Paul Cézanne quotes - page 5

Make others feel the same way about it. Without their realizing it! That's the meaning of art... Yes, what I'm aiming for is the logical development of what we see and feel when we observe nature; only then I'm concerned with the process, processes being for us no more than simple ways of getting the public to feel what we ourselves are feeling, and of making our point. The great artists we admire have done no more... Shall we have lunch? (Paul Cézanne)
Colour, if I may say so, is biological. Colour is alive and colour alone makes things come alive... Without losing any part of myself, I need to get back to that instinct, so that these colours in the scattered fields signify an idea to me, just as to them they signify a crop. Confronted by a yellow, they spontaneously feel the harvesting activity required of them, just as I, when faced with the same ripening tint.. View quote
Paul Cézanne
Treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone, the whole put into perspective so that each side of an object, or of a plane, leads towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth, whether a sections of nature, or, if you prefer, of the spectacle which Pater omnipotens aeterne Deus unfolds before your eyes. Lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth... Everything I am telling you [ Joachim Gasquet ] about - the sphere, the cone, cylinder, concave shadow – on mornings when I'm tired these notions of mine get me going, they stimulate me, I soon forget them once I start using my eyes. View quote
Paul Cézanne
It's like Impressionism. They all do it at the Salons. Oh, very discreetly! I too was an Impressionist. I don't conceal the fact. Pissarro had an enormous influence on me. But I wanted to make out of Impressionism something solid and lasting like the art of the museums. View quote
Paul Cézanne
Yes, yes, a formula that's a straitjacket.... not for me! All the same, he tries in vain, does Jean-Dominique [Ingres], to wring your heart with his glossy finish! I said this to Vollard, to shock him, he is very powerful! Nevertheless he [ Jean-Dominique Ingres, French classicist painter] is a damned good man... The most modern of the moderns. Do you know why I take my hat off to him? Because he forced his fantastic draughtsmanship down the throats of the idiots who now claim to understand it. But here there are only two: Delacroix and Courbet. The rest are scoundrels. View quote
Paul Cézanne
.. in my ideal of a good painting; there's unity. The drawing and the colour are no longer distinct; as soon as you paint you draw; the more the colours harmonize, the more precise the drawing becomes. I know that from experience. When the colour is at its richest, the form is at its fullest. View quote
Paul Cézanne
Tell me, do you think I'm going mad? I sometimes wonder, you know. View quote
Paul Cézanne
Here, on the river's verge, I could be busy for months without changing my place, simply leaning a little more to right or left. View quote
Paul Cézanne
With a painter's temperament, all that's needed are the means of expression sufficient to be intelligible to the wide public. View quote
Paul Cézanne
I'll always be grateful to the public of intelligent amateurs. View quote
Paul Cézanne
My age and health will never allow me to realize the dream of art I've been pursuing all my life. (Paul Cézanne)
Two sittings a day of my models and I'm totally exhausted. View quote
Paul Cézanne
I want to die painting. View quote
Paul Cézanne
If I dared, I should say that your [ Camille Pissarro ] letter is imprinted with sadness. The picture business isn't going well; I fear that your morale may be colored a little grey, but I'm sure that it's only a passing phase... I imagine that you would be delighted with the country where I am now.... in ', who had talked to me about it. It's like a playing card. Red roofs against the blue sea. If the weather turns favorable perhaps I'll be able to finish them off. View quote
Paul Cézanne
Alas! The memories that are swallowed up in the abyss of the years! I'm all alone now and I would never be able to escape from the self-seeking of human kind anyway. Now it's theft, conceit, infatuation, and now it's rapine or seizure of one's production. But Nature is very beautiful. They can't take that away from me. [in the last conversation Vollard had with Cezanne]. View quote
Paul Cézanne
Right now a moment is fleeting by Capture its reality in paint To do that we must put all else out of our minds. We must become that moment, make ourselves a sensitive recording plate. give the image of what we actually see, forgetting everything that has been seen before our time. View quote
Paul Cézanne
You have no idea how life-giving it is to find around one a youth that agrees not to bury one on the spot. View quote
Paul Cézanne
Perhaps I was born too early. I was more the painter of your generation than of mine. View quote
Paul Cézanne
Right now a moment of time is passing by We must become that moment. View quote
Paul Cézanne
If I dared, I should say that your [ Camille Pissarro ] letter is imprinted with sadness. The picture business isn't going well; I fear that your morale may be colored a little grey, but I'm sure that it's only a passing phase.. .I imagine that you would be delighted with the country where I am now.. ..in L'Estaque, by the sea. I haven't been in Aix for a month. I've started two little motifs of the sea, for Monsieur [Victor] Chocquet [one of them became his later painting 'The Sea at L'Estaque', who had talked to me about it. It's like a playing card. Red roofs against the blue sea. If the weather turns favorable perhaps I'll be able to finish them off. View quote
Paul Cézanne
Like a voluptuous vision, this artificial corner of paradise has left even the most courageous gasping for breath... and Mr Cézanne merely gives the impression of being a sort of madman, painting in a state of delirium tremens. (Paul Cézanne)
..he [Cézanne] never ceased declaring that he was not making pictures, but that he was searching for a technique. Of that technique, each picture contained a portion successfully applied, like a correct phrase of a new language to be created. View quote
Paul Cézanne
Cézanne made a cylinder out of a bottle. I start from the cylinder to create a special kind of individual object. I make a bottle - a particular bottle - out of a cylinder. View quote
Paul Cézanne
..[enabled] to touch the core, the essence of things. Even in as simple a subject, a great painter can achieve a majesty of vision and an intensity of feeling to which we immediately respond. [1937, referring to a still life by Cézanne and a river-sight with sandbank by Monet ]. View quote
Paul Cézanne
Push answers with pull and pull with push.. .At the end of his life and the height of his capacity Paul Cézanne understood color as a force of push and pull. In his pictures he created an enormous sense of volume, breathing, pulsating, expanding, contracting through his use of colors. View quote
Paul Cézanne