Claude Monet Quotes

I must have flowers, always, and always.

Color is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment.

Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it.

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

I would like to paint the way a bird sings.

My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece

What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence.

the more I live, the more I regret how little i know

It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.

I'm not performing miracles, I'm using up and wasting a lot of paint...

Everyday I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it.

The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration.

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

I don’t think I’m made for any earthly kind of pleasure.

No one but myself knows the anxiety I go through and the trouble I give myself…

I can only draw what I see.

…Every day I discover even more beautiful things. It is intoxicating me, and I want to paint it all - my head is bursting…

If the world really looks like that I will paint no more!

I want to paint the way a bird sings.

Water Lilies' is an extension of my life. Without the woter the lilies cannot live, as I am without art.

When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field or whatever. 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.

I get madder and madder on giving back what I feel.

The further I get, the more I regret how little I know…

I must have flowers. Always and always.

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers

Impression — I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it … and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.

For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life - the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.

The light constantly changes, and that alters the atmosphere and beauty of things every minute.

Claude Monet was the incomparable painter of bright daylight...Monet was the painter of light.

To see, we must forget the name of the things we are looking at

The essence of the motif is the mirror of water, whose appearance alters at every moment.

The next day, the cycle starts again. We’re set out like decorative plates in this cavernous architecture, and such a craggy dining hall it is. Not exactly a Claude Monet cottage, more of a Medieval bastion—a vestige of Roman conquests. It still moans with the rickety sounds of age. I can almost hear the grumblings of ancient inhabitants.

I must have flowers, always and always.

The Seine. I have painted it all my life, at all hours of the day, at all times of the year, from Paris to the sea…Argenteuil, Poissy, Vétheuil, Giverny, Rouen, Le Havre.

I am installed in a fairylike place. I do not know where to poke my head; everything is superb, and I would like to do everything, so I use up and squander lots of color, for there are trials to be made.

Dull late-afternoon light glittered on the hanging copper pots in the kitchen where the old painter sat with his wine, smoking cigarette, a letter angrily crumpled on the table in front of him.

School always appeared to me like a prison, and I could never make up my mind to stay there, when the sunshine was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was such a joy to run about in the free air, or to paddle around in the water.” Claude Monet

Sometimes he dreamt he held her; that he would turn in bed and she would be there. But she was gone and he was old. Nearly seventy. Only cool paint met his fingers. “Ma très chère . . .” Darkness started to fall, dimming the paintings. He felt the crumpled letter in his pocket. “I loved you so,” he said. “I never would have had it turn out as it did. You were with all of us when we began, you gave us courage. These gardens at Giverny are for you but I’m old and you’re forever young and will never see them. . . .

I want the unobtainable. Other artists paint a bridge, a house, a boat, and that's the end. They are finished. I want to paint the air which surrounds the bridge, the house, the boat, the beauty of the air in which these objects are located, and that is nothing short of impossible.

Cada día descubro más y más cosas hermosas, tantas que uno se puede volver loco

Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it.

Many things could upset Monet. If a meal was bad or a tree branch fell in the garden, it could send him into a rage.

Here I am surrounded by the things I love. I spend my time in the open, on the beach in stormy weather or when the fishing boats put out [...] In the evenings, my dear friend, there is a warm fire in my cottage, and the cosiness of a small family [...] I am now enjoying a spell of quiet, free of chores. Ideally I should like to stay in a peaceful nook like this for ever.

I think we can change everything all the time. Accidents are the best things in existence. They force you to leave a route that seemed to be mapped out… It’s often when things aren’t going well that we are forced into doing them differently and they suddenly become interesting

Optimal Tower is a skyscraper unlike its predecessors, rising skyward as an artistic endeavor, spirited and soulful, with a steel and glass manifestation reminiscent of Claude Monet's water lilies, and instantly dismissive of the gray, steel and mortar structures of the past. The architects and builders have pilfered Monet's color pallet and painted this vertical stretch of the Cavanaugh skyline with the delicate greens and blues and grays and yellows of Giverny. Somehow, in the structure, the sensibility of an impressionist painting emerges as the muted colors are faded in splotches and sunlit in others, with gradual transitions as subtle as the delicate brush strokes of the master himself. Steel beams crisscross haphazardly throughout the towering facade, which only reinforces its intrinsic impressionistic essence by emulating the natural randomness of the lily pond. Atop the structure, a simple fifty foot spire seems to rein in the freeform work beneath it as it merges the natural splendor into one straight pinnacle skyward. This one hundred and fifteen story building reaches twenty-five stories above its surroundings, creating a gloriously artful and peaked skyline not unlike the Alps in France that will be instantly recognizable the world over and cause onlookers to gasp and utter, "C'est Magnifique.

You are in his car and your words taste like honey. The suns yolk is stretching over the road, with hues of pink and red ribbon pressed against the bruises of the sky. He is talking about mechanics or sugar factories, and you are touching the rings on your fingers. The windows are open and the wind is making a home in your bones. Your jeans are ripped, your perfume smells like lilacs, your nails painted the color of sea weed. You forget about noise. You forget about color. It’s your lungs - I think, it’s your lungs that are morphing into purple butter. You are in his car and you are Mozart composing art, Claude Monet painting Water Lilies, you are Aphrodite, you are Shakespeare. You are in his car and you can’t remember what salt feels like against your tongue. You are in his car and you are ocean, fire - lip, tongue, breath, sweat. You are in his car and you are telling him you love him. You are in his car and he is telling you he loves you back.

Ho dipinto tante di queste ninfee, cambiando sempre punto d'osservazione, modificandole a seconda delle stagioni dell'anno e adattandole ai diversi effetti di luce che il mutar delle stagioni crea. E, naturalmente, l'effetto cambia costantemente, non soltanto da una stagione all'altra, ma anche da un minuto all'altro, poiché i fiori acquatici sono ben lungi da essere l'intero spettacolo, in realtà sono solo il suo accompagnamento. L'elemento base è lo specchio d'acqua il cui aspetto muta ogni istante per come brandelli di cielo vi si riflettono conferendogli vita e movimento. Cogliere l'attimo fuggente, o almeno la sensazione che lascia è già sufficientemente difficile quando il gioco di luce e colore si concentra su un punto fisso, ma l'acqua, essendo un soggetto così mobile e in continuo mutamento è un vero problema. Un uomo può dedicare l'intera vita a un'opera simile.

We would like to go and see the field that Millet…shows us in his Springtime, we would like Claude Monet to take us to Giverny, on the banks of the Seine, to that bend of the river which he hardly lets us distinguish through the morning mist. Yet in actual fact, it was the mere chance of a connection or family relation that give…Millet or Monet occasion to pass or to stay nearby, and to choose to paint that road, that garden, that field, that bend in the river, rather than some other. What makes them appear other and more beautiful than the rest of the world is that they carry on them, like some elusive reflection, the impression they afforded to a genius, and which we might see wandering just as singularly and despotically across the submissive, indifferent face of all the landscapes he may have painted.’ It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes. To forget this may sadden us unduly. When we feel interest to be so dependent on the exact locations where certain great artists found it, a thousand landscapes and areas of experience will be deprived of possible interest, for Monet only looked at a few stretches of the earth, and Proust’s novel, though long, could not comprise more than a fraction of human experience. Rather than learn the general lesson of art’s attentiveness, we might seek instead the mere objects of its gaze, and would then be unable to do justice to parts of the world which artists had not considered. As a Proustian idolater, we would have little time for desserts which Proust never tasted, for dresses he never described, nuances of love he didn’t cover and cities he didn’t visit, suffering instead from an awareness of a gap between our existence and the realm of artistic truth and interest. The moral? There is no great homage we could pay Proust than to end up passing the same verdict on him as he passed on Ruskin, namely, that for all its qualities, his work must eventually also prove silly, maniacal, constraining, false and ridiculous to those who spend too long on it. ‘To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.

in the morning, When Claude Monet waves to me from behind the sun I check some poems that I concealed under the pillow fearing that the wind will disperse them in the air like their predecessors And I take my way to you.

Ada perasaan yang kadang tak sanggup diungkapkan melebihi perasaan perasaanku. Apa yang bahkan tak mampu aku utarakan kepada seorang ibu. Bagaimana aku menyimpan semuanya sendiri, juga tentang mimpi mimpi yang tak pernah aku ceritakan kepada siapapun termasuk kepada ayahku. Demikian aku belajar untuk mengenali diriku sendiri. Ibuku memiliki sebuah taman kecil yang tersembunyi di samping rumah. Taman yang ia sebut sebagai sanctuary. Tempat di mana ia menanam segala macam perasaan yang ia sebut sebagai kebahagiaan. Kebahagiaan yang tumbuh dari hal hal fana yang tidak aku kenal dan mungkin juga tidak sepenuhnya aku mengerti. Seperti tangan yang mengusik lelap tidurku dan berusaha menciptakan sebuah karya seni yang indah. Ibu adalah sebuah lukisan yang  memenuhi seluruh pikiranku. Ia lebih menakjubkan dari lukisan lukisan karya Rembrandt, Gustav Klimt, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir atau bahkan Van Gogh sekalipun. Jeli matanya adalah kegairahan musim semi yang menumbuhkan rupa rupa tanaman di dalam taman itu. Ulas senyumnya dan lembut bibirnya adalah kehangatan ciuman matahari yang membuat bunga bunga bermekaran. Dan sentuhan tangannya adalah sihir, belaian sejuk angin yang membuat setiap pohon berbuah. Dan setiap kali aku dapati ia menari. Ia menari dengan seluruh tawa riangnya. Sekujur tubuhnya menari bersama celoteh burung dan goyangan daun daun. Tangannya bergerak gemulai serupa awan berarak setiap kali ia menyebar benih, mencabut rumput, mematahkan ranting kering, atau memangkas daun daun yang menguning. Ada lompatan perasaan yang tak terlukiskan setiap kali ia melakukan hal itu, seperti seolah ia sedang jatuh cinta lagi. Bukan kepada ayahku melainkan kepada dirinya sendiri. Sebab, di dalam diri ayahku aku temukan bayang bayang lain yang seakan tak mau pergi. Bayang bayang yang tak mampu meninggalkan dirinya bahkan di tengah kegelapan malam. Ayah adalah sebuah patung kayu yang usang dan berdebu. Ia menyembunyikan segala sesuatu dan menjadikannya rahasia yang ia simpan sendiri. Seperti sebuah pintu yang terkunci dan anak kuncinya hilang entah kemana. Tapi ia tak pernah bertengkar dengan ibu. Mereka juga tak pernah beradu mulut atau menunjukkan amarah antara satu dengan yang lain. Sepanjang yang mampu aku ingat, mereka adalah pasangan yang harmonis. Walau tak pernah sungguh berdekatan dalam artian yang sebenarnya. Setelah bertahun tahun lamanya, mereka masing masing tenggelam dalam dunia yang mereka ciptakan sendiri. Sejak kanak kanak, aku tak berani masuk ke dalam sanctuary ibuku. Aku hanya berani mengintip dari balik keranjang cucian dan tumpukan pakaian yang hendak dijemur. Dari balik ranting dan juga rimbun dedaunan yang tumbuh di dalam pot pot besar berwarna hitam yang menyembunyikan tubuh telanjang ibuku yang berkilauan ditempa matahari. Pernah sebelumnya aku menangkap sebuah isyarat dari tarian hujan yang ia ciptakan, ketika merdu tawanya berderai di antara dengung suara pompa dan guyuran air yang turun tiba tiba dari langit. Suara hujan itu keras berdentang di atas genteng galvalum dan menimbulkan suara berisik. Dan raga  ibu yang berpendar kehijauan seolah terbang ke langit menyambut suara guntur dan halilintar. Kadang kadang aku menangkap bayangan tubuh ibuku berjalan hilir mudik di dalam sanctuary itu entah dengan siapa. Acap aku dengar ia tertawa tergelak gelak. Suaranya bergema seperti di dalam gua. Aku selalu mengira ia tak pernah sendirian, selalu ada orang orang yang datang menemaninya entah darimana. Sering kulihat ia menjelma menjadi burung dengan warna bulu yang memesona atau menjadi bidadari yang cantik dengan sepasang sayap berwarna jingga keemasan. Dan dari balik perdu yang merayap di dinding, aku dapat melihat senyumnya yang sangat menawan, seperti menyentil kesadaranku dan membuatku terbangun dari mimpi.

In my work, we find the direct consciousness of an essential humanity. Monet shared this quality and for that I prefer Monet to Cézanne....

Es a fuerza de observación y reflexión que uno encuentra un camino”. Claude Monet L

Claude Monet's Water Lilies (The Clouds) consists of nothing more than dabs of different colored paint on a canvas.14 But because of the particular arrangement of those dabs of paint, Monet has produced not simply a piece of canvas with dabs of paint on it. Monet has produced for us a painting, a unique picture, a cognitively recognizable and culturally meaningful representation of a reality, a new entity with its own characteristics and capacities to cause effects in the world. One of the emergent causal capacities of those particularly arranged dabs of paint is the ability to evoke certain emotions in people who view the painting, such as warmth or serenity. Neither the recognizable and meaningful picture nor the capacity to evoke emotions is present in the dabs of paint totaled up. It is through Monet's particular relational arrangement of those paint dabs that a unique picture emerges possessing particular characteristics and capacities that can cause experiences in observers. To say that Monet's Water Lilies (The Clouds) is reducible to many dabs of colored paint on a canvas would be to say that all of the characteristics and capacities we observe in the painting are present in the sum total of all the dabs of paint and the piece of canvas. To say that about this painting would be to make oneself a reductionist in relation to it. And to do this would be misguided.

Blown up by the warm wind and illuminated by the sun, Anna’s creamy dress was a large, bright spot against the meadow greenery full of small flowers. The effect was excellent, distinctly painterly, worthy of Claude Monet. Against the backdrop of the grass, Anna looked like a huge, well-fed cabbage white butterfly.

In 1997, the Brooklyn Museum staged an exhibition, Monet and the Mediterranean, which included seventy-one paintings Claude Monet created during trips to the French and Italian Rivieras (in 1884 and 1888) and to Venice (in 1908).7 Instead of single, signature works, the exhibition showcased how Monet experimented, changing one variable at a time. For instance, for his Grand Canal series, Monet painted the same church from the same location but at different times of day to study changes in lighting. He also painted the Doge’s Palace for another series, showing the same building from different perspectives. Monet used this method of painting the same subject with small variations to perfect his technique.8 This illustrates the aspect of incrementalization in Layer 1, isolating and iterating the novel parts of the problem from what is considered already developed, tested, and validated

eight different cities before he was sixteen years old. Georgia O’Keeffe lived in the shadow of her “perfect” older brother Francis. And Jean-Michel Basquiat triumphed over poverty to become one of the world’s most influential artists. Kid Artists tells their stories and more with full-color cartoon illustrations on nearly every page. Other subjects include Claude Monet, Jacob Lawrence, Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Beatrix Potter, Yoko Ono, Dr. Seuss, Emily Carr, Keith Haring, Charles Schulz, and Louise Nevelson.

exquisitely intimate Marmottan. Mathilda rented a car, and they drove out of town to visit Claude Monet’s home and gardens at Giverny and the port town of Honfleur, the site of so many Impressionist paintings. The vacation was centered on art. They visited the Normandy landing beaches and stood on the cliff looking across the English Channel, imagining the boatloads of Allied forces ready to storm the beaches.

Londonas Rugsėjo 13 Londonas daug gra­žesnis ir jaukesnis, negu kad aš iki šiol buvau manęs: miestas su savo specifiniu kvapu bei charakeriu. Intymus, organizuotas iš vidaus, su minimumu išorinių nuostatų. Parkuose, kur susi­rinke londoniečiai šildosi saulėje, viešpatauja kažkokia kito pa­saulio rimtis, kaip Seurat paveiksle Baignade a Asniėres. Visi jaučiasi absoliučiai laisvai, bet tik sau ir su savim: galėtum eiti nuogas, ir niekas į tave nekreiptų nė mažiausio dėmesio. Oficialusis Londonas šiek tiek primena prieškarinį Ber­lyną, tik viskas čia šiek tiek mažesnės apimties, daugiau at ease. Visiems žinomi „landmarks“ - Parlamentas, Westminster Ab­bey, Buckingham Palace etc. - visiškai tokie, kokius juos ma­tai knygose ar atvirutėse: nei daugiau, nei mažiau. Iš Buckingham Palace man patiko tik mažas nuogas angeliukas su žuvim, pasodintas virš didžiulės rakto skylutės geležiniuose vartuose. Nepaprastai didelį įspūdį padarė National Gallery. Tai vie­nas iš patraukliausiai sutvarkytų mano matytų didžiųjų meno muziejų apskritai: erdvus, neperkrautas, privatus. Nuostabūs Manet, Renoirai (La Premiere sortie), Monet, Turner; Velaz­ quez (Roqueby Venus), Claude Lorrain, neskaitant Leonardo Uolų Madonos, Rafaelio Julijaus //, Tizianų, Gainsborough (ypač jo Watering place ir The Market cart).

Increasingly, a new generation of artists were finding the creative projects which so excited them systematically rebuffed by the official art bodies. It was exasperating. Did the jury of the Salon, that ‘great event’ of the artistic world, never tire of the tedious repertoire of historical events and myths that had formed the mainstay of Salon paintings for so long? Did they not feel ridiculed being sold the blatant lie of highly finished paint surfaces, of bodies without a blemish, of landscapes stripped of all signs of modernity? Was contemporary life, the sweat and odour of real men and women, not deserving of a place on the Salon walls? Young artists huddled around tables in Montmartre’s cafés, sharing their deepest frustrations, breathing life into their most keenly held ideas. Just a few streets away from the Cimetière de Montmartre, Édouard Manet, the enfant terrible of the contemporary art world, could be found at his regular table in the Café Guerbois surrounded by reverent confrères, who would in time become famous in their own right. When Manet spoke, his blue eyes sparkled, his body leant forwards persuasively, and an artistic revolution felt achievable. The atmosphere was electric, the conversation passionate – often heated, but always exciting. The discussions ‘kept our wits sharpened,’ Claude Monet later recalled, ‘they encouraged us with stores of enthusiasm that for weeks and weeks kept us up.’ And though the war caused many of the artists to leave the capital, it proved merely a temporary migration. At the time Madeleine and her daughters arrived in Montmartre, the artists had firmly marked their patch.

It was not until 1869 that Claude Monet became a friend of Edouard Manet, joining Manet’s circle, which by now included Zola, Cézanne, and Degas.