Auguste Renoir Quotes

I had wrung impressionism dry and I finally came to the conclusion that I know neither how to paint nor how to draw.

Most artists have retired too absolutely; they grow rusty, inflexible to the flow of currents.

Hemingway said: 'It don't come anymore.' So where did it go?

I painted with acrylic paint, and the reason why I went to oil was mainly because I didn't control it. I was looking for the insecurity of it. I mean, I might have found another reason later, but at that moment, the reason was I was looking for the insecurity.

I can't believe that I've written my best work yet. If I believed that, then I wouldn't bother releasing music anymore.

In 2012, I really thought, 'That's it. It's over. I've written what I can write.'

I think in my late 20s, I was starting to enter that realm of complacency, which is the most terrifying place I can imagine as an artist. I felt time creeping up on me.

Aly and I went through just a long period of time where we just didn't feel creative musically. And, you know, we went through the whole writer's block thing, and we went through having two pretty successful records and figuring out how we want to transition as adults.

I am tired of doing stupid comedies. Though comedy has given me the breakthrough in the industry, I constantly feel the need to grow.

I learned to paint in a historical method. First through watercolours and then through oil. Then, when I went to college and to the school of architecture, I took up modern painting.

After 'Place Beyond the Pines,' honestly, I was sick of myself. Sick of my own ideas. I wanted to do an adaptation, but everything I'd been reading, I just didn't understand it.

I have a lot of sketches and ideas, but when you don't use them, they get stale.

I always had this ego where if I ever wanted to come back to doing rap, I could do that. That was not true. I would get stuck, I would be in a room and someone would ask me for something and I didn't have it.

That's one of the problems in being a songwriter and living a long time. What you eventually end up doing is you start imitating yourself.

For awhile there, I kind of hit the plateau. Anytime you do that as an artist, one of two things can happen... you're either going to start to fall back off, or you're gonna start to rise.

I have composed too much.

I've been doing four-track songs by myself since I was like a teenager, where I'd sing in a way that I ... I just didn't think other people would like it, so I didn't play it for them but eventually I got over that, which I'm happy that I did, because it's kind of a drag to be playing a kind of music that you don't really like as much as another kind.

I have a very dear friend, a great painter, called me up very upset, the work wasn’t going well… He asked me to come to his studio -- which I did -- I looked around at the work, dozens of sketches, drawings, large pictures, and I was very close to his work, intensely involved with his work, and he asked me, ‘What’s wrong?’ And I said, ‘Simple – it’s a loss of nerve.

I don't find inspiration by just sitting down with a guitar anymore. I lost that. I started being so interested in other kinds of music.

I do not repudiate any of my paintings but there isn't one of them that I would not redo differently, if I had it to redo. My destination is always the same but I work out a different route to get there.

A young painter who cannot liberate himself from the influence of past generations is digging his own grave.

Every time you make something that somebody likes, your impulse is to remind them that if you hadn't made some of these other things that they hated, you wouldn't have been able to make the thing that they liked.

No matter how consummate a work of art may seem, it is only an approximation of the original conception. It is the artist's consciousness of this discrepancy between his conception and the realization that assures his progress.

Well my own impression of my musical pieces is that no matter how long I've been at it, there's not much improvement. So that's kind of regrettable.

The clean clear colours were in my head. But one day as I looked at the brown burned wood of the Shanty, I thought 'I can paint one of those dismal-coloured paintings like the men. I think just for fun I will try - all low-toned and dreary with the tree besides the door.' In my next show, 'The Shanty' went up. The men seemed to approve of it. They seemed to think that maybe I was beginning to paint. That was my only low-toned dismal-coloured painting.