Paul Gauguin Quotes

I wanted to be a painter, somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and Pop.

I really admire paintings that look like an actual snapshot - I think that's just extraordinary.

I like to paint nudes mostly.

I have never subscribed to the Dirty Pallet school of painting.

The fundamental grey which differentiates the masters, expresses them and is the soul of all colour.

Ah, Manet has come very, very close to it and Courbet - the marrying of form and colour.

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

When we sit down to draw or paint the sun's rays, we generally use yellow because in the morning and the evening with the blue light scattered away so strongly you're left with a little bit of red and it comes out yellowish.

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 form of my painting is the content. My work is made of single or multiple panels: rectangle, curved, or square. I am less interested in marks on the panels than the 'presence' of the panels themselves. In Red Yellow Blue III the square panels present color. It was made to exist forever in the present; it is an idea and can be repeated anytime in the future.

And I don't care what else anyone has ever told you, the Sun is white, not yellow. Human color perception is a complicated business, but if the Sun were yellow, like a yellow lightbulb, then white stuff such as snow would reflect this light and appear yellow-a snow condition confirmed to happen only near fire hydrants.

You put a blob of yellow here, and another at the further edge of the canvas: straight away a rapport is established between them. Colour acts in the way that music does.

No blue without yellow and without orange, and if you do blue, then do yellow and orange as well, surely.

Perhaps blue, red, and yellow strike the mind more forcibly from there not being any great union between them, as martial music, which is intended to rouse the nobler passions.

Orange is red brought nearer to humanity by yellow.

I have a lot of problems with Western European easel painting.

How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.

With a limited palette, the older painters could do just as well as today what they did was sounder.

Fine music without devotion is but a splendid garment upon a corpse.

Unchecked, the dominating influences of money and of barren intellectualism would reduce the life of emotions to freezing point. And, unable to grasp the holier benefits of religion, the mysticism of the heart reacts in the art-intoxication. .... In this cold, irreligious and practical age the warmth of this devotion to art has kept alive many higher aspirations of our soul, which otherwise might readily have died, as they did in the middle of the last century.

The subject should be observed more for shape and color than for drawing... precise drawing is dry and hampers the impression of the whole, it destroys all sensations.

Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?

I always want to do music that inspires or influences another generation. You want what you create to live, be it sculpture or painting or music. Like Michelangelo, he said, “I know the creator will go, but his work survives. That is why to escape death, I attempt to bind my soul to my work.

She turned to the sunlight And shook her yellow head, And whispered to her neighbor: "Winter is dead.