"To see we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at."
"Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face."
21 likes
Source: Claude Monet: Les Nymphéas. Book by Georges Clemenceau, Ch. 2, 1926.
About the author
Same author
More quotes by Claude Monet
"Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love."
"I must have flowers, always, and always."
"It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly."
"When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, house, a field....Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you."
"Paint what you really see, not what you think you ought to see; not the object isolated as in a test tube, but the object enveloped in sunlight and atmosphere, with the blue dome of Heaven reflected in the shadows."