Paul Gauguin Quotes

74 Sourced Quotes

It is better to paint from memory, for thus your work will be your own...

Paul Gauguin
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
Why work? The gods are there to lavish upon the faithful the good gifts of nature.

Paul Gauguin
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
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
The public wants to understand and learn in a single day, a single minute, what the artist has spent years learning.

Paul Gauguin
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
With this painting, I tried to make everything breathe faith, quiet suffering, religious and primitive style and great nature with its scream.

Paul Gauguin
Freely and madly; you will make progress... Above all, don't sweat over a painting; a great sentiment can be rendered immediately... Don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amide nature, extrapolate art from it and concentrate on what you will create as a result.

Paul Gauguin
Like music, [painting] acts on the soul through the intermediary of the senses, the harmonious tones corresponding to the harmonies of sounds, but in painting, a unity is obtained which is not possible in music, where the accords follow one another, and the judgement experiences a continuous fatigue if one wants to reunite the end and the beginning. In the main, the ear is an inferior sense to the eye. The hearing can only grasp a single sound at one time, whereas the sight takes in everything and at the same time simplifies at its will.

Paul Gauguin
This Cézanne [a 'Still life with Compotier, Fruit and Glass'], that you ask me for is a pearl of exceptional quality and I already have refused three hundred francs for it; it is one of my most treasured possessions, and except in absolute necessity, I would give up my last shirt before the picture.

Paul Gauguin
Life at Papeete soon became a burden. It was Europe, the Europe which I had thought to shake off — and that under the aggravating circumstances of colonial snobbism, and the imitation, grotesque even to the point of caricature, of our customs, fashions, vices, and absurdities of civilization. Was I to have made this far journey, only to find the very thing which I had fled?

Paul Gauguin
A young man who is unable to commit a folly is already an old man.

Paul Gauguin
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
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
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
A time will come when people will think I am a myth, or rather something the newspapers have made up.

Paul Gauguin
I am a great artist and I know it. It's because I am that I have endured such sufferings.

Paul Gauguin
You have long known what I have tried to establish: the right to dare everything; yet the difficulty I have had finding enough money to live on has been too great, and my capacities have not produced a very big result but the mechanism has got underway nevertheless. The public does not owe me anything because the pictorial work I have done is only relatively good, but the painters who benefit from that freedom today do owe me something.

Paul Gauguin
In a crescendo the wind rushes through the branches, the great dance begins, the cyclone is in full swing. Olympus joins in the fray; Jupiter sends us his thunderbolts, the Titans roll down rocks; the river flows.

Paul Gauguin
A great sentiment can be rendered immediately. Dream on it and look for the simplest form in which you can express it.

Paul Gauguin
The flat sound of my wooden clogs on the cobblestones, deep, hollow and powerful, is the note I seek in my painting.

Paul Gauguin
I do not paint by copying nature. Everything I do springs from my wild imagination.

Paul Gauguin
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
At the age of ten, twenty, a hundred, very young, a little older, and very old, an artist is always an artist. Isn't he better at some times, some moments, than at others? Never impeccable, since he is a living, human being?

Paul Gauguin
Copying nature — what is that supposed to mean? Follow the masters! But why should one follow them? The only reason they are masters is that they didn't follow anybody!

Paul Gauguin
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
.. so before I died I wanted to paint a large canvas that I had worked out in my head, and all month long I worked [on Tahiti] day and night at fever pitch... It's all done without a model.

Paul Gauguin
In my figures [of his famous painting 'Vision After the Sermon'] I have achieved a great simplicity, which is both rustic and superstitious..... In this picture the landscape and the struggle [between Jacob wrestling with the angel] exist only in the imagination of the people whom the sermon has moved to prayer. That's why there is a contrast between the people, depicted naturally, and the struggle in its unnatural and disproportioned landscape.

Paul Gauguin
I love Brittany; I find wildness and primitiveness there. When my wooden shoes ring on this granite, I hear the muffled, dull, and powerful tone which I try to achieve in painting.

Paul Gauguin