Quotes by Painters Appearing in Lisette's List

Camille Pissarro: Côte Jalet God takes care of imbeciles, little children and artists. Everything is beautiful. The important thing is to know how to interpret it. Sadness, bitterness, pain I can forget about, even ignore, in the joy of work. Suffering only grabs hold of the lazy. Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing. Painting, art in general, enchants me. It is my life. What else matters? When you put all your soul into a work, all that is noble in you, you cannot fail to find a kindred soul who understands you, and you do not need a host of such spirits. Is not that all an artist should wish for? At times I come across works of mine which are soundly done and really in my style, and at such moments I find great solace.

A beautiful painting by this man is the act of an honest man. I could not define his talent better than that.    -- Émile Zola

Paul Cézanne: Montagne Ste-Victoire, Vue de Bibémus Nature should be created as cylinders, spheres, and cones. It should all be aligned in correct perspective so that every side of an object or surface tends towards a central point. Art is a religion. Its goal is the elevation of thought. Look at Sainte Victoire. What a sweep. What a commanding thirst for sunshine! And what melancholy in the evening when all that heaviness settles upon it. When you translate the skin of a beautiful peach, or the melancholy of an old apple, you sense their mutual reflections, the same shadows of relinquishment, the same loving sun, the same recollections of dew.

However does he do it? The moment he dabs two touches of paint on a canvas, the result is brilliant.    --Pierre Auguste Renoir

Courage, then, once again! Take up your brush once more and give your imagination free rein. I believe in you.    -- Émile Zola

Marc Chagall: Promenade Art seems to me to be a state of soul more than anything else. What I mean by "abstract" is something which comes to life spontaneously through a gamut of contrasts, plastic at the same time as psychic, and pervades both the picture and the eye of the spectator with conceptions of new and unfamiliar elements. Neither Imperial Russia, nor the Russia of the Soviets needs me. They don't understand me. I am a stranger to them. I'm certain Rembrandt loves me. Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything. Color is vibration like music; everything is vibration. I have always painted pictures where human love floods my colors. All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites. Love and fantasy go hand in hand. Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things that revolve around love. In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love. We all know that a good person can be a bad artist. But no one will ever be a genuine artist unless he is a great human being and thus also a good one. Great art picks up where nature ends. Will God or someone else give me the strength to breathe the breath of prayer and mourning into my paintings, the breath of prayer for redemption and resurrection? All our interior world is reality, and that, perhaps, more so than our apparent world. If a symbol should be discovered in a painting of mine, it was not my intention. It is a result I did not seek. It is something that may be found afterwards, and which can be interpreted according to taste. If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.