Odilon Redon Quotes

#1. The artist yields often to the stimuli of materials that will transmit his spirit.

Odilon Redon

#2. I have placed there a little door opening on to the mysterious. I have made stories.

Odilon Redon

#3. The value of art lies in its power to increase our moral force or establish its heightening influence.

Odilon Redon

#4. One must respect black, nothing prostitutes it. It does not please the eye and it awakens no sensuality. It is the agent of the mind far more than the most beautiful color to the palette or prism

Odilon Redon

#5. Nothing in Art is achieved by will alone. It is achieved by docilely submitting to the subconscious.

Odilon Redon

#6. All my originality consists?in giving life in human fashion to beings which are impossible according to the laws of possibility.

Odilon Redon

#7. The painter is not an intellectual if, when he has painted a nude woman, he gives us the idea that she is just about to put her clothes back on.

Odilon Redon

#8. I have tried to put the real at the service of the unreal.

Odilon Redon

#9. It is precisely from the regret left by the imperfect work that the next one can be born.

Odilon Redon

#10. I am certain about what I will never do - but not about what my art will render.

Odilon Redon

#11. I await joyous surprises while working, an awakening of the materials that I work with and that my spirit develops.

Odilon Redon

#12. The fundamental grey which differentiates the masters, expresses them and is the soul of all colour.

Odilon Redon

#13. The good work proceeds with tenacity, intention, without interruption, with an equal measure of passion and reason and it must surpass that goal the artist has set for himself.

Odilon Redon

#14. Black is the most essential of all colors. Above all, if I may say so, it draws its excitement and vitality from deep and secret sources of health ... One must admire black. Nothing can debauch it.

Odilon Redon

#15. My originality consists in putting the logic of the visible to the service of the invisible.

Odilon Redon

#16. Artists who approach perfection do not have many ideas.

Odilon Redon

#17. It is difficult to judge one's contemporaries; perhaps it is impossible to understand them.

Odilon Redon

#18. While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality ... true art lies in a reality that is felt.

Odilon Redon

#19. I am repelled by those who voice the word 'nature', without having any trace of it in their hearts.

Odilon Redon

#20. My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.

Odilon Redon

#21. Like music my drawings transport us to the ambiguous world of the indeterminate.

Odilon Redon

#22. What distinguishes the artist from the dilettante? Only the pain the artist feels. The dilettante looks only for pleasure in art.

Odilon Redon

#23. I have a feeling only for shadows

Odilon Redon