Delacroix Painting Quotes & Sayings

Painters who are not colorists produce illumination, not painting. — Eugene Delacroix

What is real for me are the illusions I create with my paintings. Everything else is quicksand. — Eugene Delacroix

All painting worth its name, unless one is talking about black and white, must include the idea of color as one of its necessary supports, in the same way that it includes chiaroscuro, proportion, and perspective. — Eugene Delacroix

Remember the enemy of all painting is gray: a painting will almost always appear grayer than it is, on account of its oblique position under the light. — Eugene Delacroix

Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say. — Henri Matisse

If Delacroix discovered painting when he had neither teeth nor health, I can discover it when I have neither teeth nor the mind.
[Vincent Van Gogh] — Irving Stone

Finishing a painting demands a heart of steel: everything requires a decision, and I find difficulties where I least expect them ... It is at such moments that one fully realizes one's own weaknesses. — Eugene Delacroix

The principle of painting is also to make a choice. "Even genius," writes Delacroix, ruminating on his art,
"is only the gift of generalizing and choosing." The painter isolates his subject, which is the first way of
unifying it. Landscapes flee, vanish from the memory, or destroy one another. That is why the landscape
painter or the painter of still life isolates in space and time things that normally change with the light, get
lost in an infinite perspective, or disappear under the impact of other values. The first thing that a
landscape painter does is to square off his canvas. He eliminates as much as he includes. — Albert Camus

One never paints violently enough. — Eugene Delacroix

Glory to that Homer of painting, to that father of warmth and enthusiasm ... he really paints men. — Eugene Delacroix