Claude Monet Quotes

Almost any fool can paint an academy picture, and any imbecile can shoot off a Kodak.

Being creative is my idea of heaven. I'm just incredibly fortunate that I can do it in artwork. Watercolor is what I started out with. What I love about watercolor is that a lot of happy accidents occur.

I wanted to learn how to paint rather than just doing black-and-white work.

I was a terrible painter - my portraits looked like the evil chimera love-children of Picasso's demoiselles and the BBC test card clown.

If Monsieur X spent an eternity studying treatises on optics, he would never paint 'La Grande Jatte.'

I still love a lot of the guys who just paint.

I write and sing about whatever I am able to understand and feel.

Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour rather than as a bolt out of the blue. We have to get our vanities and our preconceptions out of the way and do the work in the time allotted.

Oh, I paint all the time.

Sometimes, trying to make a work of art can be very difficult and very painful.

Well, I'm a painter, I was trained as a painter. I seem to have spent a little less time painting than I might've done. But it didn't transcend the feeling of playing at UFO and those sort of places with the lights and that, the fact that the group was getting bigger and bigger.

It's seldom you make a great picture. you have to milk the cow quite a lot to get plenty of milk to make a little cheese.

For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.

So many people say painting is fun. I don't find it fun at all. It's hard work for me.

I know I'll keep writing poems. That's the constant. I don't know about novels. They're hard. It takes so much concentrated effort. When I'm writing a novel it's pretty much all I can do. I get bored. It takes months. Movies do the same thing. It's all-encompassing. It feels like I'm going to end up writing poems, short stories and screenplays.

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

The artist begins with a vision - a creative operation requiring an effort.

I build a painting by putting little marks together-some look like hot dogs, some like doughnuts.

People see so many things in the paintings. Although I never think of them, it charms me a little bit that people actually project actual scenarios on to the paintings. Hopefully that means that they have a little bit of life to them. Figuring out the rhythm, the structural element has been the key thing in this work, more than the color element. It really was the variety of different widths that lead to a certain movement, a rhythm. Otherwise I'd fall into anything that was too stripy or almost like bar codes, and it thwarted the natural flow of the painting.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

On an instrument you start from one tone. In painting you start from several.

My palette contains a warm and cool of each primary, plus four modifiers: Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna, Blue-Violet and Phthalo Yellow-Green just mix as I go for each painting.

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.

Poetry is like pooping. If there is a poem inside of you, it has to come out. Sometimes it can be really difficult and take longer than you'd like (it may even be painful), but other times it can be really easy and happen much faster than you expected. But either way - it is important, and it feels so much better when it's done.

If I can get it down on paper without puking all over the word processor, then as far as I'm concerned, it's fit to see the light of day.