Eugene Delacroix Quotes
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I live in company with a body, a silent companion, exacting and eternal.
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What moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.
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A fine suggestion, a sketch with great feeling, can be as expressive as the most finished product.
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Cold exactitude is not art... The so-called consciousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring. People like that, if they could, would work with the same minute attention on the back of their canvas.
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One should not be too difficult. An artist should not treat himself like an enemy.
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Nature creates unity even in the parts of a whole.
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Glory to that Homer of painting, to that father of warmth and enthusiasm... he really paints men.
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Every time I await a model, even when I am most pressed to time, I am overjoyed when the time comes and I tremble when I hear the key turn in the door.
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Weaknesses in men of genius are usually an exaggeration of their personal feeling; in the hands of feeble imitators they become the most flagrant blunders. Entire schools have been founded on misinterpretations of certain aspects of the masters. Lamentable mistakes have resulted from the thoughtless enthusiasm with which men have sought inspiration from the worst qualities of remarkable artists because they are unable to reproduce the sublime elements in their work.
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When a thing bores you, do not do it.
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What is real for me are the illusions I create with my paintings. Everything else is quicksand.
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Everything is a subject; the subject is yourself. It is within yourself that you must look and not around you... The greatest happiness is to reveal it to others, to study oneself, to paint oneself continually in one's work.
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The only ones who can really benefit by consulting the model are those who can produce their effect without a model.
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The artist is always concerned with a total view of the world. However, when the photographer takes a picture ... the edge of his picture is just as interesting as the middle, one can only guess at the existence of a whole, and the view presented seems chosen by chance.
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Real beauty in the arts is eternal and would be accepted at all periods; but it wears the dress of its century: something of that dress clings to it, and woe to the works which appear in periods when the general taste is corrupted.
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The things one experiences alone with oneself are very much stronger and purer.
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We work not only to produce, but to give value to time.
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Experience alone can give, even to the greatest talent, that confidence in having done all that could be done.
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Perfect beauty implies perfect simplicity, a quality that at first sight does not arouse the emotions which we feel before gigantic works, objects whose very disproportion constitutes an element of beauty.
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I have told myself a hundred times that painting - that is, the material thing called a painting - is no more than a pretext, the bridge between the mind of the painter and the mind of the spectator.
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The source of genius is imagination alone.
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Seeing artistically does not happen automatically. We must constantly develop our powers of observation.
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The true wisdom of the philosopher ought to insist in enjoying everything. Yet we apply ourselves to dissecting and destroying everything that is good in itself, that has virtue, albeit the virtue there is in mere illusions. Nature gives us this life like a toy to a weak child. We want to see how it all works; we break everything. There remains in our hands, and before our eyes, stupid and opened too late, the sterile wreckage, fragments that will not again make a whole. The good is so simple.
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The first virtue of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes.