A certain blue enters your soul

The artist begins with a vision - a creative operation requiring effort. Creativity takes courage.

The artists must see all things as if he were seeing them for the first time. All his life he must see as he did when he was a child.

Expression for me does not reside in passions glowing in a human face or manifested by violent movement. The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive; the place occupied by my figures, the empty space around them, the proportions, everything has its share.

For my part I have never avoided the influence of others. I would have considered it cowardice and a lack of sincerity toward myself.

Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say.

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