I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
Interpretation
Monet expresses his inspiration from nature and the inability to fully understand it.
Claude Monet's quote reflects the deep connection he felt with nature, particularly flowers, which he believes significantly influenced his journey as a painter. This statement conveys the idea that while one may not fully comprehend the complexities of nature, the beauty and inspiration it provides can lead to artistic creation and passion.
In practice
During an art class discussion about the influence of nature on artists.
When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, house, a field....Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you.
Zaandam has enough to paint for a lifetime.
The effect of sincerity is to give one's work the character of a protest. The painter, being concerned only with conveying his impression, simply seeks to be himself and no one else.
The light constantly changes, and that alters the atmosphere and beauty of things every minute.
Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face.
Pictures aren't made out of doctrines. Since the appearance of impressionism, the official salons, which used to be brown, have become blue, green, and red...But peppermint or chocolate, they are still confections.
In those days, a gay man was made to feel nothing but shame about his feelings and his sexuality. I wanted my drawings to counteract that, to show gay men being happy and positive about who they were. Oh, I didn't sit down to think this all out carefully. But I knew - right from the start - that my men were going to be proud and happy men!
My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.
Art is long, life is short; judgement difficult, opportunity transient.
Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise, and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself- a voice answering a voice.
For me, drawing is a question of death and life. Every day I draw, I write, I do something.
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