Paul Gauguin - Painting Quotes

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

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
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
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
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
The critic asks me: 'So you are a Symbolist? I mean well and I would like to learn; why don't you explain Symbolism to me'.. I answer...'Well, my paintings probably speak Hebrew, which you do not understand, so there is no point in continuing the conversation.

Paul Gauguin
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
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
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
Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed, at its aspect everyone may create romance at the will of his imagination, and at a glance have his soul invaded by the most profound memories, no efforts of memory, everything summed up in one moment. Complete art which sums up all the others and completes them.

Paul Gauguin
It is well for young men to have a model, but let them draw the curtain over it while they are painting.

Paul Gauguin