all these fabulous colors, this subdued and silent glow."But none of this exists!""Oh yes it does, as an equivalent of the grandeur, the depth, the mystery of Tahiti, when you have to express it on a canvas measuring only one square meter."Very subtle, very knowing in her naïveté is the Tahitian Eve. The riddle hiding in the depth of her childlike eyes is still incommunicable to me. View quote
Paul Gauguin
Life at Papeete soon became a burden.It was Europe, the Europe which I had thought to shake off - and that under the aggravating circumstances of colonial snobbism, and the imitation, grotesque even to the point of caricature, of our customs, fashions, vices, and absurdities of civilization.Was I to have made this far journey, only to find the very thing which I had fled? View quote
Paul Gauguin
I have lingered among the nymphs of Corot, dancing in the sacred wood of Ville-d'Avray. (Paul Gauguin)
Concentrate your strengths against your competitor's relative weaknesses. View quote
Paul Gauguin
In my figures [of his famous painting 'Vision After the Sermon'] I have achieved a great simplicity, which is both rustic and superstitious..... In this picture the landscape and the struggle [between Jacob wrestling with the angel ] exist only in the imagination of the people whom the sermon has moved to prayer. That's why there is a contrast between the people, depicted naturally, and the struggle in its unnatural and dis-proportioned landscape. View quote
Paul Gauguin
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? View quote
Paul Gauguin
The flat sound of my wooden clogs on the cobblestones, deep, hollow and powerful, is the note I seek in my painting. View quote
Paul Gauguin