I wear myself out and struggle with the sun. And what a sun here! It would be necessary to paint here with gold and gemstones. It is wonderful.
Interpretation
Monet describes the intense effort and beauty of his painting experience, emphasizing the awe-inspiring nature he observes.
In this quote, Claude Monet expresses the profound dedication and effort he invests in his art, particularly in capturing the beauty of the sun and his surroundings. He indicates that the light and scenery he encounters are so exquisite that they seem worthy of being rendered in precious materials like gold and gemstones, highlighting the extraordinary inspiration he finds in nature and his relentless pursuit of capturing it through painting.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of art in education.
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.
I have the worst ear for criticism, even when I have created a stage set I like, I always hear the woman in the back of the dress circle, who says she doesn't like blue.
When I sang my American folk melodies in Budapest, Prague, Tiflis, Moscow, Oslo, or the Hebrides or on the Spanish front, the people understood and wept or rejoiced with the spirit of the songs. I found that where forces have been the same, whether people weave, build, pick cotton, or dig in the mine, they understand each other in the common language of work, suffering, and protest.
Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
I can see myself as a very old man in a terrific wheelchair. Only, I won't be photographing the tree outside my window, the way Steichen did. I'll be photographing other old people.
To my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering 'I want to be white,' hidden in the aspirations of his people, to 'Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro - and beautiful!'
See, a painting is much cheaper than making a film. And photography is, you know, way cheap. So if I get an idea for a film, there are many ways to get it together and go realise that film. There's really nothing to be afraid of.
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