Most people think I paint fast. I paint very slowly.
Interpretation
The quote reflects Monet's true artistic process, emphasizing the care and detail he gives to his work despite the perception of speed.
In this quote, Claude Monet expresses that although others may see his painting process as rapid, he personally dedicates a considerable amount of time and attention to his craft. This highlights the distinction between public perception and the reality of artistic creation, where the fruits of labor often appear effortless, yet behind them lies a meticulous and deliberate effort.
In practice
In a discussion about artistic techniques during a gallery opening.
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.
I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from oneβs tears.
I miss horribly those couple of hours before the performance when you get into the theater and you see people.
We all steal, but if we're smart we steal from great directors. Then, we can call it influence.
I want to allow others to reveal and celebrate aspects of themselves that are usually hidden. My camera is a witness. It holds a light up for my subjects to help them feel their own essence, and gives them the courage to collaborate in the recording of these revelations.
But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.
I was always the first person in the theater all the time. If it was an eight-o'clock curtain, I was here at five-thirty, and it wasn't that I needed to vocalize, because I was all warmed up. I couldn't wait for it to begin.
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