You want to paint? First of all you must cut off your tongue because your decision takes away from you the right to express yourself with anything but your brush.

You want to paint? First of all you must cut off your tongue because your decision takes away from you the right to express yourself with anything but your brush.

The essential thing is to spring forth, to express the bolt of lightning one senses upon contact with a thing. The function of the artist is not to translate an observation but to express the shock of the object on his nature; the shock, with the original reaction.

It is not enough to place colors, however beautiful, one beside the other; colors must also react on one another. Otherwise, you have cacophony.

Starting to paint, I felt gloriously free, quiet, and alone.

Color helps to express light, not the physical phenomenon, but the only light that really exists, that in the artist's brain.

The role of the artist, like that of the scholar, consists of seizing current truths often repeated to him, but which will take on new meaning for him and which he will make his own when he has grasped their deepest significance.