It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
Meaning of the quote
Picasso is saying that it took him a long time to learn how to paint like a famous artist named Raphael, but that it took him his whole life to be able to paint like a child. Children can create art without worrying about being perfect, and Picasso admired their natural, carefree style. He wanted to capture that same free and expressive feeling in his own paintings, even though it was much harder for him to do as an adult.
About Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso was a renowned Spanish artist who co-founded the Cubist movement and experimented with a wide range of styles, from naturalism to Surrealism. He was a prolific and influential figure in 20th-century art, known for iconic works like ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ and ‘Guernica’.
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More quotes from Pablo Picasso
To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Disciples be damned. It’s not interesting. It’s only the masters that matter. Those who create.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
The world today doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
You mustn’t always believe what I say. Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Youth has no age.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Are we to paint what’s on the face, what’s inside the face, or what’s behind it?
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite – that particular peach is but a detail.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
If there were only one truth, you couldn’t paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
We must not discriminate between things. Where things are concerned there are no class distinctions. We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
I do not seek. I find.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
When I die, it will be a shipwreck, and as when a huge ship sinks, many people all around will be sucked down with it.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
To draw you must close your eyes and sing.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Every positive value has its price in negative terms… the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
To make oneself hated is more difficult than to make oneself loved.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Painting is a blind man’s profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn’t everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
The older you get the stronger the wind gets – and it’s always in your face.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
There are only two types of women – goddesses and doormats.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a minotaur.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Everything you can imagine is real.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
It takes a long time to become young.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Love is the greatest refreshment in life.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Work is a necessity for man. Man invented the alarm clock.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephantand the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
We don’t grow older, we grow riper.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
I don’t believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
My mother said to me, ‘If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.’ Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
They ought to put out the eyes of painters as they do goldfinches in order that they can sing better.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
The chief enemy of creativity is “good” sense.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
The more technique you have, the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is, the less there is.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Action is the foundational key to all success.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)
One must act in painting as in life, directly.
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881-1973)