Paul Gauguin - Nature Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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
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
I borrow some subject or other from life or from nature, and, using it as a pretext, I arrange lines and colors so as to obtain symphonies, harmonies that do not represent a thing that is real, in the vulgar sense of the word, and do not directly express any idea, but are supposed to make you think the way music is supposed to make you think, unaided by ideas or images, simply through the mysterious affinities that exist between our brains and such arrangements of colors and lines.

Paul Gauguin
I am leaving in order to have peace and quiet, to be rid of the influence of civilization. I want only to do simple, very simple art, and to be able to do that, I have to immerse myself in virgin nature, see no one but savages, live their life, with no other thought in mind but to render, the way a child would, the concepts formed in my brain and to do this with the aid of nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true.

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

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
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
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