Top 100 Gauguin Quotes
#1. The great radio telescopes of the world are constructed in remote locations for the same reason Paul Gauguin sailed to Tahiti: For them to work well they must be far from civilization.
Carl Sagan
#2. The non-geometric biomorphic forms of Arp and Miro and Moore are definitely in the ascendant. The formal tradition of Gauguin, Fauvism and Expressionism will probably dominate for some time to come the tradition of Cezanne and Cubism.
Alfred H. Barr Jr.
#3. Letter from Van Gogh to Gauguin: Ah! my dear friend, to make of painting what the music of Berlioz and Wagner has been before us ... a consolatory art for distressed hearts! There are as yet only a few who feel it as you and I do!!! [Letter 739, Arles, 21 January 1889]
Liesbeth Heenk
#4. French Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin would never have become Gauguin if he had not followed this principle. He was a bank employee for a good part of his life, until the day he decided he was an artist. That day he left the bank and became a genius painter.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#5. Gauguin flew into a frenzy! He held my head under the X-ray machine for ten straight minutes and for several hours after I could not blink my eyes in unison." - "If The Impressionists Had Been Dentists
Woody Allen
#6. I've never really understood the term 'Post-Impressionism' as more than a label for Cezanne, Gauguin and van Gogh.
Nigel Hamilton
#7. Paul Gauguin asked, "whence do we come? What are we? Where are we going?" Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I came from my room, I'm a kid with big plans, and I'm going outside! See ya later! Say, who the heck is Paul Gauguin anyway?
Bill Watterson
#8. I studied all about Gauguin. He was a banker. He was a banker who - he used to paint on Sundays. And one day he hated himself for painting on Sundays.
Anthony Quinn
#9. I reached out a hand, and touched her. Her body was hard, and slim, and lithe, and her breasts felt like breasts that Gauguin might have painted. Her mouth, in the darkness, was soft and warm against mine.
People come into your life for a reason.
Neil Gaiman
#10. When you see a Gauguin, you think, This man is living in a dream world. When you see a van Gogh, you think, This dream world is living in a man.
Adam Gopnik
#11. I wanted to paint in a folk-artist-y way. My heroes were Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Rembrandt. I think Picasso is about as a modern as I got. But I incorporated things that they rejected as well as movements that happened later.
Joni Mitchell
#12. I'm now painting with all the elan of a Marseillais eating soup, which won't surprise you when I tell you I'm painting large sunflowers. The idea? To decorate the studio, now there's hope of Gauguin living here. I aim at a dozen panels of sunflowers in the room I've set aside for Gauguin ...
Vincent Van Gogh
#13. Gauguin says that when sailors have to move a heavy load or raise an anchor, they all sing together to keep them up and give them vim. That's just what artists lack!
Vincent Van Gogh
#14. 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
#15. Sometimes people accuse me of being incomprehensible only because they look for an explicative side to my pictures which is not there.
Paul Gauguin
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Nothing so resembles a daub as a masterpiece.
Paul Gauguin
#21. A nude by Degas is chaste. But his women wash in tubs! ...
Paul Gauguin
#22. In painting one must search rather for suggestion than for description, as is done in music.
Paul Gauguin
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form.
Paul Gauguin
#29. Having the certitude of a succession of days ... equally free and beautiful, peace descends on me.
Paul Gauguin
#30. It is better to paint from memory, for thus your work will be your own ...
Paul Gauguin
#31. On an instrument you start from one tone. In painting you start from several.
Paul Gauguin
#32. Absinthe is the only decent drink that suits an artist.
Paul Gauguin
#33. 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
#34. The landscape with its violent, pure colours dazzled and blinded me. I was always uncertain ...
Paul Gauguin
#35. My God! How terrible these money questions are for an artist!
Paul Gauguin
#36. Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.
Paul Gauguin
#37. I have always wanted a mistress who was fat, and I have never found one. To make a fool of me, they are always pregnant.
Paul Gauguin
#38. 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
#39. A time will come when people will think I am a myth, or rather something the newspapers have made up.
Paul Gauguin
#40. There is no such thing as exaggerated art. I even believe that there is salvation only in extreme.
Paul Gauguin
#41. 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
#42. I tried to make everything breathe in this painting: faith, quiet suffering, religious and primitive style, and great nature with its scream.
Paul Gauguin
#43. Seek art and abstraction in nature by dreaming in the presence of it.
Paul Gauguin
#44. It is useless to advise solitude for everyone; one must be strong enough to endure it and to work alone.
Paul Gauguin
#45. A great sentiment can be rendered immediately. Dream on it and look for the simplest form in which you can express it.
Paul Gauguin
#46. 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
#47. The single most powerful tool for winning a negotiation is the ability to get up and walk away from the table without a deal
Paul Gauguin
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Color! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams.
Paul Gauguin
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Follow the masters! But why should one follow them? The only reason they are masters is that they didn't follow anybody!
Paul Gauguin
#54. Stay firmly in your path and dare; be wild two hours a day!
Paul Gauguin
#55. Silence! I am learning to know the silence of a Tahitian night.
Paul Gauguin
#57. 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
#59. Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction.
Paul Gauguin
#60. 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
#61. It is well for young men to have a model, but let them draw the curtain over it while they are painting.
Paul Gauguin
#62. Poor artist! You gave away part of your soul when you painted the picture which you are now trying to dispose of.
Paul Gauguin
#63. 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
#64. Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!
Paul Gauguin
#65. In order to produce something new, you have to return to the original source, to the childhood of mankind.
Paul Gauguin
#66. 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
#67. Nature has mysterious infinities and imaginative power. It is always varying the productions it offers to us. The artist himself is one of nature's means.
Paul Gauguin
#68. 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
#69. In art there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists
Paul Gauguin
#70. 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
#71. Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.
Paul Gauguin
#72. Oh mysterious world of all light, thou hast made a light shine within me, and I have grown in admiration of thy antique beauty, which is the immemorial youth of nature.
Paul Gauguin
#73. 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
#74. Machines have come, art has fled, and I am far from thinking photography can help us.
Paul Gauguin
#76. Sooner or later people will learn to recognize your worth
Paul Gauguin
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. It was so simple to paint things as I saw them; to put without special calculation a red close to a blue.
Paul Gauguin
#80. In art one is concerned with the condition of the spirit for three quarters of the time; one must therefore care for oneself if he wishes to make something great and lasting.
Paul Gauguin
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. Without delay I began work, without hesitation and all of a fever.
Paul Gauguin
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. How do you see this tree? Is it green?
... Don't be afraid to paint it as green as possible.
Paul Gauguin
#87. I'd like to write the way I do my paintings, that is, as fantasy takes me, as the moon dictates.
Paul Gauguin
#88. It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.
Paul Gauguin
#89. 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
#90. Happiness and work rose up together with the sun, radiant like it.
Paul Gauguin
#92. Don't over finish your work. There is value to done.
Paul Gauguin
#93. By the combination of lines and colors, under the pretext of some motif taken from nature, I create symphonies and harmonies that represent nothing absolutely real in the ordinary sense of the word but are intended to give rise to thoughts as music does.
Paul Gauguin
#94. Where do we come from?" "What are we?""Where are we going?
Paul Gauguin
#95. Art is either a plagiarist or a revolutionist.
Paul Gauguin
#96. 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
#97. When the physical organism breaks up, the soul survives. It then takes on another body.
Paul Gauguin
#98. How to re-light the fire the very ashes of which are scattered?
Paul Gauguin
#99. The self-esteem one acquires and a well-earned feeling of one's strength are the only consolation in this world. Income, after all, most brutes have that.
Paul Gauguin
#100. The public wants to understand and learn in a single day, a single minute, what the artist has spent years learning.
Paul Gauguin
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