Claude Monet Quotes

I paint what I see, not what a camera would see.

I really admire paintings that look like an actual snapshot - I think that's just extraordinary.

A person with normal eyesight would have nothing to know in the way of 'Impressionism' unless he were in a blinding light or in the dusk or dark.

For an Impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject, but to realize sensations.

I love Monet - I've nicknamed him King Blob. When you go up to the painting, it's a series of blobs - amazing.

By using patches of color and tone it is possible to capture every natural impression in the simplest way, freshly and immediately.

The aim of our studies is to prove that color is the most relative means of artistic expression, that we never really perceive what color is physically.

I learned my color in Europe. I've always been a colorist, I think. I started when I was very young, being a bird-watcher, fascinated by the bird colors.

I paint abstract expressions.

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.

The chief concern of the French Impressionists was the discovery of balance between light and dark.

Remember that a painting - before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.

Don't put needless expense into painting a head! Don't try to match tints! Rose and pearly colours blend into each other so that no one can unite them if painted separately. Keep the impression of your subject as one thing!

Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.

Color is a big part of what I do. It's like music. There are only so many notes in the scale, but there are endless permutations; there's no limit to the number. Color on the walls or furniture can reflect back and distort the reality of the true colors of lipsticks and eye shadow.

A painting of a person can be descriptive, but for me it's about all the things that make up a picture - the feelings, the brushstrokes - more than describing somebody. People latch on to the personalities when they talk about my work and forget the other parts.

'Impressionism' was the name given to a certain form of observation when Monet, not content with using his eyes to see what things were or what they looked like as everybody had done before him, turned his attention to noting what took place on his own retina (as an oculist would test his own vision).

If the technical innovations of the Impressionists led merely to a more accurate representation of nature, it was perhaps of not much value in enlarging their powers of expression.

Picasso's superhuman gift for draftsmanship might have made him lazy about pursuing the full potential of color. It was not unusual for him to build a composition by first outlining figures and objects in black and then filling the interstices in a perfunctory manner that can put one in mind of a museum-shop coloring book.

If Monsieur X spent an eternity studying treatises on optics, he would never paint 'La Grande Jatte.'

Painting does what we cannot do - it brings a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane.

I love the way painting is so full of illusionistic possibilities.

If I had gone to art college and everybody was being a conceptual artist, I probably would have wanted to be a portrait or landscape painter.

In some ways painters have been more important in my life than writers. Painters teach you how to see—a faculty that usually isn’t highly developed in poets. Whether you take a walk in the woods with a painter, or go to a museum with one, through them you notice shapes, colors, harmonies, relationships that enhance your own seeing.

I don't have anything to say in any picture. My only interest in photography is to see what something looks like as a photograph. I have no preconceptions.