Top 100 Paul Gauguin Quotes
#1. No one wants my painting because it is different from other people's peculiar, crazy public that demands the greatest possible degree of originality on the painter's part and yet won't accept him unless his work resembles that of the others!
Paul Gauguin
#2. Sometimes people accuse me of being incomprehensible only because they look for an explicative side to my pictures which is not there.
Paul Gauguin
#3. A hint - don't paint too much direct from nature. Art is an abstraction! study nature then brood on it and treasure the creation which will result, which is the only way to ascend towards God - to create like our Divine Master.
Paul Gauguin
#4. If instead of a figure you put the shadow only of a person, you have found an original starting point, that strangeness of which you have calculated.
Paul Gauguin
#5. Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.
Paul Gauguin
#6. I plunged eagerly and passionately into the wilderness, as if in the hope of thus penetrating into the very heart of this Nature, powerful and maternal, there to blend with her living elements.
Paul Gauguin
#7. Nothing so resembles a daub as a masterpiece.
Paul Gauguin
#8. In painting one must search rather for suggestion than for description, as is done in music.
Paul Gauguin
#9. How do you see those tree? ... They are yellow. Well then put down yellow. And that shadow is rather blue. So render it with pure ultramarine. Those red leaves? Use vermillion.
Paul Gauguin
#10. I sit at my door, smoking a cigarette and sipping my absinthe, and I enjoy every day without a care in the world
Paul Gauguin
#11. Oh mysterious world ... I have become better for having understood and having loved thy human soul - a flower which has ceased to bloom and whose fragrance no one henceforth will breathe.
Paul Gauguin
#12. There are tonalities which are noble and others which are vulgar, harmonies which are calm or consoling, and others which are exciting because of their boldness.
Paul Gauguin
#13. But I owe something to Vincent, and that is, in the consciousness of having been useful to him, the confirmation of my own original ideas about painting. And also, at difficult moments, the remembrance that one finds others unhappier than oneself.
Paul Gauguin
#14. Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form.
Paul Gauguin
#15. On an instrument you start from one tone. In painting you start from several.
Paul Gauguin
#16. Absinthe is the only decent drink that suits an artist.
Paul Gauguin
#17. What still concerns me the most is: am I on the right track, am I making progress, am I making mistakes in art?
Paul Gauguin
#18. The landscape with its violent, pure colours dazzled and blinded me. I was always uncertain ...
Paul Gauguin
#19. Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.
Paul Gauguin
#20. If I did what has already been done, I would be a plagiarist and would consider myself unworthy; so I do something different and people call me a scoundrel. I'd rather be a scoundrel than a plagiarist!
Paul Gauguin
#21. I tried to make everything breathe in this painting: faith, quiet suffering, religious and primitive style, and great nature with its scream.
Paul Gauguin
#22. It is useless to advise solitude for everyone; one must be strong enough to endure it and to work alone.
Paul Gauguin
#23. A great sentiment can be rendered immediately. Dream on it and look for the simplest form in which you can express it.
Paul Gauguin
#24. Do not finish your work too much. An impression is not sufficiently durable for its first freshness to survive a belated search for infinite detail; in this way you let the lava grow cool ...
Paul Gauguin
#25. For Christ's sake, were the mountains blue, then chuck on some blue and don't go telling me that it was a blue a bit like this or like that, it was blue wasn't it? Good - make them blue and that's enough!
Paul Gauguin
#26. I made a promise to keep a watch over myself, to remain master of myself, so that I might become a sure observer.
Paul Gauguin
#27. Color! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams.
Paul Gauguin
#28. Perhaps I have no talent, but all vanity aside - I do not believe that anyone makes an artistic attempt, no matter how small, without having a little - or there are many fools.
Paul Gauguin
#29. Many people say that I don't know how to draw because I don't draw particular forms. When will they understand that execution, drawing and color (in other words, style) must be in harmony with the poem?
Paul Gauguin
#30. Follow the masters! But why should one follow them? The only reason they are masters is that they didn't follow anybody!
Paul Gauguin
#31. Silence! I am learning to know the silence of a Tahitian night.
Paul Gauguin
#33. And here in my isolation I can grow stronger. Poetry seems to come of itself, without effort, and I need only let myself dream a little while painting to suggest it.
Paul Gauguin
#34. Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction.
Paul Gauguin
#35. Moved by an unconsious sentiment born out of solitude and savagery - idle tales of a noughty child who sometimes reflects and who is always a lover of the beautiful - the beauty that is personal - the only beauty that is human.
Paul Gauguin
#36. It is well for young men to have a model, but let them draw the curtain over it while they are painting.
Paul Gauguin
#37. Poor artist! You gave away part of your soul when you painted the picture which you are now trying to dispose of.
Paul Gauguin
#38. All the masters have those weak points that are called masterpieces; and besides, they do them as crowd pleasers
to prove that they have the know-how.
Paul Gauguin
#39. Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!
Paul Gauguin
#40. In order to produce something new, you have to return to the original source, to the childhood of mankind.
Paul Gauguin
#41. A critic in my house sees some paintings. Greatly perturbed, he asks for my drawings. My drawings? Never! They are my letters, my secrets.
Paul Gauguin
#42. The cyclone ends. The sun returns; the lofty coconut trees lift up their plumes again; man does likewise. The great anguish is over; joy has returned; the sea smiles like a child.
Paul Gauguin
#43. In art there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists
Paul Gauguin
#44. With practice the craft will come almost of itself, in spite of you and all the more easitly if you think of something besides technique.
Paul Gauguin
#45. Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.
Paul Gauguin
#46. Lacking many of the essential implements, it irritated me to be reduced to impotence in the face of artistic projects to which I had passionately given myself.
Paul Gauguin
#47. Machines have come, art has fled, and I am far from thinking photography can help us.
Paul Gauguin
#49. Sooner or later people will learn to recognize your worth
Paul Gauguin
#50. It is so small a thing, the life of a man, and yet there is time to do great things, fragments of a common task.
Paul Gauguin
#51. Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth? - photography, once it begins to reproduce colors, and that won't be long in coming. And yet you want an intelligent man to sweat for months so as to give the illusion he can do something as well as an ingenious little machine can!
Paul Gauguin
#52. It was so simple to paint things as I saw them; to put without special calculation a red close to a blue.
Paul Gauguin
#53. I have come to an unalterable decision - to go and live forever in Polynesia. Then I can end my days in peace and freedom, without thoughts of tomorrow and this eternal struggle against idiots.
Paul Gauguin
#54. I am a great artist and I know it. It's because of what I am that I have endured so much suffering, so as to pursue my vocation, otherwise I would consider myself a rogue - which is what many people think I am, for that matter.
Paul Gauguin
#55. Without delay I began work, without hesitation and all of a fever.
Paul Gauguin
#56. Night is here. All is at rest. My eyes close in order to see without actually understanding the dream that flees before men infinite space; and I experience the languorous sensation produced by the mournful procession of my hopes.
Paul Gauguin
#57. I must confess that I too am a woman and that I am always prepared to applaud a woman who is more daring than I, and is equal to a man in fighting for freedom of behavior.
Paul Gauguin
#58. It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.
Paul Gauguin
#59. In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.
Paul Gauguin
#61. Don't over finish your work. There is value to done.
Paul Gauguin
#62. Where do we come from?" "What are we?""Where are we going?
Paul Gauguin
#63. There are two sorts of beauty; one is the result of instinct, the other of study. A combination of the two, with the resulting modifications, brings with it a very complicated richness, which the art critic ought to try to discover.
Paul Gauguin
#64. When the physical organism breaks up, the soul survives. It then takes on another body.
Paul Gauguin
#65. Oh yes! he loved yellow, this good Vincent, this painter from Holland - those glimmers of sunlight rekindled his soul, that abhorred the fog, that needed the warmth.
Paul Gauguin
#66. There are noble tones, ordinary ones, tranquil harmonies, consoling ones, others which excite by their vigour.
Paul Gauguin
#67. A bit of advice, don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it, and concentrate on what you will create as a result.
Paul Gauguin
#68. Why did I hesitate to put all this glory of the sun on my canvas?
Paul Gauguin
#69. Solitude is not to be recommended to everyone, for you have to be strong in order to bear it and act alone.
Paul Gauguin
#70. Out in the sun, some painters are lined up. The first is copying nature, the second is copying the first, the third is copying the second ... You see the sequence.
Paul Gauguin
#71. However depressed I may be I am not in the habit of giving up a project without having tried everything, even the 'impossible', to gain my end.
Paul Gauguin
#72. In Europe men and women have intercourse because they love each other. In the South Seas they love each other because they have had intercourse. Who is right?
Paul Gauguin
#73. One's state of mind is three-quarters of what counts, so it has to be carefully nurtured if you want to do something great and lasting.
Paul Gauguin
#74. Take care not to step on the foot of a learned idiot. His bite is incurable.
Paul Gauguin
#75. Nail up some indecency in plain sight over your door; from that time forward you will be rid of all respectable people,the most insupportable folk God has created.
Paul Gauguin
#76. All the joys - animal and human - of a free life are mine. I have escaped everything that is artificial, conventional, customary. I am entering into the truth, into nature.
Paul Gauguin
#77. You may dream freely when you listen to music as well as when you look at painting. When you read a book you are the slave of the author's mind.
Paul Gauguin
#78. Soon I'll be old and I've done precious little in this world for lack of time. I am always afraid I'll become senile before I've finished what I've undertaken.
Paul Gauguin
#79. The work of a man is the explanation of the man.
Paul Gauguin
#80. My eyes close and uncomprehendingly see the dream in the infinite space that stretches away, elusive, before me.
Paul Gauguin
#81. Whatever may happen the sun will rise tomorrow as it rose to-day, beneficent and serene.
Paul Gauguin
#82. The flat sound of my wooden clogs on the cobblestones, deep, hollow and powerful, is the note I seek in my painting.
Paul Gauguin
#83. Many excellent cooks are spoilt by going into the arts.
Paul Gauguin
#84. Life is merely a fraction of a second. An infinitely small amount of time to fulfill our desires, our dreams, our passions.
Paul Gauguin
#85. Today one can dare anything, and, furthermore, nobody is surprised.
Paul Gauguin
#86. Beware of luxury! Beware of acquiring the taste and need for it, under the pretext of providing for the morrow ...
Paul Gauguin
#87. A critic is someone who meddles with something that is none of his business.
Paul Gauguin
#88. Wherever I go I need a period of incubation so that I may learn the essence of nature, which never wishes to be understood or yield herself.
Paul Gauguin
#89. Let everything about you breathe the calm and peace of the soul.
Paul Gauguin
#90. Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.
Paul Gauguin
#92. The great artist is a formulation of the greatest intelligence: he is the recipient of sensations which are the most delicate and consequently the most invisible expressions of the brain.
Paul Gauguin
#93. Is there a recipe for making beauty? The schools give recipes, but they do not beget works that make people exclaim: How beautiful that is!
Paul Gauguin
#94. Why work? The gods are there to lavish upon the faithful the good gifts of nature.
Paul Gauguin
#95. Beautiful colors exist, though we do not realize it, and are glimpsed behind the veil that modesty has drawn over them.
Paul Gauguin
#96. Look closely at the Japanese; they draw admirably and yet in them you will see life outdoors and in the sun without shadows ...
Paul Gauguin
#97. A meter of green is greener than a centimeter.
Paul Gauguin
#98. Concentrate your strengths against your competitor's relative weaknesses.
Paul Gauguin
#99. A young man who is unable to commit a folly is already an old man.
Paul Gauguin
#100. The critics can say stupid things and we can enjoy them, if we have the legitimate feeling of superiority - the satisfaction of a duty accomplished.
Paul Gauguin
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