Quotes About Creativity

In short it is not as good as your painting yet; never mind, it will come; you must certainly continue your sonnets. There are so many people, especially among our comrades, who imagine that words are nothing - on the contrary, isn't it true that saying a thing well is as interesting and as difficult as painting it? There is the art of lanes and colours, but the art of words is there nonetheless, and will remain.

The more ugly, old, mean, ill, poor I get, the more I want to take my revenge by producing a brilliant colour, well arranged, resplendent. Jewellers too get old and ugly before they learn how to arrange precious stones properly. And arranging the colours in a painting in order to make them vibrate and to enhance their value by their contrasts is something like arranging jewels properly or designing costumes

Now and then when I am writing, I automatically do a small drawing, such as I sent you lately. I did one this morning representing Elijah in the desert under an orange sky, with some hawthorns in the foreground. It is nothing special, but I see it all so clearly before me, and I think that at such moments I could speak about it enthusiastically - may it be given me to do so later on.

I know there are persons who think I ought to resign myself, and that it is against the rules not to consider myself beaten; but if they say of my proposal this summer, "If you sing before breakfast, you will cry before night," then you know the verse, He lost his feather in a fight But knew they'd grow again all right, Far finer than before

Goodbye, write again between times if you can. As to the money, do what you can, but remember that we must try our utmost to succeed. And I won't let that idea of painting portraits go, for it is a good thing to fight for, to show people that there is more in them than the photographer can possibly get out of them with his machine.

But always those same conventional eyes, noses, mouths - waxlike and smooth and cold. It cannot but always remain lifeless. And the painted portraits have a life of their own, coming straight from the painter's soul, which the machine cannot reach. The more one looks at photographs, the more one feels this, I think.

I must tell you that even while working I think continually about the plan of setting up a studio in which you and I will be permanent residents, but which both of us want to turn into a shelter and refuge for friends, against the times when they find that the struggle is getting too much for them.

If you hear a voice within you say ,you cannot paint,' then by all means paint. And that voice will be silenced.

Fortunately for me, I do not hanker after victory any more, and all that I seek in painting is a way to make life bearable.

If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint. And that voice will be silenced.

Iar, dac? m-aÈ™ hot?rî s? m? las în voia pornirilor mele, nimic nu mi-ar fi mai uÈ™or decât s? m? uit cu dispreÈ› la tot ce-am f?cut È™i s?-mi calc tablourile în picioare, aÈ™a cum face père Cézanne.

You have been lucky to meet Guy de Maupassant. I have just read his first book, Des Vers, poems dedicated to his master Flaubert; there is one, "Au bord de l'eau," which is already himself. What Van der Meer of Delft is to Rembrandt among the painters, he is to Zola among the French novelists.

But in the course of four months 250 fr. must be deducted for the payment of colours and rent; well, then my work is hampered and obstructed to such an extent that I am at my wit's end, and I prefer to tell the fellows: Sell the whole lot! But let me work!

It does one good to read things like that, more than most of the stuff the decadents write, with their passion for saying the most obvious things in the most wildly contorted phrases.

There are certain times when it is far from clear to us that art should be something sacred or good.

I should very much like to see Millet reproductions in the schools. I think there are children who would become painters if only they saw good things.

But since then I've had no chance of getting models, though on the other hand I did have the chance to study the colour question. And if I should find models again for my figures later, then I would hope to be able to show that I am after something other than little green landscapes or flowers.

Did I tell you that I had sent the drawings to friend Russell? At the moment I am doing practically the same ones again for you, there will be twelve likewise. You will then see better what there is in the painted studies in the way of drawing. I have already told you that I always have to fight against the mistral, which makes it absolutely impossible to be master of your stroke. That accounts for the "haggard" look of the studies.

If I were living near you, I should try to make you understand that it might perhaps be more practical for you to paint with me than to write, and that you might be able to express your feelings more easily that way. In any case I can do something personally about your painting, but I am not in the writing profession.

The rest certainly must seem damn bad." And the days when I bring home a study I say to myself - If it was like this every day, we might be able to get on; but the days when you come back empty-handed, and eat and sleep and spend money all the same, you don't think much of yourself, and you feel like a fool and a shirker and a good-for-nothing.

But then I know that I am not - not their equal - but didn't the Flauberts and Balzacs make the Zolas and Maupassants? So here's to - not us, but to the generation to come.

To my letter of the day before yesterday I want to add that yesterday I had a letter from Rappard, and that our quarrel is completely made up, that he has sent me a sketch of a large picture of a brickyard which he is painting.

Try to grasp the essence of what the great artists, the serious masters, say in their masterpieces, and you will again find God in them. One man has written or said it in a book, another in a painting. Just read the Bible and the Gospel, that will start you thinking, thinking about many things, thinking about everything, well then, think about many things, think about everything, that will lift your thoughts above the humdrum despite yourself. We know how to read, so let us read!

I insist on this, the plan remains just as real and solid whether Gauguin comes or not, seeing that our object doesn't change - to deliver me and one of the comrades from this cancer that is gnawing at our work, this being forced to live in these ruinous inns without any profit to ourselves. It is pure madness.