I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
Interpretation
Monet expresses gratitude to flowers for inspiring him to become a painter.
In this quote, Claude Monet acknowledges that the beauty and presence of flowers played a pivotal role in his artistic journey, suggesting that nature can serve as a profound source of inspiration for creativity. His statement reflects the idea that the natural world can ignite passions and talents within us, leading to the discovery of our true calling.
In practice
In a speech about artistic influence at 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.
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
Acutely aware of the poverty of my means, language became obstacle. At every page I thought, 'That's not it.' So I began again with other verbs and other images. No, that wasn't it either. But what exactly was that it I was searching for? It must have been all that eludes us, hidden behind a veil so as not to be stolen, usurped and trivialized. Words seemed weak and pale.
It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place.
A dancer, if she is great, can give to the people something that they can carry with them forever. They can never forget it, and it has changed them, though they may never know it.
My mother is a great artist, but she always treated her paintings like minor postcards. Had she pursued it, she would have been a great artist. Instead, she looked down on her art.
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