Eugene Delacroix Quotes
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Remember the enemy of all painting is gray: a painting will almost always appear grayer than it is, on account of its oblique position under the light.
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Cold exactitude is not art; ingenious artifice, when it pleases or when it expresses, is art itself.
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A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator.
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The secret of not having worries, for me at least, is to have ideas.
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I am carrying out my plan, so long formulated, of keeping a journal. What I most keenly wish is not to forget that I am writing for myself alone. Thus I shall always tell the truth, I hope, and thus I shall improve myself. These pages will reproach me for my changes of mind.
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Finishing a painting demands a heart of steel: everything requires a decision, and I find difficulties where I least expect them... It is at such moments that one fully realizes one's own weaknesses.
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They say that each generation inherits from those that have gone before; if this were so there would be no limit to man's improvements or to his power of reaching perfection. But he is very far from receiving intact that storehouse of knowledge which the centuries have piled up before him; he may perfect some inventions, but in others, he lags behind the originators, and a great many inventions have been lost entirely. What he gains on the one hand, he loses on the other.
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As for the ridiculous fear of making things below one's potential abilities... No, there is the root of the evil. There is the hiding place of stupidity I must attack: vain mortal, you are limited by nothing.
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What I have done cannot be taken from me.
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Do not be troubled for a language, cultivate your soul and she will show herself.
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What makes sovereign ugliness are our conventions.
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Perhaps the sketch of a work is so pleasing because everyone can finish it as he chooses.
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You increase your self-respect when you feel you've done everything you ought to have done, and if there is nothing else to enjoy, there remains that chief of pleasures, the feeling of being pleased with oneself. A man gets an immense amount of satisfaction from the knowledge of having done good work and of having made the best use of his day, and when I am in this state I find that I thoroughly enjoy my rest and even the mildest forms of recreation.
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One must learn to be grateful for one's own findings.
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Painters who are not colorists produce illumination, not painting.
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How can this world, which is so beautiful, include so much horror?
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The contour should come last, only a very experienced eye can place it rightly.
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To be understood a writer has to explain almost everything.
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Draughtsmen may be made, but colourists are born.
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The so-called conscientiousness of the majority of painters is only perfection applied to the art of boring.