Odilon Redon Quotes & Sayings

My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined. — Odilon Redon

Artists who approach perfection do not have many ideas. — Odilon Redon

I have tried to put the real at the service of the unreal. — Odilon Redon

What distinguishes the artist from the dilettante? Only the pain the artist feels. The dilettante looks only for pleasure in art. — Odilon Redon

Nothing in Art is achieved by will alone. It is achieved by docilely submitting to the subconscious. — Odilon Redon

The good work proceeds with tenacity, intention, without interruption, with an equal measure of passion and reason and it must surpass that goal the artist has set for himself. — Odilon Redon

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality ... true art lies in a reality that is felt. — Odilon Redon

The fundamental grey which differentiates the masters, expresses them and is the soul of all colour. — Odilon Redon

My originality consists in putting the logic of the visible to the service of the invisible. — Odilon Redon

All my originality consists?in giving life in human fashion to beings which are impossible according to the laws of possibility. — Odilon Redon

It is difficult to judge one's contemporaries; perhaps it is impossible to understand them. — Odilon Redon

I have placed there a little door opening on to the mysterious. I have made stories. — Odilon Redon

It is precisely from the regret left by the imperfect work that the next one can be born. — Odilon Redon

Like music my drawings transport us to the ambiguous world of the indeterminate. — Odilon Redon

One must respect black, nothing prostitutes it. It does not please the eye and it awakens no sensuality. It is the agent of the mind far more than the most beautiful color to the palette or prism — Odilon Redon

The value of art lies in its power to increase our moral force or establish its heightening influence. — Odilon Redon

The artist yields often to the stimuli of materials that will transmit his spirit. — Odilon Redon

The Artist submits from day to day to the fatal rhythm of the impulses of the universal world which encloses him, continual centre of sensations, always pliant, hypnotized by the marvels of nature which he loves, he scrutinizes. His eyes, like his soul, are in perpetual communion with the most fortuitous of phenomena. — Odilon Redon

I am repelled by those who voice the word 'nature', without having any trace of it in their hearts. — Odilon Redon

The painter is not an intellectual if, when he has painted a nude woman, he gives us the idea that she is just about to put her clothes back on. — Odilon Redon

I await joyous surprises while working, an awakening of the materials that I work with and that my spirit develops. — Odilon Redon

I am certain about what I will never do - but not about what my art will render. — Odilon Redon

Black is the most essential of all colors. Above all, if I may say so, it draws its excitement and vitality from deep and secret sources of health ... One must admire black. Nothing can debauch it. — Odilon Redon

I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted before an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual appearance; but the day left me sad and with an unsatiated thirst. The next day I let the other source run, that of imagination, through the recollection of the forms and I was then reassured and appeased. — Odilon Redon

I have a feeling only for shadows — Odilon Redon