Paul Gauguin Quotes

The good thing about painting from memory is that so much is forgotten.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

As a creative person, you want to start with a blank canvas.

Creativity's about ownership.

I love to be creative.

Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.

I believe in creative work.

You never know what an artist is going to create next.

The creative processes are so mysterious.

That's the thing about creating. When you create, you create your own thing, whatever that is. It's always going to seep through in whatever you do.

Creativity is not about making 30 songs in 30 days. It's never about demand and supply. No one can possibly do that.

I chose to do art in the way I always do it, which is with all the crazy contradictions of life in there.

When you draw, you copy the world don't you? You remake it on paper, but it isn't the same. It's yours. No one else could have created it just like that. When I make poems, I use the words we all use, but the order and the sound create a new power. This wood is someone's creation. We stumble through it's tendrils, as if we're crawling through the synapses of his mind.

I'm completely in control of creating my photographs, and I'm not always in complete control of creating a character. It's more of a way to express myself than acting is, by far.

But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories.

An artist must be very careful not to look for models. As soon as one artist takes another as model, he is lost. There is no other point of departure than reality.

An artist must find his expression closely linked to his individual experience or else follow in the old grooves resulting in lifeless forms.

A painting is above all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants to add two or three touches from nature, of course it doesn't spoil anything.

I can do my part of the storytelling. I can carry it. I can paint it. I can maneuver it. I can massage it. But if I don't have anything to work with, then there's nothing.

I like to paint something that leads me on and on into the unknown, something that I want to see away on beyond.

Creativity needs discipline and freedom.

Where beams of imagination play, the memory's soft figures melt away.

An artist's job is to surprise himself. Use all means possible.

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere.

Sometimes the song isn't strong enough to contain the fiction, because memories are fictions.