Auguste Renoir Quotes

To an artist, creating an image means being in love with it.

Throughout the time in which I am working on a canvas I can feel how I am beginning to love it, with that love which is born of slow comprehension.

Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track, but I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist - whatever.

Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.

I feel that I am pregnant by music, and it is the father and mother of my child.

An artist's love for what they create is what creates love.

In love as in art, good technique helps.

Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.

Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting should begin by cutting out his own tongue

I think writers can get a little melodramatic sometimes about their work, and it helps me not to do that, to just say, "Well, this is how I make a living, and I need to become a very good craftsman."

It does not matter whether you paint, sculpt, or make shoes, whether you are a gardener, a farmer, a fisherman, a carpenter-it does not matter. What matters is, are you putting your very soul into what you are creating? Then your creative products have something of the quality of divine.

You stand your ground and you perform your art. That's what the artist does. The artist is about perfection.

It's with my brush that I make love.

Creative work carries with it a form of intense love.

Industry in art is a necessity - not a virtue - and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work, for work alone will efface the footsteps of work.

Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.

It's certainly true that when I was young, writing seemed to me so important that I would have sacrificed almost anything to it ... Because I thought of the world in which I wrote -- the world I created -- as somehow much more enormously alive than the world I was actually living in.

That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman--the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.

When I paint I am ageless, I just have the pleasure or the difficulty of painting.

The artist should be intoxicated with the idea of the thing he wants to express.

Maybe it's because it's connected to my childhood, or it's connected to the origins of what drove me creatively, but I feel like my life never makes more sense than when I'm in that process.

When I stand before a canvas, I never know what I'll do, and I am the first one surprised at what comes out.

At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands before our camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect--a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.

To be a good poet, you must care more about the writing, than the writer.

My first sense of myself was as an artist, a painter. I would see a Van Gogh painting and just love it, the more emotional and passionate the more it attracted me.