For me, the subject is of secondary importance: I want to convey what is alive between me and the subject.
Interpretation
The essence of art lies in the emotional connection between the artist and the subject rather than the subject itself.
Claude Monet emphasizes that the relationship and emotional engagement the artist feels with their subject is more significant than the subject's inherent qualities. This perspective shifts the focus of art from mere representation to the dynamic interaction and feelings that arise during the creative process, highlighting the importance of personal expression in artistic endeavors.
In practice
During an art exhibition, an artist might express this quote to explain their approach to viewers.
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.
My songs are personal music, they're not communal. I wouldn't want people singing along with me. It would sound funny. I'm not playing campfire meetings. I don't remember anyone singing along with Elvis, Carl Perkins or Little Richard.
Let’s be realistic about this, the guitar can be the single most blasphemous device on the face of the earth. That’s why I like it . . . The disgusting stink of a too-loud electric guitar: now that’s my idea of a good time.
In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
When you see the films of certain young directors, you get the impression that film history begins for them around 1980.
To write tragedy, a man must feel tragedy. To feel tragedy, a man must be aware of the world in which he lives. Not only with his mind, but with his blood and sinews.
They hear it come out, but they don't know how it got there. They don't understand that's life's way of talking. You don't sing to feel better. You sing 'cause that's a way of understanding life.
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