Gauguin Quotes & Sayings

Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form. — Paul Gauguin

My God! How terrible these money questions are for an artist! — Paul Gauguin

Absinthe is the only decent drink that suits an artist. — Paul Gauguin

How do you see this tree? Is it green?
... Don't be afraid to paint it as green as possible. — Paul Gauguin

Let everything about you breathe the calm and peace of the soul. — Paul Gauguin

It is better to paint from memory, for thus your work will be your own ... — Paul Gauguin

Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors
somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating
none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries. — James A. Michener

Under the continual contact with the pebbles my feet have become hardened and used to the ground. My body, almost constantly nude, no longer suffers from the sun. Civilization is falling from me little by little. I am beginning to think simply, to feel only very little hatred for my neighbor - rather, to love him. — 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

I studied all about Gauguin. He was a banker. He was a banker who - he used to paint on Sundays. And one day he hated himself for painting on Sundays. — Anthony Quinn

The landscape with its violent, pure colours dazzled and blinded me. I was always uncertain ... — Paul Gauguin

I'm now painting with all the elan of a Marseillais eating soup, which won't surprise you when I tell you I'm painting large sunflowers. The idea? To decorate the studio, now there's hope of Gauguin living here. I aim at a dozen panels of sunflowers in the room I've set aside for Gauguin ... — Vincent Van Gogh

Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge. — Paul Gauguin

I'd like to write the way I do my paintings, that is, as fantasy takes me, as the moon dictates. — Paul Gauguin

Nail up some indecency in plain sight over your door; from that time forward you will be rid of all respectable people,the most insupportable folk God has created. — Paul Gauguin

All the joys - animal and human - of a free life are mine. I have escaped everything that is artificial, conventional, customary. I am entering into the truth, into nature. — Paul Gauguin

I plunged eagerly and passionately into the wilderness, as if in the hope of thus penetrating into the very heart of this Nature, powerful and maternal, there to blend with her living elements. — Paul Gauguin

Machines have come, art has fled, and I am far from thinking photography can help us. — Paul Gauguin

Do not finish your work too much. An impression is not sufficiently durable for its first freshness to survive a belated search for infinite detail; in this way you let the lava grow cool ... — Paul Gauguin

Civilization is paralysis. — Paul Gauguin

All the masters have those weak points that are called masterpieces; and besides, they do them as crowd pleasers
to prove that they have the know-how. — Paul Gauguin

The work of a man is the explanation of the man. — 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

A hint - don't paint too much direct from nature. Art is an abstraction! study nature then brood on it and treasure the creation which will result, which is the only way to ascend towards God - to create like our Divine Master. — Paul Gauguin

In art there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists — Paul Gauguin

Night is here. All is at rest. My eyes close in order to see without actually understanding the dream that flees before men infinite space; and I experience the languorous sensation produced by the mournful procession of my hopes. — Paul Gauguin

One's state of mind is three-quarters of what counts, so it has to be carefully nurtured if you want to do something great and lasting. — Paul Gauguin

Stay firmly in your path and dare; be wild two hours a day! — Paul Gauguin

In order to produce something new, you have to return to the original source, to the childhood of mankind. — Paul Gauguin

There is no such thing as exaggerated art. I even believe that there is salvation only in extreme. — Paul Gauguin

Life is merely a fraction of a second. An infinitely small amount of time to fulfill our desires, our dreams, our passions. — Paul Gauguin

French Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin would never have become Gauguin if he had not followed this principle. He was a bank employee for a good part of his life, until the day he decided he was an artist. That day he left the bank and became a genius painter. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

I have always wanted a mistress who was fat, and I have never found one. To make a fool of me, they are always pregnant. — 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

Gauguin says that when sailors have to move a heavy load or raise an anchor, they all sing together to keep them up and give them vim. That's just what artists lack! — Vincent Van Gogh

Solitude is not to be recommended to everyone, for you have to be strong in order to bear it and act alone. — Paul Gauguin

The day may come when, contemplating a world given back to the primeval forst, a human survivor will have no means of even guessing how much intelligence Man once imposed upon the forms of the earth, when he set up the stones of Florence in the billowing expanse of the Tuscan olive-groves. No trace will be left then of the palaces that saw Michelangelo pass by, nursing his grievances against Raphael; and nothing of the little Paris cafes where Renoir once sat beside Cezanne, Van Gogh beside Gauguin. Solitude, vicegerent of Eternity, vanquishes men's dreams no less than armies, and men have known this ever since they came into being and realized that they must die. — Andre Malraux

Out in the sun, some painters are lined up. The first is copying nature, the second is copying the first, the third is copying the second ... You see the sequence. — Paul Gauguin

A critic in my house sees some paintings. Greatly perturbed, he asks for my drawings. My drawings? Never! They are my letters, my secrets. — Paul Gauguin

I reached out a hand, and touched her. Her body was hard, and slim, and lithe, and her breasts felt like breasts that Gauguin might have painted. Her mouth, in the darkness, was soft and warm against mine.
People come into your life for a reason. — Neil Gaiman

We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves. — Paul Gauguin

Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth? - photography, once it begins to reproduce colors, and that won't be long in coming. And yet you want an intelligent man to sweat for months so as to give the illusion he can do something as well as an ingenious little machine can! — Paul Gauguin

Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them. — Paul Gauguin

Art is either a plagiarist or a revolutionist. — Paul Gauguin

31. "Shut your eyes in order to see." ~ — Paul Gauguin

Many excellent cooks are spoilt by going into the arts. — Paul Gauguin

Wherever I go I need a period of incubation so that I may learn the essence of nature, which never wishes to be understood or yield herself. — Paul Gauguin

Thanks to our cinctures and corsets we have succeeded in making an artificial being out of woman. She is an anomaly, and Nature herself, obedient to the laws of heredity, aids us in complicating and enervating her. We carefully keep her in a state of nervous weakness and muscular inferiority, and in guarding her from fatigue, we take away from her possibilities of development. Thus modeled on a bizarre ideal of slenderness to which, strangely enough, we continue to adhere, our women have nothing in common with us, and this, perhaps, may not be without grave moral and social disadvantages. — Paul Gauguin

There are two sorts of beauty; one is the result of instinct, the other of study. A combination of the two, with the resulting modifications, brings with it a very complicated richness, which the art critic ought to try to discover. — Paul Gauguin

Beautiful colors exist, though we do not realize it, and are glimpsed behind the veil that modesty has drawn over them. — Paul Gauguin

Having the certitude of a succession of days ... equally free and beautiful, peace descends on me. — Paul Gauguin

Why work? The gods are there to lavish upon the faithful the good gifts of nature. — Paul Gauguin

Go on working, freely and furiously, and you will make progress. — Paul Gauguin

When the physical organism breaks up, the soul survives. It then takes on another body. — Paul Gauguin

A critic is someone who meddles with something that is none of his business. — Paul Gauguin

The fields that push up the corn, and the water that rushes down the ravine, the juice of the grape, and the life of a man as it flows past him, are all one and the same thing. The sole unity in life is the unity of rhythm. A rhythm to which we all dance; men, apples, ravines, ploughed fields, carts among the corn, houses, horses, and the sun. The stuff that is in you, Gauguin, will pound through a grape tomorrow, because you and the grape are one. When I paint a peasant labouring in the field, I want people to feel the peasant flowing down into the soil, just as the corn does, and the soil flowing up into the peasant. I want them to feel the sun pouring into the peasant, into the field, the corn, the plough, and the horses, just as they all pour back into the sun. When you begin to feel the universal rhythm in which everything on earth moves, you begin to understand life ... . — Irving Stone

I sit at my door, smoking a cigarette and sipping my absinthe, and I enjoy every day without a care in the world — Paul Gauguin

A nude by Degas is chaste. But his women wash in tubs! ... — Paul Gauguin

Take care not to step on the foot of a learned idiot. His bite is incurable. — Paul Gauguin

What still concerns me the most is: am I on the right track, am I making progress, am I making mistakes in art? — Paul Gauguin

Many people say that I don't know how to draw because I don't draw particular forms. When will they understand that execution, drawing and color (in other words, style) must be in harmony with the poem? — Paul Gauguin

There are noble tones, ordinary ones, tranquil harmonies, consoling ones, others which excite by their vigour. — Paul Gauguin

I wanted to paint in a folk-artist-y way. My heroes were Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Rembrandt. I think Picasso is about as a modern as I got. But I incorporated things that they rejected as well as movements that happened later. — Joni Mitchell

The cyclone ends. The sun returns; the lofty coconut trees lift up their plumes again; man does likewise. The great anguish is over; joy has returned; the sea smiles like a child. — Paul Gauguin

You may dream freely when you listen to music as well as when you look at painting. When you read a book you are the slave of the author's mind. — Paul Gauguin

The wrinkled man in the wheelchair with the legs wrapped, the girl with her face punctured deep with the teeth marks of a dog, the mess of the world, and I see - this, all this, is what the French call d'un beau affreux, what the Germans call hubsch-hasslich - the ugly-beautiful. That which is perceived as ugly transfigures into beautiful. What the postimpressionist painter Paul Gauguin expressed as 'Le laid peut etre beau' - The ugly can be beautiful. The dark can give birth to life; suffering can deliver grace. — Ann Voskamp

Oh mysterious world ... I have become better for having understood and having loved thy human soul - a flower which has ceased to bloom and whose fragrance no one henceforth will breathe. — Paul Gauguin

Art is either revolution or plagiarism — Paul Gauguin

I tried to make everything breathe in this painting: faith, quiet suffering, religious and primitive style, and great nature with its scream. — Paul Gauguin

In painting one must search rather for suggestion than for description, as is done in music. — Paul Gauguin

Beware of luxury! Beware of acquiring the taste and need for it, under the pretext of providing for the morrow ... — Paul Gauguin

Happiness and work rose up together with the sun, radiant like it. — Paul Gauguin

Proficiency in art is a contract with your self and the empowerment of your self. Not all of us demand or even desire proficiency, but for those who do it's necessary to temper the influence of groups. And while some artists think history is bunk, the historical evidence is overwhelming: "In my isolation I grow stronger." — Paul Gauguin

For Christ's sake, were the mountains blue, then chuck on some blue and don't go telling me that it was a blue a bit like this or like that, it was blue wasn't it? Good - make them blue and that's enough! — Paul Gauguin

The critics can say stupid things and we can enjoy them, if we have the legitimate feeling of superiority - the satisfaction of a duty accomplished. — Paul Gauguin

Soon I'll be old and I've done precious little in this world for lack of time. I am always afraid I'll become senile before I've finished what I've undertaken. — Paul Gauguin

It was so simple to paint things as I saw them; to put without special calculation a red close to a blue. — Paul Gauguin

If instead of a figure you put the shadow only of a person, you have found an original starting point, that strangeness of which you have calculated. — Paul Gauguin

Today one can dare anything, and, furthermore, nobody is surprised. — Paul Gauguin

However depressed I may be I am not in the habit of giving up a project without having tried everything, even the 'impossible', to gain my end. — Paul Gauguin

I taught myself how to draw, and I soon found out it was what I really wanted to do. I didn't think I was going to create any great masterpieces like Rembrandt or Gauguin. I thought comics was a common form of art, and strictly American in my estimation, because America was the home of the common man - and show me the common man that can't do a comic. So comics is an American form of art that anyone can do with a pencil and paper. — Jack Kirby

The public wants to understand and learn in a single day, a single minute, what the artist has spent years learning. — Paul Gauguin

Nature has mysterious infinities and imaginative power. It is always varying the productions it offers to us. The artist himself is one of nature's means. — Paul Gauguin

Whatever may happen the sun will rise tomorrow as it rose to-day, beneficent and serene. — Paul Gauguin

In the art of literature there are two contending parties. Those who aim to tell stories that are more or less well thought out, and those who aim at beautiful language, beauty of form. This contest may last a very long time; each side has a fifty-fifty chance. Only the poet can rightfully demand that verse be beautiful and nothing but. — Paul Gauguin

The missionary is no longer a man, a conscience. He is a corpse, in the hands of a confraternity, without family, without love, without any of the sentiments that are dear to us. Emasculated, in a sense, by his vow of chastity, he offers us the distressing spectacle of a man deformed and impotent or engaged in a stupid and useless struggle with the sacred needs of the flesh, a struggle which, seven times out of ten, leads him to sodomy, the gallows, or prison. — Paul Gauguin

Oh mysterious world of all light, thou hast made a light shine within me, and I have grown in admiration of thy antique beauty, which is the immemorial youth of nature. — Paul Gauguin

A young man who is unable to commit a folly is already an old man. — Paul Gauguin

In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters. — Paul Gauguin

In Europe men and women have intercourse because they love each other. In the South Seas they love each other because they have had intercourse. Who is right? — Paul Gauguin

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity! — Paul Gauguin

Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction. — Paul Gauguin

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation. — Paul Gauguin

Follow the masters! But why should one follow them? The only reason they are masters is that they didn't follow anybody! — Paul Gauguin

Is there a recipe for making beauty? The schools give recipes, but they do not beget works that make people exclaim: How beautiful that is! — Paul Gauguin

I am leaving in order to have peace and quiet. To be rid of the influence of civilization. I only want to do simple, very simple art and to be able to do that, I have to immerse myself in virgin nature, see no one but savages, live their life, with no other thought in my mind but to render, the way a child would, the concepts formed in my brain and to do this with the aid of nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true. — Paul Gauguin

And here in my isolation I can grow stronger. Poetry seems to come of itself, without effort, and I need only let myself dream a little while painting to suggest it. — Paul Gauguin

The great artist is a formulation of the greatest intelligence: he is the recipient of sensations which are the most delicate and consequently the most invisible expressions of the brain. — Paul Gauguin

Gauguin flew into a frenzy! He held my head under the X-ray machine for ten straight minutes and for several hours after I could not blink my eyes in unison." - "If The Impressionists Had Been Dentists — Woody Allen

When you see a Gauguin, you think, This man is living in a dream world. When you see a van Gogh, you think, This dream world is living in a man. — Adam Gopnik