Edouard Manet Quotes

If you go too far with naturalism, there is no need to even organize; just look... and paint what you see until the canvas ends.

Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations.

I'll take anything and slap it on a canvas.

There is only one true thing: instantly paint what you see. When you've got it, you've got it. When you haven't, you begin again. All the rest is humbug.

Drawing and color are by no means two different things. As you paint, you draw... When color is at its richest, form is at its fullest.

A heightened sense of the observation of nature is one of the chief delights that have come to me through trying to paint.

When I had spent a few days without thinking, without doing anything, I would feel a sudden urge to paint. Then I would set up my easel in full sunshine.

I've no doubt that those photographs i took will make people look at everything in a more interesting way - the little tear on one piece of paper, the shadow on another. But good painting has always done that - made you see things. And the most ordinary can be the most extraordinary.

I try to paint what I have found and not what I look for. In art, intentions are of little importance.

I can only draw what I see.

My work is about your seeing. There is a rich tradition in painting of work about light, but it is not light -- it is the record of seeing. My material is light, and it is responsive to your seeing.

The best reason to paint is that there is no reason to paint.

When you paint, try to put down exactly what you see. Whatever else you have to offer will come out anyway.

The first time I started choreographing was in the dark, in my living room, with the lights completely out, to some popular music on the radio. I put the radio on full blast and I started moving. I didn't know what it looked like. I didn't want to see it... I had to start in the dark.

I don't really like to just sit down at a computer and write because that tends to be a little forced. Sometimes the funniest ideas just happen in the moment, when you're talking to people, or you notice something.

When they're looking at my work, they're looking at a painting and they're able to accept it better because it is also a quilt.

You have to practice improvisation, let no one kid you about it!

Since I cannot sing, I paint.

Painting is similar to music. You get a couple or words or notes or chords that excite you, and you just follow them and add a bit more and see where it takes you. That's the thrill for me. It still is a thrill, which is amazing after all this time.

I paint what cannot be photographed, something from the imagination... I photograph the things I don't want to paint, things that are already in existence.

To paint is not to copy the object slavishly, it is to grasp a harmony among many relationships.

Every time I improvise I'm aware that I could be ruining what it is that we're doing and we'll just have to do it again.

True life is creativity, not development: it is the freedom for creative acts, for creative fire, rather than necessity and the heaviness of congealing self-perfection.

I have never seen an angel. Show me an angel, and I'll paint one.

In painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter your manner.