Painting is damned difficult – you always think you’ve got it, but you haven’t.
Meaning of the quote
Painting is really hard work. Even when you think you've finished a painting and done a great job, it's never actually as good as you thought it would be. The artist is always trying to make the painting better, but it's never perfect.
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More quotes from Paul Cezanne
Don’t be an art critic. Paint. There lies salvation.
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Genius is the ability to renew one’s emotions in daily experience.
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There are two things in the painter, the eye and the mind; each of them should aid the other.
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Keep good company – that is, go to the Louvre.
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I have sworn to die painting.
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I ask you to pray for me, for once age has overtaken us, we find consolation only in religion.
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I want to die painting.
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The world doesn’t understand me and I don’t understand the world, that’s why I’ve withdrawn from it.
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It is impossible for emotion not to come on us in thinking of that time now flowed away.
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Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one’s sensations.
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I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature.
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Tell me, do you think I’m going mad? I sometimes wonder, you know.
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Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.
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If isolation tempers the strong, it is the stumbling-block of the uncertain.
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The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.
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We must not be content to memorize the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go out and study beautiful nature.
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My nervous system is enfeebled, only work in oils can sustain me.
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The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality.
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The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.
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Is it the factitious and the conventional that most surely succeed on earth and in the course of life?
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I could paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing.
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The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself.
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It’s so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas.
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I allow no one to touch me.
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I have nothing to hide in art. The initial force alone can bring anyone to the end he must attain.
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The painter must enclose himself within his work; he must respond not with words, but with paintings.
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Shadow is a colour as light is, but less brilliant; light and shadow are only the relation of two tones.
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I paint as if I were Rothschild.
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We live in a rainbow of chaos.
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Painting is damned difficult – you always think you’ve got it, but you haven’t.
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I am a pupil of Pissarro.
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One does not substitute oneself for the past, one merely adds to it a new link.
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A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.
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Is art really the priesthood that demands the pure in heart who belong to it wholly?
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Here, on the river’s verge, I could be busy for months without changing my place, simply leaning a little more to right or left.
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Art is a harmony parallel with nature.
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For an Impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject, but to realize sensations.
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I’ll always be grateful to the public of intelligent amateurs.
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A puny body weakens the soul.
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I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not really possible to help others.
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I am the primitive of the method I have invented.
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Optics, developing in us through study, teach us to see.
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With an apple I will astonish Paris.
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People think how a sugar basin has no physiognomy, no soul. But it changes every day.
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My age and health will never allow me to realize the dream of art I’ve been pursuing all my life.
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When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.
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Doubtless there are things in nature which have not yet been seen. If an artist discovers them, he opens the way for his successors.
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The clear French landscape is as pure as a verse of Racine.
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An art which isn’t based on feeling isn’t an art at all.
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I must be more sensible and realize that at my age, illusions are hardly permitted and they will always destroy me.
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Two sittings a day of my models and I’m totally exhausted.
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I am more a friend of art than a producer of painting.
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The truth is in nature, and I shall prove it.
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You say a new era in art is preparing; you sensed it coming; continue your studies without weakening. God will do the rest.
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With a painter’s temperament, all that’s needed are the means of expression sufficient to be intelligible to the wide public.
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A thousand painters ought to be killed yearly. Say what you like: I’m every inch a painter.
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