Claude Monet Quotes

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

Art is embedded in nature and they who can extract it, have it.

But to make the intangible tangible, to pick the emotion out of the air and make it true for others, is both the blessing and the curse of the writer, for the thing between book covers is never as beautiful as the thing he imagined.

The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature.

Art arises when the secret vision of the artist and the manifestation of nature agree to find new shapes.

I devour nature ceaselessly. I exaggerate, sometimes I make changes in the subject; but still I don't invent the whole picture. On the contrary, I find it already there. It's a question of picking out what one wants from nature.

All art is but imitation of nature.

I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldn't have to paint at all.

Plants exist in the weather and light rays that surround them - waving in the wind, shimmering in the sunlight. I am always puzzling over how to draw such things.

I look out the window sometimes to seek the color of the shadows and the different greens in the trees, but when I get ready to paint I just close my eyes and imagine a scene.

To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.

When I look at green trees on a sunny day, I don't know how to make an interesting picture of that.

I don't write about nature, but I'm definitely very inspired by it.

The power of nature is what all art strives to be. The more we can get in tune with the harmony of the planet, the more our art can benefit from that relationship.

I find it painful when I'm without anything. But I work in multiple fields. If I can't write, I find myself taking photographs. I can go on the road and perform. But the most important thing for me is writing, and when I hit those walls, it's painful.

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

I'd spent five hours that morning trying to write a song that was meaningful and good, and I finally gave up and lay down. Then, "Nowhere Man" came, words and music, the whole damn thing, as I lay down...Song writing is about getting the demon out of me. It's like being possessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won't let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you're allowed sleep.

In the same way, I can wake up with a very positive idea of what I want to do for my collection, and be completely desperate at night regarding the same thing. And I do a lot of other things too: Writing for me is almost as important as drawing my collection.

Artists should never look at pictures, but should stutter in a language of their own.

All I did was to look at what the universe showed me, to let my brush bear witness to it.

Art is the result of a creative impulse derived out of a consciousness of life.

The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature - translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive, and every work of art should be alive.

A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man.

I have heard painters acknowledge, though in that acknowledgment no degradation of themselves was intended, that they could do better without nature than with her; or as they express themselves, 'that it only put them out.