Impressionist Quotes

Having a Coke with You is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully as the horse it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it

To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.

I’m not sure if things got quiet or loud, blurry or hyperfocused, but I know the universe changed as I looked at Liz, everything melting into impressionistic streaks of fuzzy background colors.

Cooking is an art and patience a virtue... Careful shopping, fresh ingredients and an unhurried approach are nearly all you need. There is one more thing - love. Love for food and love for those you invite to your table. With a combination of these things you can be an artist - not perhaps in the representational style of a Dutch master, but rather more like Gauguin, the naïve, or Van Gogh, the impressionist. Plates or pictures of sunshine taste of happiness and love.

I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart's desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities. I suppose you could say my real weakness is a kind of long-sightedness: usually it is only at a distance, and much too late, that I can see the pattern.

Telling yourself you like the way you look is easy. Believing it is an entirely different kettle of whales.

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

One of the side effects of Viagra is blurred vision. Sounds great! When I’m taking a pill to pop a stiffy, how great is it that any woman I look at has blurred features and therefore is as beautiful as an impressionistic painting?


I want to paint humanity, humanity and again humanity.

I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That’s what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don’t see him as a living individual painter any more.

Having a Coke with You is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully as the horse it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it.

You know those French impressionists; all they did was fornicate, drink absinthe, and play dominoes.

seduce me at sunrise, dance with me barefoot in the dew on the grass, make me wet and warm, and loved

He thought for a moment. About puppets. About being controlled. Everyone was controlled by something, the Impressionist knew. By a spouse. A parent. A boss. A friend. By one’s own impulses, be they dark or light. Everyone was a puppet to something. Most people just couldn’t see the strings, is all. And so they didn’t believe they were puppets in the first place.

Anyway, for whatever interest is to be derived therefrom. Bacon, Balthus, and Magritte are my three favourite painters, along with Dubuffet, of the whole post-impressionist period, by which I mean that before them Bonnard, Vuillard, & Seurat are my favourite painters of that time.

Perhaps I shall not write my account of the Paleolithic at all, but make a film of it. A silent film at that, in which I shall show you first the great slumbering rocks of the Cambrian period, and move from those to the mountains of Wales, from Ordovician to Devonian, on the lush glowing Cotswolds, on to the white cliffs of Dover... An impressionistic, dreaming film, in which the folded rocks arise and flower and grow and become Salisbury Cathedral and York Minster...

The campus, an academy of trees, under which some hand, the wind's I guess, had scattered the pale light of thousands of spring beauties, petals stained with pink veins; secret, blooming for themselves. We sat among them. Your long fingers, thin body, and long bones of improbable genius; some scattered gene as Kafka must have had. Your deep voice, this passing dust of miracles. That simple that was myself, half conscious, as though each moment was a page where words appeared; the bent hammer of the type struck against the moving ribbon. The light air, the restless leaves; the ripple of time warped by our longing. There, as if we were painted by some unknown impressionist.

If I walked down by different streets to the Jardin du Luxembourg in the afternoon I could walk through the gardens and then go to the Musée du Luxembourg where the great paintings were that have now mostly been transferred to the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume. I went there nearly every day for the Cézannes and to see the Manets and the Monets and the other Impressionists that I had first come to know about in the Art Institute at Chicago. I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it was a secret. But if the light was gone in the Luxembourg I would walk up through the gardens and stop in at the studio apartment where Gertrude Stein lived at 27 rue de Fleurus.

The old concept of chronological, orderly, symmetrical development of character died when it was discovered that the unconscious motivations are entirely at odds with fabricated conventions. Human beings do not grow in perfect symmetry. They oscillate, expand, contract, backtrack, arrest themselves, retrogress, mobilize, atrophy in part, proceed erratically according to experience and traumas. Some aspects of the personality mature, others do not. Some live in the past, some in the present. Some people are futuristic characters, some are cubistic, some are hard-edged, some geometric, some abstract, some impressionistic, some surrealistic!

I remembered some of what I'd read in the past: the small group of the original Impressionists, including one woman-Berthe Morisot- who'd first banded together in 1874 to exhibit works in a style that the Paris Salon found too experimental for inclusion. We postmoderns take them for granted, or disdain them, or love them too easily.

I could need you in many ways yet I don’t; I love you in many ways. It is peculiar. I need you only in the sense that you need yourself. I don’t expect anything to be mutually intense among us. I somehow like the thought of being the one who is feeling already more than one should. But I need you to believe that you are distinctively refreshing. And uncommon. And intriguing. It is an extreme oddity of mine but I need you to believe that. Call it a form of paranoia; I know that I am feeding your ego right now. Call it self-defense; I am putting in words your uniqueness in an attempt to explain to my own self why is it that I adore you. The truth is: You shine out like the sun shines out and you melt away all my intentions of a fatal, whatsoever, description regarding what is it exactly that you do. There is no exactness. See, it takes suns and miraculous imagery to slightly sketch you in words whereas you probably are as complex as an impressionist painting of impeccable quality. You continually provoke my blatantly awful poetical instincts; that is for sure.

And I see that his brown eye has a splash of green in it and the green one a splash of brown. Like Cezanne painted them. Impressionist eyes.

Inside" Children Inside each of us are the children we were at each developmental stage. With regard to our creative dreams, these inside children can prevent us from living them by "acting out" in order to try to get our attention. Your inner 5-year-old is not going to patiently wait as you learn intricate metalworking techniques or study impressionist painting. Yet, your inner 10-year-old may be perfectly suited to learn and observe new skills. What's really needed is parenting of these inside children so that we bring them to age-appropriate activities.

look at its shape, with vibrant yellows and oranges, a sunflower can brighten your day...it's as if it is smiling like a happy face painted on the sun...so if you do only one thing all day, let it be to smile, so you can brighten the day of others around you, just like the sunflower

It was a renovated train station housing galleries of famous French impressionists and other artists of the period. Van Gogh’s Starry Night over the Rhone, my favorite of them all, was . . . here.

Now keep in mind, memories aren’t historical archives. They’re—improvisations, really. A lot of the stuff you associate with a particular event might be factually wrong, no matter how clearly you remember it. The brain has a funny habit of building composites. Inserting details after the fact. But that’s not to say your memories aren’t true, okay? They’re an honest reflection of how you saw the world, and every one of them went into shaping how you see it. But they’re not photographs. More like impressionist paintings. Okay?

see me as your moonlight and you're the sky, i'm the satellite orbiting through your night

without your colors, my world would always be like night, it would be so much colder, so dark and colorless...i'd be living in a black and white picture where all the flowers have closed up

In another part of the city in a ramshackle gallery that had to be reached through a narrow stairway was an exhibition of “degenerate art” which Dr. Goebbels had organized to show the people what Hitler was rescuing them from. It contained a splendid selection of modern paintings—Kokoschka, Chagall and expressionist and impressionist works. The day I visited it, after panting through the sprawling House of German Art, it was crammed, with a long line forming down the creaking stairs and out into the street. In fact, the crowds besieging it became so great that Dr. Goebbels, incensed and embarrassed, soon closed it.

Ms. Harrison paled so that the makeup floated on her suddenly pale skin like impressionist water lilies.

Your impression of me is different than my impression of me. But that’s OK, because your impression is impressionistic, like a Monet painting, while mine is realistic, like a Rembrandt.

i found my flower, there she was, she caught my eye and captured my heart. i listened to her...she called out to me with her colors and warmth, held me with her softness and beauty, silently asking only that i let her grow, and let her be, and love her for who she was: my flower

and a manner so peculiar and romantic, and extraneous, and ad libitum, and heart-searching, that—that—he—he is an impressionist, I presume?" "No," said the captain simply, "he is a Presbyterian.

yeah, sure, the sun will age my skin, and all these giggles and smiles with you will, over time, will crack up my face and give me wrinkles...sunshine, giggles, smiles, you? that's happiness, baby i'm living!

walking across the moors made me feel as if I’d stepped primly out of a Jane Austen book or an Impressionist painting. But I bet even Elizabeth Bennet had never punted a rabbit before, and my current count was 137.

Poetry that tames language into tight structures and yet manages to move us comes off as a feat, paralleling ballet or athletic talent in harnessing craft to beauty. When poetry is based on a less rigorous, more impressionistic definition of craft, its appeal depends more on whether one happens to be individually constituted to “get it” for various reasons. The audience narrows: poetry becomes more like tai chi than baseball.

our life is a coloring book...together we color our world onto the vibrant pages with our radiant hues, saturating and warming our lives with a beauty that's so filled with colorful luminosity, just like sparkling sunbeams shining through a thousand colorful leaves ablaze on autumn trees

I think it is the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more. It is concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness. Life, on the other hand, is meaningless most of the time. The novel imitates life, where the short story is bony, and cannot wander. It is essential art.

Let me add, just in case, that experts on literary “schools” should wisely refrain this time from casually dragging in “the influence of German Impressionists”: I do not know German and have never read the Impressionists—whoever they are.

falling into the mist through colorful trees on wings of love becoming a part of colors ablaze in autumn's leaves holding each color with floating kisses on sighs of feathers

After the great Impressionists, and again after Van Gogh and Gaugin, people said, 'Painting is now played out.' But Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Roussel and Vuillard appeared and gave them the lie. 'We were wrong,' said the croakers, 'but this at any rate is the end.' Yet to refute them, and to prove that there is no end to art, still another generation of painters sprang up.

It's commonplace to say that we 'love' a book, but when we say it, we mean all sorts of things. Sometimes we mean that a book was important to us in out youth, though we haven't picked it up in years; sometimes what we 'love' is an impressionistic idea glimpsed from afar (Combray...madeleins...Tante Leonie...) as apposed to the experience of wallowing and plowing through an actual text, and all too often people claim to love books they haven't read at all. Then there are books we love so much that we read every year or two, and know passages of them by heart; that cheer us up when we are sick or sad and never fail to amuse us when we take them up at random; that we pass on to all our friends and acquaintances; and to which we return again and again with undimmed enthusiasm over the course of a lifetime. I think it goes without saying ghat most books that engage readers on this very high levels are masterpieces; and this is why I believe that True Grit by Charles Portis is a masterpiece.

I had not then acquired the technique that I flatter myself now enables me to deal competently with the works of modern artist. If this were the place I could write a very neat little guide to enable the amateur of pictures to deal to the satisfaction of their painters with the most diverse manifestations of the creative instinct. There is the intense ‘By God!’ that acknowledges the power of the ruthless realist, the ‘It’s so awfully sincere’ that covers your embarrassment when you are shown the coloured photograph of an alderman’s widow, the low whistle that exhibits your admiration for the post-impressionist, the ‘Terribly amusing’ that expresses what you feel about the cubist, the ‘Oh!’ of one who is overcome, the ‘Ah!’ of him whose breath is taken away.

The lesson of the Impressionists is that there are times and places where it is better to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond than a Little Fish in a Big Pond, where the apparent disadvantage of being an outsider in a marginal world turns out not to be a disadvantage at all.

Having DID is, for many people, a very lonely thing. If this book reaches some people whose experiences resonate with mine and gives them a sense that they aren't alone, that there is hope, then I will have achieved one of my goals. A sad fact is that people with DID spend an average of almost seven years in the mental health system before being properly diagnosed and receiving the specific help they need. During that repeatedly misdiagnosed and incorrectly treated, simply because clinicians fail to recognize the symptoms. If this book provides practicing and future clinicians certain insight into DID, then I will have accomplished another goal. Clinicians, and all others whose lives are touched by DID, need to grasp the fundamentally illusive nature of memory, because memory, or the lack of it, is an integral component of this condition. Our minds are stock pots which are continuously fed ingredients from many cooks: parents, siblings, relatives, neighbors, teachers, schoolmates, strangers, acquaintances, radio, television, movies, and books. These are the fixings of learning and memory, which are stirred with a spoon that changes form over time as it is shaped by our experiences. In this incredibly amorphous neurological stew, it is impossible for all memories to be exact. But even as we accept the complex of impressionistic nature of memory, it is equally essential to recognize that people who experience persistent and intrusive memories that disrupt their sense of well-being and ability to function, have some real basis distress, regardless of the degree of clarity or feasibility of their recollections. We must understand that those who experience abuse as children, and particularly those who experience incest, almost invariably suffer from a profound sense of guilt and shame that is not meliorated merely by unearthing memories or focusing on the content of traumatic material. It is not enough to just remember. Nor is achieving a sense of wholeness and peace necessarily accomplished by either placing blame on others or by forgiving those we perceive as having wronged us. It is achieved through understanding, acceptance, and reinvention of the self.

The world he saw on the news came to seem like a genre-fusing farce, its story lines ever less plausible, ever more dispiriting. The world of the chamber, by contrast, was all impressionist masterworks, images and plotlines manifestly finer and more nourishing than what, of late, was passing for the real.

The industrialisation of England had quickened during Hardy’s life and in the novel he places great importance on rural culture and the need of man to interact with, and understand the natural world, however indifferent it may be to human survival. The author does not sketch a portrait of an idyllic rural scene, but highlights and details the devastating consequences and brute force of the natural world. Hardy uses these disasters to underline the prominence of chance or luck in life, rather than benevolent design by a creator and how this might impact moral decisions. Impressionist art also influences Hardy’s perception of reality and what knowledge each individual is capable of attaining in any situation.

be the lone tree standing in the misty rain, branches outstretched upward tasting the fog, waiting for the air to clear, waiting for clouds to break and give way to blue skies...waiting for the sunbeams to sing down and warm your soul all the way down to your wet roots

we are made of the sea, of the stars, of the flowers, of the sand, of the breeze...that's why it is not correct to say we are in love, for we are in everything, we are love

you are the yellow-breasted finch singing the sound of sunshine into my heart

she said simply, 'my favorite color is you'...and that's all it took for my heart to be ablaze with love

In Antwerp I did not even know what the impressionists were, now I have seen them and though not being one of the club yet I have much admired certain

Thank you very much too for all the steps you have taken toward the exhibition of the Independents. On the whole I’m very glad that they’ve been put with the other impressionists.

Paint, for the Impressionists, became a medium whose material properties were being celebrated as opposed to being disguised behind the artifice of a pictorial illusion.

What will you be when you grow up?” “A human being.” -An Impressionist Painting of My Younger Brother

she danced with her own reflection, absorbed in a trance of morning light, a glowing impression, whose sheer beauty was pure and simply, her timeless simplicity

The light air, the restless leaves; the ripple of time warped by our longing. There, as if we were painted by some unknown impressionist.

THERE ARE ENORMOUS HOLES IN MY EDUCATION. I left college in March of my freshman year and never went back. I’ve never read Moby-Dick and it’s probably too late now. I know nothing about the history of music or the history of art except what I’ve learned through osmosis. But Outsider Art is its own context. I don’t have to know all about the Impressionists or the Abstract Expressionists. I don’t have to be able to fit this art into any historic chronology. I don’t feel like an ignoramus. Irony of ironies, I don’t feel like an outsider—to fall in love I only need eyes.

In the end, the Impressionists made the right choice, which is one of the reasons that their paintings hang in every major art museum in the world. But this same dilemma comes up again and again in our own lives, and often we don’t choose so wisely. The inverted-U curve reminds us that there is a point at which money and resources stop making our lives better and start making them worse.

Washington in 1965. We instinctively measure advantage in terms of the three M’s because men, money, and matériel are the easiest and most obvious ways to make sense of a battle. The only way to appreciate the threat that the Viet Cong posed was to actually listen to what they had to say—to look past the armor and see the man. The book you have just read has tried to persuade you to think that way. Men, money, and matériel aren’t always the deciding factors in a battle. In fact, what the inverted U-shaped curve tells us is that having too much money and matériel is as debilitating as having too little. Being an underdog—having nothing to lose—opens up possibilities. The Impressionists were better for shunning the Salon. History and experience ought to teach us to be suspicious of Goliaths, because the very thing that makes the giant so terrifying is also the source of his weakness. David understood that, as he sized up his opponent long ago in the Valley of Elah.

her reflection captivates me her darkness teaches me her essence fills me her light calms me her soul caresses me... she is my fascination she is is my art she is my glow she is my love she is my dance

In the first place, it pleased me enormously that Theo and Mr. Tersteeg have entered into business relations in order to make the work of the painters here who are called impressionists known in Holland too.

The Impressionists were better for shunning the Salon. History and experience ought to teach us to be suspicious of Goliaths, because the very thing that makes the giant so terrifying is also the source of his weakness.

I wanted an impressionistic effect, so I highlighted down her arms and the back of one hand. The other I left curled on one side and picked out her shoulders and collar bone. Then down to her navel, which I also highlighted in gold. Then I took a small paintbrush and hovered above her nipples. 'Gold, or pink?' 'Oh, definitely gold,' she said. I painted her nipples and areola, and she giggled. 'Interesting,' she said, lifting her head and looking down.

in photography and as in life, it is the strong contrasts between dualities that make things interesting and beautiful...particularly speaking, darkness has to exist and be present in order for light to glow, and have meaning and purpose

i look up in hope, dreaming to be brightened up, and begotten out of this hazy funk, and suddenly, i see my light glowing high above me, she is warming certainty wearing her angelic halo, as my spirits rise up to kiss her, i smile clearly

Pixels don't have the depth, the resonance you're looking for. No matter how hight the resolution, how true the colours, they're still only an impressionist approximation of their subject. Whereas film captures something of its essence, a transferral that goes beyond the chemical process. A real photograph is created by light, pure and simple: a paintbrush of photons that leaves its mark on the canvas of the film. There's a physical link between photographer and subject that calls for fine judgement, for skill.

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.

The academy expected artists to make work based on mythology, religious iconography, history or classical antiquity in a style that idealized the subject. Such fakery didn’t interest this group of young, ambitious painters. They wanted to leave their studios and go outside to document the modern world around them. It was a bold move. Artists simply didn’t wander off and paint 'low' subjects such as ordinary people picnicking, or drinking or walking; it wasn’t the done thing. It would be like Steven Spielberg hiring himself out for wedding videos.

But what would Monsieur Tersteeg say about this picture when he said before a Sisley - Sisley, the most discreet and gentle of the impressionists - “I can’t help thinking that the artist who painted that was a little tipsy.” If he saw my picture, he would say that it was delirium tremens in full swing.

I should not be surprised if the impressionists soon find fault with my way of working, for it has been fertilized by the ideas of Delacroix rather than by theirs. Because, instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use colour more arbitrarily so as to express myself forcibly.

An impressionistic map of the South China Sea has been dashed across these covers by molecularly reconstructed Ming Dynasty calligraphers using brushes of combed unicorn mane dipped into ink made of grinding down charcoal slabs fashioned by blind stylite monks from hand-charred fragments of the True Cross.

always remember, you are the sunshine to those who look up to you, and they are your sunbathers...so glow brightly, be that positive enlightenment that radiates joy into their hearts and fills them with warmth and positivity. so that they may do the same one day, unto all those sunbathers who look up to them

There is a school--I believe--of impressionists. But I know very little about it. But I do know who are the original and most important masters, around whom--as round an axis--the landscape and peasant painters will turn. Delacroix, Corot, Millet and the rest. That is my own opinion, not formulated as it should be.

I would say to myself: “Curious sunset, this; it’s different from what they usually are but after all I’ve seen them just as fine, just as remarkable as this.” I had more pleasure on evenings when a ship, absorbed and liquefied by the horizon so much the same in colour as herself (an Impressionist exhibition this time

Imagine members of an art appreciation society pleading in court that they ‘believe’ they need a hallucinogenic drug in order to enhance their understanding of Impressionist or Surrealist paintings. Yet, when a church claims an equivalent need, it is backed by the highest court in the land. Such is the power of religion as a talisman.

He led Jess to a painting of a Black woman selling flowers. She leaned in and read the wall plate. “Frédéric Bazille, Young Woman with Peonies. I don’t know this artist.” “He was in the outer circle of the French Impressionists. Look how she offers the bouquet to a potential client, but she doesn’t seem to care if he buys them or not. She’s got that little frown line between her eyes—see, there?—‘Take it or leave it, mister’—as if she’s impatient that he can’t make up his mind. She’s not a bit ingratiating. And the peonies, of course, are Bazille’s bisou to Manet, who was the leader of the French avant-garde at the time. Manet loved peonies, cultivated them. There’s a peony at the center of the bouquet that the Black servant is offering the prostitute in Manet’s Olympia. That painting was at the height of its notoriety when Bazille painted this one. Everyone in the Paris art world would’ve got the reference.” “A Black servant in Olympia? I only remember the scowly White nude, and how upset everyone was that Manet didn’t paint her in a classical style.” Theo pulled out his cell phone and called up the image with a few taps. “Here,” he said, handing it to Jess. “Wow. I’ve looked at that picture dozens of times. How could I not have noticed her?” Theo frowned. “I’d be surprised, I guess, except that I once sat through a forty-minute lecture on that painting and the professor didn’t mention her. He spent more time on the black cat at the nude’s feet than the interesting woman who occupies half the canvas. I call it the Invisible Man effect, or in this case, Invisible Woman. Which is kind of the whole point of my work. To say, Hey, we’re here. We’ve always been here.

on this morning, you feel her touch deeply into your soul as the misty fog lightly brushes in whispering silence across the surface of your being, amidst the soothing fragrance of wet pine needles floating all around...she creeps playfully though in wavy reflections, warming your waters with her magic, her dance, the hope for a new awakening

Through a complex combination of whitewashing, guilt, and an intentional recasting of history that absolves them of their hatred, our historical translators have painted a sanitized, impressionist portrait of a struggle for Black liberation that was eventually fulfilled by American’s unwavering commitment to justice and equality. Out of whole cloth, they managed to fabricate a fantastic ahistorical myth that somehow became truth. They remember a socially conservative, respectable campaign of racial reconciliation, not a movement of anti-establishment revolutionaries. And for their sake, the doctrine of nonviolent resistance was eventually reduced to simple ‘nonviolence.’ They never speak of the ‘resisting.

Changing your marriage and family starts with changing you.

I’m not focusing on your outside. I’m trying to find the masterpiece inside you.

how can you be holding me from doing what i want to do, when all i want to do is hold you?

before you,  i stand, and  i realize, that  i never knew how good life was,  before you

you are everything everywhere...my spirit rises up in your light, my heart blossoms in your colors, and my soul is born into your shade

the tree tops whisper your name when i'm missing you the most. your shadow is observing me... it all reminds me how much more my life glows in your presence

when you are there, be truly present, be into that moment, 100%, and that place, or person, or experience will forever become part of you

love and understanding are one into the same. without love, there is no understanding, and without understanding, there can be no love

when you see her unspoiled beauty for the first time, you realize that's why you came this way afterall in the first place

the evils of ego devour the soul with darkness, destroy all hope, and eat away at any chance of experiencing the pure beauty of a glowing, unspoiled love

i dream my photograph, and i photograph my dream...

we are only here on this planet for a little while...so dance, and love, and reflect what makes you happy, and then love and dance some more

The Bible says, ‘The Lord is compassionate and gracious and does not treat us as our sins deserve. He knows how we are formed. He remembers that we are dust.’ Christ died for you too,

For the last couple of years, I've always started in the same place. It's a little room, more like a little hallway, off one of the Impressionist galleries. That always bothered me. I mean, even in my most Edward-centric moments, I knew he didn't merit a big room of his own.But to tack his work onto the wrong era, not to mention any conceivable style, always chafed.

Religion, as ever, is the trump card. Imagine members of an art appreciation society pleading in court that they ‘believe’ they need a hallucinogenic drug in order to enhance their understanding of Impressionist or Surrealist paintings. Yet, when a church claims an equivalent need, it is backed by the highest court in the land. Such is the power of religion as a talisman.

And yet some Germans at least, especially in the art center of Germany which Munich was, preferred to be artistically polluted. In another part of the city in a ramshackle gallery that had to be reached through a narrow stairway was an exhibition of “degenerate art” which Dr. Goebbels had organized to show the people what Hitler was rescuing them from. It contained a splendid selection of modern paintings—Kokoschka, Chagall and expressionist and impressionist works. The day I visited it, after panting through the sprawling House of German Art, it was crammed, with a long line forming down the creaking stairs and out into the street. In fact, the crowds besieging it became so great that Dr. Goebbels, incensed and embarrassed, soon closed it.

When Pablo Picasso was an old man, he was sitting in a café in Spain, doodling on a used napkin. He was nonchalant about the whole thing, drawing whatever amused him in that moment—kind of the same way teenage boys draw penises on bathroom stalls—except this was Picasso, so his bathroom-stall penises were more like cubist/impressionist awesomeness laced on top of faint coffee stains.

(About Georgia O'Keeffe) At the Art Students League in New York one of her fellow students advised her that, since he would be a great painter and she would end up teaching painting in a girs' school, any work of hers was less important than modeling for him. Another painted over her work to show her how the Impressionists did trees. She had not before heard how the Impressionists did trees and she did not much care. At twenty-four she left all those opinions behind and went for the first time to live in Texas, where there were no trees to paint and no one to tell her how not to paint them. In Texas there was only the horizon she craved. In Texas she had her sister Claudia with her for a while, and in the late afternoons they would walk away from town and toward the horizon and watch the evening star come out. "That evening star fascinated me," she wrote. "It was in some way very exciting to me. My sister had a gun, and as we walked she would throw bottles into the air and shoot as many as she could before they hit the ground. I had nothing but to walk into nowhere and the wide sunset space with the star. Ten watercolors were made from that star.

How divine the coming of the morning,—the coming of the Sun,—exorcising the shadowy terrors of the night with infinite restoration of color! I look upon the woods, and they are not the same: the palms have vanished; the cypresses have fled away; trees young and comely and brightly green replace them. A hand is laid upon my shoulder,—the hand of the gray Captain: 'Go forward, and see what you have never seen before.' Even as he speaks, our boat, turning sharply, steams out of the green water into—what can I call it?—a flood of fluid crystal,—a river of molten diamond,—a current of liquid light?

am not good at noticing when I’m happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart’s desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities.

after a hot shower, wipe the mirror and clear the mist covering it...look closely at yourself, see the reflection you want to see...breathe in, breathe out...now, let go of who you are, and become who you can be...

just as a autumn transforms a beautiful tree, fully ablaze in only its best colors, and blooming in full wisdom from all the seasons, so will the words well spoken bring out the best in the one who puts them into practice

i ask you, what are you into? ...whatever it is, get into it, totally jump all the way into it, experience everything you can, learn and love...and then transcend through it, and find your other side in this life, don't wait

The works of the Impressionists, as much as those of any medieval craftsman or renaissance Humanist, are related to a world view, a context of interdependent beliefs and ideas about what is good and bad, true and false, the nature of existence and the means for investigating it. There are no ‘value vacuums’ in human history, no ‘intermediary periods’, only periods which are more or less unified, more or less amenable to the procedures, and temperaments, of historians.

I thought of the future, and spoke of the past. Because Holly wanted to know about my childhood. She talked of her own, too; but it was elusive, nameless, placeless, and impressionistic recital, though the impression received was contrary to what one expected, for she gave an almost voluptuous account of swimming and summer, Christmas trees, pretty cousins and parties: in short, happy in a way that she was not, and never, certainly, the background of a child who had run away.

there she was, so full of delicious colors, impossible not to look at, impossible not to love...so profoundly aligned into my being, with this radiance of beauty so powerful and warming, that even after she left, my world still glowed in her afterglow

when i was a little boy, i needed my speedracer nightlight plugged into its wall outlet next to the bed to keep me calm in the darkness, so i could relax and fall asleep...now as a grown man, i find that i am no different, just my nightlight is now a person

Memory is an artist, an impressionist. She adds colour, sound, smell and emotion to events at her whim. She adds, subtracts and embellishes until the event she started documenting is quite unrecognisable to the others who also experienced it, but at the same time, is more truthful to the owner of the memory. There is no reality. There are only impres- sions of past events, made by a million selves, all interacting with each other, vying for superiority. Reality doesn’t exist, perhaps in the end, that’s my only truth.

When Pablo Picasso was an old man, he was sitting in a café in Spain, doodling on a used napkin. He was nonchalant about the whole thing, drawing whatever amused him in that moment—kind of the same way teenage boys draw penises on bathroom stalls—except this was Picasso, so his bathroom-stall penises were more like cubist/impressionist awesomeness laced on top of faint coffee stains. Anyway, some woman sitting near him was looking on in awe. After a few moments, Picasso finished his coffee and crumpled up the napkin to throw away as he left. The woman stopped him. “Wait,” she said. “Can I have that napkin you were just drawing on? I’ll pay you for it.” “Sure,” Picasso replied. “Twenty thousand dollars.” The woman’s head jolted back as if he had just flung a brick at her. “What? It took you like two minutes to draw that.” “No, ma’am,” Picasso said. “It took me over sixty years to draw this.” He stuffed the napkin in his pocket and walked out of the café. Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you’ve failed at something.

this beautiful bird, a little yellow-breasted finch, landed on my windowsill...she just stopped my time flow...i looked at her, for i could see nothing else mattered in that moment, and she looked directly at me, and then turned her head slightly sideways, and then quickly back...she then sang to me a wonderful melody of tweets and chirps in harmony with the sound of sunshine glowing through her feathers...her wild and innocent essence warmed all my senses, to my core...and all of a sudden with an assured certainty, i knew everything was going to be alright

am not good at noticing when I’m happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart’s desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities. I suppose you could say my real weakness is a kind of long-sightedness: usually it is only at a distance, and much too late, that I can see the pattern.

i had a dream of you last night, i was all alone in the desert, surrounded by darkness on a desolate playa, and then you came to me and gave me light, you were the moon...i knew it was you, for you were the brightest of all the heavenly bodies, and something of this sort of certainty come but once in a lifetime

Always until then, as is common among men whose taste for the arts develops independently of their sensuality, a weird disparity had existed between the satisfactions which he would accord to both simultaneously; yielding to the seductions of more and more rarefied works of art in the company of more and more vulgar women, taking a little servant-girl to a screened box at the theatre for the performance of a decadent piece he particularly wanted to see, or to an exhibition of Impressionist painting, convinced, moreover, that a cultivated society woman would have understood them no better, but would not have managed to remain so prettily silent.

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.

In the following year my father took us on a rare excursion to the Museum of Art in Philadelphia. My parents worked very hard, and taking four children on a bus to Philadelphia was exhausting and expensive. It was the only such outing we made as a family, marking the first time I came face-to-face with art. I felt a sense of physical identification with the long, languorous Modiglianis; was moved by the elegantly still subjects of Sargent and Thomas Eakins; dazzled by the light that emanated from the Impressionists. But it was the work in a hall devoted to Picasso, from his harlequins to Cubism, that pierced me the most. His brutal confidence took my breath away. My

Paul Gauguin’s remark about his friend Van Gogh is not without interest: “Il oubliait même,” wrote the famous painter of négresses, “d’écrire le hollandais, et comme on a pu voir par la publication de ses lettres à son frère, il n’écrivait jamais qu’en français, et cela admirablement, avec des ‘Tant qu’à, Quant à,’ à n’en plus finir.”[1]

I sought to model my techniques on those of the Impressionist School, but my pictures remained flat as paper cutouts, and seemed to offer no promise of ever developing into anything. But Takeichi's words made me aware that my mental attitude towards painting had been completely mistaken. What superficiality—and what stupidity—there is in trying to depict in a pretty manner things which one has thought pretty. The masters through their subjective perceptions created beauty out of trivialities. They did not hide their interest even in things which were nauseatingly ugly, but soaked themselves in the pleasure of depicting them. In other words, they seemed not to rely in the least on the misconceptions of others.

What a mistake Parisians make in not having a palate for crude things, for Monticellis, for common earthenware. But there, one most not lose heart because Utopia is not coming true. It is only that what I learned in Paris is leaving me, and I am returning to the ideas I had in the country before I knew the impressionists. And I should not be surprised if the impressionists soon find fault with my way of working, for it has been fertilized by Delacroix’s ideas rather than by theirs. Because instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use colour more arbitrarily, in order to express myself forcibly. Well, let that be, as far as theory goes, but I’m going to give you an example of what I mean.

travel to that place you always wanted to see, go see it, only excuses are stopping you. say all those things you wanted to say to those people you never said them to, only pride is keeping you from it. learn to do that thing you always wanted to do, and do it, only fear is holding you back...do not instead make up a list of all the stuff you want to do before you die, just start doing it, and do it now. do not wait for 'one day.' experience what you can right here, right now, before it all changes...because it will change. the tides of change are as constant as time itself. as buddha once said, ' nothing is forever except change'...so take nothing for granted, nothing is guaranteed except that it will all change one day...

together our colors sing, ablaze with a melody of passion hues drenched with reds, and yellows, and oranges, mellowed by greens, and cooling blues... floating silently upon the morning breeze, we're autumn's leaves falling from trees, landing in the river floating quietly away, upon still waters, wrapped around colorful sighs, a simple, single, infinite moment of living to love

he could smell her petals, with their warming colors. and hear her silent wisdom as he listened to those colors...and her beauty, behold! wow; oh, how he wanted so badly to keep her and cherish her...but he dare not take her away from the other purple flowers, she was not his to take. because it was there that she was needed, and there he would let her be, standing out above the crowd, where she belonged

The defector is a typical—likely an impressionist—beguiled by a fantasy of freedom and escape. It is a state of mind I can grasp only theoretically. There is nothing original about human behavior. Any idea I have is likely occurring to scores of others in my demographic categories. We live in similar ways, think similar thoughts. What the eluders want to restore, I suspect, is the uniqueness they felt before counting like ours revealed that they were an awful lot like everyone else. But where the eluders have it wrong is that quantifiability doesn’t make human life any less remarkable, or even (this is counterintuitive, I know) less mysterious—any more than identifying the rhyme scheme in a poem devalues the poem itself. The opposite! Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious; only our ignorance made them seem so.

the word, 'before,' has the meaning of what is right in front of you, as well as the idea of something that happened in the past....thus it is a word with a beautiful duality, and with in itself carries such a powerful meaning: live each moment before it is too late and you can no longer...and cherish all you have right before you now, because you never know when it will all be gone, all gone before you can even blink, *poof* just like that...

Like all Freed musicals and all Astaire musicals, The Band Wagon believes that high and low, art and entertainment, elite and popular aspirations meet in the American musical. The Impressionist originals in Tony’s hotel room, which eventually finance his snappier vision of the show, draw not only a connection to An American in Paris but to painters, like Degas, who found art in entertainers. The ultimate hymn to this belief is the new Dietz and Schwartz song for the film, “That’s Entertainment,” which is to filmusicals what Berlin’s “There’s No Business Like Show Business” is to the stage.11 Whether a hot plot teeming with sex, a gay divorcée after her ex, or Oedipus Rex, whether a romantic swain after a queen or “some Shakespearean scene (where a ghost and a prince meet and everything ends in mincemeat),” it’s all one world of American entertainment. “Hip Hooray, the American way.” Dietz’s lyrics echo Mickey’s theorem in Strike Up the Band. What’s American? Exactly this kind of movie musical from Mount Hollywood Art School.

For myself, I wouldn't have lifted a finger to own a Rolex, a pair of Nikes or a BMW Z3; in fact, I had never succeeded in identifying the slightest difference between designer goods and non-designer goods. In the eyes of the world, I was clearly wrong. I was aware of this: I was in a minority, and consequently in the wrong. There had to be a difference between Yves Saint-Laurent shirts and other shirts, between Gucci moccasins and Andre moccasins. I was alone in not perceiving this difference; it was an infirmity which I could not cite as grounds for condemning the world. Does one ask a blind man to set himself up as an expert on post-impressionist painting? Through my blindness, however involuntary, I set myself apart from a living human reality powerful enough to incite both devotion and crime. These youths, through their half-savage instincts, undoubtedly discerned the presence of beauty; their desire was laudable, and perfectly in keeping with social norms; it was merely a question of rectifying the inappropriate way in which it was expressed.

You see in his Le pont de l’Europe a young man, well dressed in his grey overcoat and black top hat, maybe the artist, walking over the bridge along the generous pavement. He is two steps ahead of a young woman in a dress of sedate frills carrying a parasol. The sun is out. There is the glare of newly dressed stone. A dog passes by. A workman leans over the bridge. It is like the start of the world: a litany of perfect movements and shadows. Everyone, including the dog, knows what they are doing. Gustave Caillebotte, Le pont de l’Europe, 1876 The streets of Paris have a calmness to them: clean stone façades, rhythmic detailing of balconies, newly planted lime trees appear in his painting Jeune homme à sa fenêtre, shown in the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876. Here Caillebotte’s brother stands at the open window of their family apartment looking out onto the intersection of the rue de Monceau’s neighbouring streets. He stands with his hands in his pockets, well dressed and self-assured, with his life before him and a plush armchair behind him. Everything is possible.

In 1892 the Hungarian doctor and journalist Max Nordau published his Entartung (Degeneration), which he dedicated to Cesare Lombroso. Despite its size (almost six hundred pages), the book became an international bestseller and soon appeared in a dozen languages. Nordau had expanded the Lombrosian analysis to show that “degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes … lunatics; they are often authors and artists.” Charles Baudelaire and the French “decadent” poets, Oscar Wilde (Bram Stoker’s original model for Count Dracula), Manet and the Impressionists, Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, Emile Zola, as well as Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche—all the leading lights of fin de siècle culture, in fact—came under Doctor Nordau’s critical microscope. He concluded that they were all victims of diseased “subjective states of mind.” The modern degenerate artist, like his criminal counterpart, lacks a moral sense: “For them there exists no law, no decency, no modesty.” Emotionalism and hysteria, as well as that old disease of Romanticism, ennui , pervade their works and outlook, Nordau proclaimed, because of their enfeebled nervous state. “The degenerate and insane,” he wrote, “are the predestined disciples of Schopenhauer.

be into your own happiness...so that's how it is... if you are happy, that's enough...at your age, stay on the path of discovery into what makes you happy...the path into yourself, discover a path that's only for you. it does not have to be crystal clear, so even if there is fog that makes it impossible to see, even a step ahead of you, don't be afraid, and just slowly take it one step at a time, into it all....don't give into the fear of the unknown or unseen. move into and towards it, and cherish that excitement. because when the fog clears up, who knows, you might just end up where you dearly wanted to be...

Here is another weird example of the privileging of religion. On 21 February 2006 the United States Supreme Court ruled, in accordance with the Constitution, that a church in New Mexico should be exempt from the law, which everybody else has to obey, against the taking of hallucinogenic drugs. Faithful members of Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal believe that they can understand God only by drinking dimethyltryptamine. Note that it is sufficient that they believe that the drug enhances their understanding. They do not have to produce evidence. Conversely, there is plenty of evidence that cannabis eases the nausea and discomfort of cancer sufferers undergoing chemotherapy. Yet, again in accordance with the Constitution, the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that all patients who use cannabis for medicinal purposes are vulnerable to federal prosecution (even in the minority of states where such specialist use is legalized). Religion, as ever, is the trump card. Imagine members of an art appreciation society pleading in court they they 'believe' they need a hallucinogenic drug in order to enhance their understanding of Impressionist or Surrealist paintings. Yet, when a church claims an equivalent need, it is backed by the highest court in the land. Such is the power of religion as a talisman.

On 21 February 2006 the United States Supreme Court ruled, in accordance with the Constitution, that a church in New Mexico should be exempt from the law, which everybody else has to obey, against the taking of hallucinogenic drugs.8 Faithful members of the Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal believe that they can understand God only by drinking hoasca tea, which contains the illegal hallucinogenic drug dimethyltryptamine. Note that it is sufficient that they believe that the drug enhances their understanding. They do not have to produce evidence. Conversely, there is plenty of evidence that cannabis eases the nausea and discomfort of cancer sufferers undergoing chemotherapy. Yet, again in accordance with the Constitution, the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that all patients who use cannabis for medicinal purposes are vulnerable to federal prosecution (even in the minority of states where such specialist use is legalized). Religion, as ever, is the trump card. Imagine members of an art appreciation society pleading in court that they ‘believe’ they need a hallucinogenic drug in order to enhance their understanding of Impressionist or Surrealist paintings. Yet, when a church claims an equivalent need, it is backed by the highest court in the land. Such is the power of religion as a talisman.

Gervex's painting had a lurid and well-known literary source: it was based on Alfred de Musset's poem "Rolla," published in 1833 and 1840. The poem, a paradigm of July Monarchy romanticism, chronicles the disgrace that befalls Jacques Rolla, a son of the bourgeoisie, in the big city. The narrative of his decline — he squandered his fortune and committed suicide — is interleaved with lamentations over the moral and spiritual decadence of contemporary life. Thenineteen-year-old Rolla becomes the "most debauched man" in Paris, "where vice is the cheapest, the oldest and the most fertile in the world." The poem tells a second story as well, that of Marie (or Maria or Marion), a pure young girl who becomes a degraded urban prostitute. Her story amplifies the poet's theme — a world in moral disarray - and provides the instrument of, and a sympathetic companion for, Rolla's climactic self-destruction. Musset is clear about his young prostitute's status: she was forced into a prostitution de la misère by economic circumstances ("what had debased her was, alas, poverty /And not love of gold"), and he frequently distinguishes her situation from that of the venal women of the courtesan rank ("Your loves are golden, lively and poetic; . . . you are not for sale at all"). He is also insistent about the tawdry circumstances in which the young woman had to practice her miserable profession ("the shameful curtains of that foul retreat," "in a hovel," "the walls of this gloomy and ramshackle room"). The segments of the poem from which Gervex drew his story — and which were published in press reviews of the painting — are these: With a melancholy eye Rolla gazed on The beautiful Marion asleep in her wide bed; In spite of himself, an unnameable and diabolical horror Made him tremble to the bone. Marion had cost dearly. — To pay for his night He had spent his last coins. His friends knew it. And he, on arriving, Had taken their hand and given his word that In the morning no one would see him alive. When Rolla saw the sun appear on the roofs, He went and leaned out the window. Rolla turned to look at Marie. She felt exhausted, and had fallen asleep. And thus both fled the cruelties of fate, The child in sleep, and the man in death! It was a moment of inaction, then, that Gervex chose to paint - that of weary repose for her and melancholic contemplation for Rolla, following the night of paid sex and just prior to his suicide.

The street sprinkler went past and, as its rasping rotary broom spread water over the tarmac, half the pavement looked as if it had been painted with a dark stain. A big yellow dog had mounted a tiny white bitch who stood quite still. In the fashion of colonials the old gentleman wore a light jacket, almost white, and a straw hat. Everything held its position in space as if prepared for an apotheosis. In the sky the towers of Notre-Dame gathered about themselves a nimbus of heat, and the sparrows – minor actors almost invisible from the street – made themselves at home high up among the gargoyles. A string of barges drawn by a tug with a white and red pennant had crossed the breadth of Paris and the tug lowered its funnel, either in salute or to pass under the Pont Saint-Louis. Sunlight poured down rich and luxuriant, fluid and gilded as oil, picking out highlights on the Seine, on the pavement dampened by the sprinkler, on a dormer window, and on a tile roof on the Île Saint-Louis. A mute, overbrimming life flowed from each inanimate thing, shadows were violet as in impressionist canvases, taxis redder on the white bridge, buses greener. A faint breeze set the leaves of a chestnut tree trembling, and all down the length of the quai there rose a palpitation which drew voluptuously nearer and nearer to become a refreshing breath fluttering the engravings pinned to the booksellers’ stalls. People had come from far away, from the four corners of the earth, to live that one moment. Sightseeing cars were lined up on the parvis of Notre-Dame, and an agitated little man was talking through a megaphone. Nearer to the old gentleman, to the bookseller dressed in black, an American student contemplated the universe through the view-finder of his Leica. Paris was immense and calm, almost silent, with her sheaves of light, her expanses of shadow in just the right places, her sounds which penetrated the silence at just the right moment. The old gentleman with the light-coloured jacket had opened a portfolio filled with coloured prints and, the better to look at them, propped up the portfolio on the stone parapet. The American student wore a red checked shirt and was coatless. The bookseller on her folding chair moved her lips without looking at her customer, to whom she was speaking in a tireless stream. That was all doubtless part of the symphony. She was knitting. Red wool slipped through her fingers. The white bitch’s spine sagged beneath the weight of the big male, whose tongue was hanging out. And then when everything was in its place, when the perfection of that particular morning reached an almost frightening point, the old gentleman died without saying a word, without a cry, without a contortion while he was looking at his coloured prints, listening to the voice of the bookseller as it ran on and on, to the cheeping of the sparrows, the occasional horns of taxis. He must have died standing up, one elbow on the stone ledge, a total lack of astonishment in his blue eyes. He swayed and fell to the pavement, dragging along with him the portfolio with all its prints scattered about him. The male dog wasn’t at all frightened, never stopped. The woman let her ball of wool fall from her lap and stood up suddenly, crying out: ‘Monsieur Bouvet!

1. ‘ I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That’s what people are always doing in art.They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don’t see him as a living individual painter any more. But I can see they’re beautiful arranged.’ 2. ’ Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?... Why do you keep on using these stupid words-nasty, nice, proper, right? Why are you so worried about what’s proper?...why do you take all the life out of life? Why do you kill all the beauty?’ 3. ‘ Because I can’t marry a man to whom I don’t feel I belong in all ways. My mind must be his, my heart must be his, my body must be his. Just as I must feel he belongs to me. ‘ 4.’ The only thing that really matters is feeling and living what you believe-so long as it’s something more than belief in your own comfort.’ 5. 'It’s weird. Uncanny. But there is a sort of relationship between us. I make fun of him, I attack him all the time, but he senses when I’m ‘soft’. When he can dig back and not make me angry. So we slip into teasing states that are almost friendly. It’s partly because I’m so lonely, it’s partly deliberate (I want make him relax, both for his own good and so that one dat he may make a mistake), so it’s part weakness, and part cunning, and part charity. But there’s a mysterious fourth part I can’t define. It can’t be friendship, I loathe him. Perhaps it’s just knowledge. Just knowing a lot about him. And knowing someone automatically makes you feel close to him. Even when you wish he was on another planet.’ 6.’ You must MAKE, always. You must act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you’re going to paint. The most terrible form. If you feel something deeply, you’re not ashamed to show your feeling.’ 7. ‘ The women I’ve loved have always told me I’m selfish. It’s what makes them love me. And then be disgusted with me...But what they can’t stand is that I hate them when they don’t behave in their own way. ‘ 8. ‘ I love honesty and freedom and giving. I love making , I love doing, I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart. ‘ 9. ‘ I don’t know what love is...love is something that comes in different clothes, with a different way and different face, and perhaps it takes a long time for you to accept it, to be able to call it love.’ 10. ‘ All this business, it’s bound up with my bossy attitude to life. I’ve always known where I’m going, how I want things to happen. And they have happened as I have wanted, and I have taken it for granted that they have because I know where I’m going. But I have been lucky in all sorts of things. I’ve always tried to happen to life; but it’s time I let life happen to me. ‘ 11. ‘I said, what you love is your own love. It’s not love, it’s selfishness. It’s not me you think of, but what you feel about me.’ 12. ‘ The power of women! I’ve never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke. We’re so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we’re stronger then they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can’t stand ours.

Favorite painting...?" "Painting? Odalisque," I said. "Really.His non-nude nude. Interesting." It was,to me. Edward's most famous painting of Diana is Troie, where he painted her as Helen of Troy: naked except for the diamond bracelet and the occasional tendril of auburn hair. It had caused quite a stir at its exhibition. Apparently, Millicent Carnegie Biddle fainted on seeing it. It wasn't quite what she was used to viewing when she sat across from Mrs. Edward Willing every few weeks, sipping tea from Wedgewood china cups. Odalisque was more daring in its way, and infinitely more interesting to me. Most of the Post-Impressionist painters did an odalisque, or harem girl, reclining on a sofa or carpet, promising with their eyes that whatever it was that they did to men, they did it well. An odalisque was almost compulsory material.But unlike any of them,Edward had painted his subject-Diana-covered from neck to ankle in shimmery gauze.Covered,but still the ultimate object of desire. "Why that one?" Dr. Rothaus asked. "I don't know-" "Oh,please.Don't go all stupid teenager on me now.You know exactly why you like the painting.Humor me and articulate it." I felt myself beginning the ubiquitos shoulder dip. "Okay. Everyone is covering up something. I guess I think there's an interesting question there." "'What are they hiding?'" I shook my head. "'Does it make a difference?'" "Ah." One sharp corner of her mouth lifted. I would hesitate to call it a smile. "That is interesting.But your favorite Willing piece isn't a painting." "How-" "You hesitated when I asked. Let me guess...Ravaged Man?" "How-" "You're a young woman. And-" Dr. Rothaus levered herself off the desk-"you went through the 1899 file. I know the archive.

Before us is mighty, so to speak, transformative and preparatory work. From a period which is creative, immediate and elemental, we must proceed to a period which is critical, conscious and cultural. These are the two worlds between which exists the entire abyss. The contemporary generation has the misfortune of being born between these two worlds, before this abyss. Herein is explained its frailty, diseased anxiety, hungry search for new ideals and a certain fateful impotency in all of its efforts. The best youth and vigor of talent is not expended on vital creativity but on an internal destructiveness and struggle with the past, on the passage across the abyss to that land, to that shore, to the frontiers of a free and divine idealism. How many people are perishing in this passage or are losing their strength irrevocably!... ("On The Reasons For The Decline And On The New Tendencies In Contemporary Literature")

The concentrated structure of musical form, based on dramatic climaxes, gradually breaks up in romanticism and gives way again to the cumulative composition of the older music. Sonata form falls to pieces and is replaced more and more often by other, less severe and less schematically moulded forms—by small-scale lyrical and descriptive genres, such as the Fantasy and the Rhapsody, the Arabesque and the Étude, the Intermezzo and the Impromptu, the Improvisation and the Variation. Even extensive works are often made up of such miniature forms, which no longer constitute, from the structural point of view, the acts of a drama, but the scenes of a revue. A classical sonata or symphony was the world in parvo: a microcosm. A succession of musical pictures, such as Schumann’s Carnaval or Liszt’s Années de Pèlerinage, is like a painter’s sketch-book; it may contain magnificent lyrical-impressionistic details, but it abandons the attempt to create a total impression and an organic unity from the very beginning. [...] This change of form is accompanied by the literary inclinations of the composers and their bias towards programme music. The intermingling of forms also makes itself felt in music and is expressed most conspicuously in the fact that the romantic composers are often very gifted and important writers. In the painting and poetry of the period the disintegration of form does not proceed anything like so quickly, nor is it so far-reaching as in music. The explanation of the difference is partly that the cyclical ‘medieval’ structure had long since been overcome in the other arts, whereas it remained predominant in music until the middle of the eighteenth century, and only began to yield to formal unity after the death of Bach. In music it was therefore much easier to revert to it than, for example, in painting where it was completely out of date. The romantics’ historical interest in old music and the revival of Bach’s prestige had, however, only a subordinate part in the dissolution of strict sonata form, the real reason is to be sought in a change of taste which was in essentials sociologically conditioned.

Duhovna sloboda sveta direktno zavisi od politicke slobode Indije. Molimo Vas da stavite nesto sitinine u kasu. Posle tri cetvrti sata gubi svaku sigurnost, posle sat i po, sasvim je rastrojen. I dok prodju dva sata straze, njegove granice su se savsim istopile i on je potpuno izgubljen, ili mozda ne toliko izgubljen koliko razasut svuda po tami, okretanje njegovog sveta ima iznenadne zastoje i sada uopste nije siguran ni ko je, ni sta je, ni gde je ili cak da li uopste ima pravo da naziva sebe on. Dzonatan je naucio trik. Ljudi mare samo za spoljasnji izgled: sirinu manzetne, izgovor dentalno-labijalnog frikativa V. Da bi postao neko drugi treba samo da promenis krojaca i zapamtis da moras da dodirujes donjom usnom ivicu gornjih zuba. Lako je. Ali ako se promena lika ne desava spontano, onda noge gube oslonac i hvata te panika i onda nista ne moze zaustaviti pad. Onda je promena lika beg, onda je to trcanje uz saznanje da zaustavljanje moze izazvati sumnju da ustvari niko i ne trci. Niko ne trci. Niko se ne zaustavlja. Tu uopste i nema nikoga. Kako se coveculjak okrece, tako se pojavljuju razne licnosti jedna za drugom. Svaka pojava traje samo nekoliko sekundi, najvise minut. Svaka brise onu prethodnu. Ovaj covek postaje neko drugi tako potpuno da se nista od njegove sopstvene licnosti ne moze prepoznati. Izmedju svaka dva utiska koja coveculjak stvara, u trenutku dok jedna osoba odlazi, a druga jos nije stupila na njeno mesto, coveculjak, imitator-impresionista, sasvim je bezlican, potpuno prazan. On je niko.

Simplicity–or rather discrimination of vision–is the trademark of the true Post-Impressionist. He observes and then selects what is essential.

No matter where you are in your life, you must do what you love, and fuck what anybody says about what you do. If you are an artist, maybe your 19th century romantic style is not what is popular now, but you might just discover that in ten years, everyone will pay whatever amount you ask for your paintings. Or, if you love the Impressionist movement, you might be the person who starts a Neo-Impressionism movement.

In a form of homage to the Impressionist painters, Proust inserted one into his novel, the fictional Elstir, who shares traits with Renoir, Degas and Manet. In the seaside resort of Balbec, Proust's narrator visits Elstir's studio, where he finds canvasses that, like Monet's Le Havre, challenge the orthodox understanding of what things look like. In Elstir's seascapes, there is no demarcation between the sea and the sky, the sky looks like the sea, the sea like the sky. In a painting of a harbour at Carquehuit, a ship that is out at sea seems to be sailing through the middle of the town, women gathering shrimps among the rocks look as if they were in a marine grotto overhung by ships and waves, a group of holidaymakers in a boat look like they were in a cariole riding up through sunlit fields and down through shady patches. Elstir is not trying his hand at surrealism. If his work seems unusual, it is because he is attempting to paint something of what we actually see when we look around, rather than what we know we see.

A GATE It originates at the detail, the hinge of the door to the museum. Not the landscape or the figure that might be art, might be a coin-collector, maybe both. How you’ve taken us to twenty such places in the name of teaching me. The titles were always better than their canvases, all that blank sincerity. Their voices— if voiced—would spiral up into sincerity, and I never liked a sound for what it signified. I lost you in the impressionists. Found the gate to the pleasure-garden behind the museum. There, I named no flowers, no birds. Let the world be a worse sketch, left untitled.

It was raining harder now; the fat drops were falling too fast for the windshield wipers to keep up with them, making it look like as through we were heading straight into an impressionist’s vision of West Virginia.

The lesson of the Impressionists is that there are times and places where it is better to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond than a Little Fish in a Big Pond, where the apparent disadvantage of being an outsider in a marginal world turns out not to be a disadvantage at

she could take a seat for the evening in the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes. Conveniently located on the Place Pigalle, it was to this café that Édouard Manet and his Impressionist companions had switched allegiance from the Café Guerbois in the 1870s.16 It was also the café whose unremarkable interior Edgar Degas used as the setting for his In the Café (The Absinthe Drinker) (1875–1876).

The buildings looked like mere children’s blocks from a distance. The sun hid behind the interlaced clouds, softening the atmosphere and blurring the edges of the individual objects in the landscape. Paris appeared as it would on an impressionist artist’s canvas – real but without exact details.

A dandy," wrote Charles Baudelaire, "must be looking in his mirror at all times, waking and sleeping." Dali could easily have become the living proof of Baudelaire's dictum. But the literal mirror was not enough for him. Dali needed mirrors of many kinds: his pictures, his admirers, newspapers and magazines and television. And even that still left him unsatisfied. So one Christmas he took a walk in the streets of New York carrying a bell. He would ring it whenever he felt people were not paying enough attention to him. "The thought of not being recognised was unbearable." True to himself to the bitter end, he delighted in following Catalonian television's bulletins on his state of health during his last days alive (in Quiron hospital in Barcelona); he wanted to hear people talking about him, and he also wanted to know whether his health would revive or whether he would be dying soon. At the age of six he wanted to be a female cook - he specified the gender. At seven he wanted to be Napoleon. "Ever since, my ambition has been continually on the increase, as has my megalomania: now all I want to be is Salvador Dali. But the closer I get to my goal, the further Salvador Dali drifts away from me." He painted his first picture in 1910 at the age of six. At ten he discovered Impressionist art, and at fourteen the Pompiers (a 19th century group of academic genre painters, among them Meissonier, Detaille and Moreau). By 1927 he was Dali, and the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, a friend of his youth, wrote an 'Ode to Salvador Dali.' Years later Dali claimed that Lorca had been very attracted to him and had tride to sodomize him, but had not quite managed it. Dali's thirst for scandal was unquenchable. His parents had named him Salvador "because he was the chosen one who was come to save painting from the" deadly menace of abstract art, academic Surrealism, Dadaism, and any kind of anarchic "ism" whatsoever." If he had lived during the Renaissance, his genius would have been recognized at an earlier stage and indeed considered normal. But in the twentieth century, which Dali damned as stupid, he was thought provocative, a thorn in the flesh. To this day there are many who misunderstand the provocativeness and label him insane. But Dali repeatedly declared: "... the sole difference between me and a madman is the fact that I am not mad!" Dali also said: "The difference between the Surrealists and me is that I am a Surrealist" - which is perfectly true. And he also claimed: "I have the universal curiosity of Renaissance men, and my mental jaws are constantly at work.

For years Matisse had battled his conflicting impulses, between commercially viable conservatism and something else, although he had not yet grasped what that something else was. Earlier that year he had helped organize the first official exhibition of Vincent van Gogh’s works, as part of the Salon des Indépendants—certainly an influence, for he later gave credit to van Gogh as well as Gauguin for his summer breakthrough. But it was the little fishing village of Collioure that dazzled him with color and light, and drove him to take more risks than ever before. Two summers in the south of France had exposed this northerner to vibrant color, and he responded ardently, even gratefully. Collioure radiated color and light, but it also exuded an element of savagery, for there was a fierce primitivism in this Catalan town that expressed itself in the explosive colors and contrasts of Fauvism, so unlike the gentler colors of the Impressionists. Embracing Gauguin’s insistence that art should primarily communicate emotion, Matisse forged ahead, daring all by rejecting art as representation, and producing works of shattering impact.

Let go of who you are, and become who you can be...

The rest of life was just waiting, waiting to go back to the Pudding. It was as if the lights were always on at the Pudding and off everywhere else. But those lights were soft, and the gentle, impressionistic shadows they shed on the dining room were always in the most delicate palette of peach, rose, and pinkish cream.

Each palette teaches color mixing. Some have advantages, some limitations. Get to know what those are. The Zorn palette, in particular, teaches resourcefulness. The impressionist palette can teach the vibrancy of lighting effects. The “modern” palette can teach the importance of restraint. You will find the colors that “speak” to you, that work for you, that you have an affinity for.

But Outsider Art is its own context. I don’t have to know all about the Impressionists or the Abstract Expressionists. I don’t have to be able to fit this art into any historic chronology. I don’t feel like an ignoramus. Irony of ironies, I don’t feel like an outsider—to fall in love I only need eyes.

I would also say that poems are impressionistic, but that impressionism is a kind of truth. Poems shouldn’t be read for their evidence of rights and wrongs nor for their voyeurism into a person’s life, but for the ways they make atmospheres, music, and imagery communal with the reader for a brief moment. All writers struggle with this issue of being fair or not, presenting episodes or interactions in ways that are just or truthful. I guess I’d say that poems are not meant to be fair and that all artists should be allowed to present complexity and multidimensionality in ways that expand our humanness. A good poem doesn’t necessarily take sides, but offers layers to interpret. I think my poems about family really begin from a place of uncertainty and confusion, not necessarily from a place of authority. To me, this distinction matters. I’m figuring out something with the reader as the poem unfolds, I’m not going in there with an agenda.

We are a sum of our unique, individual life experiences. The trials we have faced, the causes we fight for, the fears that haunt us, the oddities of our minds; all of these and more become the food for our spirit. The universe does not need repetition from the past; another pretty, but pointless reclining nude, sunlit but stale impressionist landscape, or old and cold minimalist cube. It needs YOU. It needs you to strip away all that clouds your genuine sense of self. It needs you to unearth and unabashedly OWN your messy honest, and magnificent truth. And it needs you to deepen and shape that truth into an authentic core, one that will nourish you and your work for a lifetime.

HIS NAME WOULD be lost almost until the age of the Impressionists. “The greatest mystery of all,” in the words of the historian Paul Johnson, “is how his works fell into a black hole of taste for nearly two hundred years. He is now more generally, and unreservedly, admired than any other painter.

They compassed the whole arc of the circle, merging towards the west in a horizon that was fierce, almost garish in coloring, like an impressionist back-drop done by some half-mad genius.

In the early 1900s, Soviet agronomist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov discovered a strange phenomenon: weeds in crop fields sometimes begin to look like the crop themselves. Original rye plants, he realized, looked nothing like the plump grain that by then was a staple crop in Russia. It was a scraggly, inedible weed. Rye, he realized, had performed an incredible trick of mimicry. Early wheat farmers, weeding by hand, pulled out and discarded the rye-weed to keep their planted crops healthy. So, to survive, a few rye plants took on a form more similar to wheat. Farmers still extricated the pesky rye, when they could spot it. This selective pressure molded the rye to evolve to trick a farmer’s discerning eye. In this case, only the best impressionists survived. Eventually, the rye became so excellent a mimic that it became a crop itself. “Vavilovian mimicry” is now a basic fact of agriculture.* Oats are a product of the same process; they also got their start mimicking wheat. In rice paddies, the weed known as barnyard grass is indistinguishable from the rice at the seedling stage. Recent genetic analysis found that this weed began to change its architecture to match the rice about a thousand years ago, when rice cultivation in Asia was well underway. In lentil fields, common vetch is a ubiquitous weed that masterfully redesigned its previously spherical seeds to be the same flat, round disc shape as lentils themselves. In that case, the plant needed not to trick a farmer’s eye but rather make itself impossible to eliminate from the mechanical threshing process. Winnowing machines simply could not tell the difference between a vetch and a lentil. Weed genomicist Scott McElroy argues that modern herbicide-resistant plants are actually just engaging in Vavilovian mimicry at the biochemical level; they are mimicking the crop plants that have been conveniently engineered to tolerate the herbicide.

Among musical instruments, only the first—the human voice—is more universal than the harmonica. This is appropriate, given that the mouth organ is the most ventriloquial of musical devices. “I throw my voice,” explains Lonnie Glosson, the seller of millions of “talking harmonicas.” DeFord Bailey, harmonica star of the early Grand Ole Opry broadcasts, approached his first mouth organ as an impressionist would: “Oh, I would wear it out, trying to imitate everything I heard! Hens, foxes, hounds, turkeys . . . everything around me.

Blind adherence to contextualization alters our preaching in at least three ways, and none of them is for the better. First, it impairs our perspective in the study—in his preparation of his sermon, the preacher becomes preoccupied with the world rather than God’s Word. This leads to impressionistic preaching.

You’re in a war whether you realize it or not. Denying it or going numb as you say causes you to lose your passion for life. God gave you emotions for a reason. Sometimes you got to get scared enough or angry enough to fight. Filling your life with substitutes just anesthetizes the hole inside you. It’s the enemy’s way of keeping you disengaged and keeping you from fighting for what’s important.

Where did Judith’s most ground-breaking intuitions come from? Did they come from the realm of logic and rationality? Or from a world beyond it, the very same that had inspired Bach to compose his fugues, and the Impressionists to capture life in all of its fleeting nature?

These definitions are a deliberate attempt to avoid a mass of synonyms of the kind that clog—just to give one example—Johnson’s second definition of ‘to plague’, which reads ‘to trouble; to teaze; to vex; to harrass; to torment; to afflict; to distress; to torture; to embarrass; to excruciate; to make uneasy; to disturb’. This is impressionistic: as we read a definition of this type, we can see Johnson floundering in search of the word’s quintessence,

Like an impressionist’s stroke on a canvas, up-close formed a new image. This image was vibrant and alive. This image was not the woman who

She ended her talk, once again showing both the Bigelow Cassatt and the Raphael Granduca Madonna. “By transforming Helen, first into a mother and then into the Madonna model,” she concluded, “Cassatt captured the religious belief system of the Renaissance in an Impressionist context. Her work shows that the living bond between every mother and child is no less than Mary’s with the infant Jesus. Unconditional human love is holy.

Then a scream of steam, a mighty jolt; and the thunder-rattle recommences, and the train again begins to rock in mad storms of dust and smoke, and the red sun ignites a stupendous conflagration behind the pillars of the pines. At last, under the moon, there is another shriek of steam; the wheels slacken, rumble jerkingly, then roll slowly and silently, as if muffled, with occasional squeak, and pause with a final shock; while through hastily opened windows and doors, a strong cool air dashes in,—the breath of the great St. Johns River, sweetened by mingling with the mightier breath of the sea, and bearing with it scent of orange flowers and odors of magnolia. And in the purple night, under the palpitation of stars, Jacksonville opens all her electric eyes.

The inventions of writers and artists are forged through dissatisfaction. That discrepancy between the world we walk through and the world inside of us encourages some to try to build a bridge (in the shape of a book about talking bunnies or an impressionistic painting).

As a teacher, Kurt Vonnegut was easy, magnanimous. He didn't try to make his students into little Kurt Vonneguts. He respected material unlike his own and was startlingly humble about what he did. ("I write with a big black crayon," he would write to me later, "while you're more of an impressionist. I don't think you have it in you to be crude.") In his workshop sessions, things always seemed a little looser, a little kinder, a little funnier.

own independent exhibition, marketing it as an American Salon des Refusés. In February 1908 eight painters showcased their work at the Macbeth Galleries. The Eight, as critic James Huneker baptized them, included Henri, Sloan, Glackens, Luks, and Shinn—the Philadelphia Five—and three others, stylistically different but equally determined to crack open NAD’s restrictive practices: symbolist Arthur B. Davies (who was well wired into wealthy New York collector circles), Impressionist/realist Ernest Lawson, and Postimpressionist Maurice Prendergast. (Davies and Lawson had been among the blackballed in 1907.)

Stories are not made from common and routine occurrences. Impressionist tales suggest that we learn more from the exceptional than from the topical. In some quarters this is heresy.

J just like his Dad E ever so just (like his Dad) S specless (he never wore glasses) U unable to swim S sometimes I wonder if he was praying for the betraying kiss of Judas so as not to miss out on his Easter egg C cut bread into very thin slices H hippy aeroplane impressionist R really easy to spot in a crowd on a Good Friday I I wonder if he had a dog S escapologist T took him three days but he did it - In the name of the Lord

But, memory paints impressionistic portraits of the past, enhancing some images and blurring others. To her,

the Impressionists were able to lead the viewer into mixing color in his or her own eye.

Those looking to experience some of the greatest Impressionist art should absorb Monet’s most famous works at Musée de l’Orangerie.

speaking in Roanoke, VA, at an Extraordinary Women event when a woman stepped up and started crying. “How is Ashley?” she searched my face, completely sincere.

Medieval to Modern, Imperially Commissioned Fresco to Catatonically Impressionist Cheese Danish, Dada to Dali, Bosch to Banksy,

God’s not mad at you. All His anger was taken out on Jesus. Thank God for the blood! Now you receive His gift!

I look at the clouds spinning in slow-motion helix patterns and wonder whether the fact that M will never love me is the result of the conversation we’ve just had, or whether our conversation merely revealed a preexisting fact that M will never love me. Was the mathematics of our conversation causal or merely illustrative? Wondering is the realm of impressionists, and as I watch the clouds, I feel my mother and sister in me. I wonder if I’ll ever love someone the way I love Alison, but with the other stuff thrown in. I wonder if I can survive without that love. I wonder whether the misery of my childhood and adolescence will return and knock me back into despair that no mathematical ladder can lift me out of. I notice the pearlization of the cloud helixes overhead, and the blue behind them, and I realize that what I’m looking at is a mathematical ladder. But I cannot seem to climb it.

(p.62) Van Gogh came to realize in Nuenen that color could be a means of expression in its own right. Later, in France, based on his observation and experience of the color theories of Impressionist like Monet and Pissarro and Post-Impressionists like Seurat and Gauguin, he developed a quite radical, very bright palette that had little to do with naturalism. For some time, too, he tried to work from his imagination. Despite all this, he continued to believe that the direct study of nature was a sine qua non for a contemporary artist. Artists could never study nature enough. They constantly had to "grind away at it. And whatever imagination could achieve, to Van Gogh nature remained the ultimate source of inspiration: "The greatest, most powerful imaginations have also made things directly from reality that leave one dumbfounded" [537].

I love to paint,” Dre said. “My style is sort of what it’d look like if a cubist was beaten to death by an impressionist.

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.

The old antiquarian bookstore was a sliver amongst the larger pastel-coloured shops on the leafy Parisian street of Rue Cardinet. It was called Librairie d'antiquites de Geroux but was, nonetheless, as much a part of the Batignolles village as the Saturday farmers' market, the square, or the tourists retracing the steps of impressionist painter Alfred Sisley. The only other building that seemed as much a part of the furniture was the abandoned restaurant on the corner, like one of those unfortunate heirloom pieces that tends to clash with everything. Most people believed it to be cursed or haunted as a result of what had happened there during the Occupation, when the former owner had poisoned all of her customers one night. A fact that had turned to legend over the intervening years

If the two Sherpas were Impressionist painters, the older man would be Renoir, and the younger Monet.

Some artists, including many of the original Impressionistic painters, banned black completely from their palettes because they felt they could create richer colors without it.

Sooz Rillington: Big doe-like eyes, legs for miles, and the confidence of ten mediocre men. A brilliant mind for Shakespeare and masterful impressionist

modern city-dwellers, surrounded by hot, baking concrete, imagine the environment as something pristine and paradisal, like a French impressionist landscape. Eco-activists, even more idealistic in their viewpoint, envision nature as harmoniously balanced and perfect, absent the disruptions and depredations of mankind. Unfortunately, “the environment” is also elephantiasis and guinea worms (don’t ask), anopheles mosquitoes and malaria, starvation-level droughts, AIDS and the Black Plague. We don’t fantasize about the beauty of these aspects of nature, although they are just as real as their Edenic counterparts.

The inventions of writers and artists are forged through dissatisfaction. That discrepancy between the world we walk through and the world inside of us encourages some to try to build a bridge (in the shape of a book about talking bunnies or an impressionistic painting). A perfectly happy artist would be a failure.

It is not in our cities or townships, it is not in our agricultural or mining areas, that the Australian attains full consciousness of his own nationality; it is in places like this, and as clearly here as at the centre of the continent. To me the monotonous variety of this interminable scrub has a charm of its own; so grave, subdued, self-centred; so alien to the genial appeal of more winsome landscape, or the assertive grandeur of mountain and gorge. To me this wayward diversity of spontaneous plant life bespeaks an unconfined, ungauged potentiality of resource; it unveils an ideographic prophecy, painted by Nature in her Impressionist mood, to be deciphered aright only by those willing to discern through the crudeness of dawn a promise of majestic day.

Caravaggio being one of my favourites.” “Who?” “He was an impressionist.

Impressionists, Cubists, and Surrealists who had stunned the world between 1870 and 1960 by entirely redefining art. VAN GOGH… SEURAT… PICASSO… MUNCH… MATISSE… MAGRITTE… KLIMT… KANDINSKY… JOHNS… HOCKNEY… GAUGUIN… DUCHAMP… DEGAS… CHAGALL… CÉZANNE… CASSATT… BRAQUE… ARP… ALBERS…

Impressionists, Cubists, and Surrealists who had stunned the world between 1870 and 1960 by entirely redefining art. VAN GOGH… SEURAT… PICASSO… MUNCH… MATISSE… MAGRITTE… KLIMT… KANDINSKY… JOHNS… HOCKNEY… GAUGUIN… DUCHAMP… DEGAS… CHAGALL… CÉZANNE… CASSATT… BRAQUE… ARP… ALBERS… This section terminated at one last architectural rib, and Langdon moved past it, finding himself in the final section of the library. The volumes here appeared to be dedicated to the group of artists that Edmond, in Langdon’s presence, liked to call “the school of boring dead white guys”—essentially, anything predating the modernist movement of the mid-nineteenth century. Unlike Edmond, it was here that Langdon felt most at home, surrounded by the Old Masters. VERMEER… VELÁZQUEZ… TITIAN… TINTORETTO… RUBENS… REMBRANDT… RAPHAEL… POUSSIN… MICHELANGELO… LIPPI… GOYA… GIOTTO… GHIRLANDAIO… EL GRECO… DÜRER… DA VINCI… COROT… CARAVAGGIO… BOTTICELLI… BOSCH… The last few feet of the final shelf were dominated by a large glass cabinet, sealed with a heavy lock. Langdon peered through the glass and saw an ancient-looking leather box inside—a protective casing for a massive antique book. The text on the outside of the box was barely legible, but Langdon could see enough to decrypt the title of the volume inside. My God, he thought, now realizing why this book had been locked away from the hands of visitors. It’s probably worth a fortune. Langdon knew there were precious few early editions of this legendary artist’s work in existence. I’m not surprised Edmond invested in this, he thought, recalling that Edmond had once referred to this British artist as “the only premodern with any imagination.” Langdon disagreed, but he could certainly understand Edmond’s special affection for this artist. They are both cut from the same cloth. Langdon crouched down and peered through the glass at the box’s gilded engraving: The Complete Works of William Blake. William Blake, Langdon mused. The Edmond Kirsch of the eighteen hundreds. Blake had been an idiosyncratic genius—a prolific luminary whose painting style was so progressive that some believed he had magically glimpsed the future in his dreams. His symbol-infused religious illustrations depicted angels, demons, Satan, God, mythical creatures, biblical themes, and a pantheon of deities from his own spiritual hallucinations

Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.

I lie splayed out on the bed, staring numbly at the world's most beautiful bedroom. I've been given the Duchess Suite, a relic from the days when husbands and wives slept in separate rooms. The bedroom's damask walls are painted robin's-egg blue, the same shade as Tiffany's famous little boxes, with matching curtains framing the French windows. The ceiling above my bed is gilded in a mosaic pattern, and impressionist paintings grace the walls. Delicate white-and-gold furniture softens the room's edges, and the freshly cut peonies in a vase on my bedside table lend the air a sweet smell.

PARIS WAS IN AN UPROAR. IT WAS THE WINTER OF 1875 AND THE ART world was under attack by a rebellious cadre of young painters who styled themselves the Société anonyme (Anonymous Society), but whose enemies had stuck them with a range of dismissive labels including “Impressionalists,” “Impressionists,” and “lunatics.

impressionist

The word nature has many senses; but if we preserve the one which etymology justifies, and which is the most philosophical as well, nature should mean the principle of birth or genesis, the universal mother, the great cause, or system of causes, that brings phenomena to light. If we take the word nature in this sense, it may be said that Lucretius, more than any other man, is the poet of nature. Of course, being an ancient, he is not particularly a poet of landscape. He runs deeper than that; he is a poet of the source of landscape, a poet of matter. A poet of landscape might try to suggest, by well-chosen words, the sensations of light, movement, and form which nature arouses in us; but in this attempt he would encounter the insuperable difficulty which Lessing long ago pointed out, and warned poets of: I mean the unfitness of language to render what is spatial and material; its fitness to render only what, like language itself, is bodiless and flowing,—action, feeling, and thought. It is noticeable, accordingly, that poets who are fascinated by pure sense and seek to write poems about it are called not impressionists, but symbolists; for in trying to render some absolute sensation they render rather the field of association in which that sensation lies, or the emotions and half-thoughts that shoot and play about it in their fancy. They become—against their will, perhaps—psychological poets, ringers of mental chimes, and listeners for the chance overtones of consciousness. Hence we call them symbolists, mixing perhaps some shade of disparagement in the term, as if they were symbolists of an empty, super-subtle, or fatuous sort. For they play with things luxuriously, making them symbols for their thoughts, instead of mending their thoughts intelligently, to render them symbols for things. A poet might be a symbolist in another sense,—if he broke up nature, the object suggested by landscape to the mind, and reverted to the elements of landscape, not in order to associate these sensations lazily together, but in order to build out of them in fancy a different nature, a better world, than that which they reveal to reason. The elements of landscape, chosen, emphasized, and recombined for this purpose, would then be symbols for the ideal world they were made to suggest, and for the ideal life that might be led in that paradise. Shelley is a symbolic landscape poet in this sense. To Shelley, as Francis Thompson has said, nature was a toy-shop; his fancy took the materials of the landscape and wove them into a gossamer world, a bright ethereal habitation for new-born irresponsible spirits. Shelley was the musician of landscape; he traced out its unrealized suggestions; transformed the things he saw into the things he would fain have seen. In this idealization it was spirit that guided him, the bent of his wild and exquisite imagination, and he fancied sometimes that the grosser landscapes of earth were likewise the work of some half-spiritual stress, of some restlessly dreaming power. In this sense, earthly landscape seemed to him the symbol of the earth spirit, as the starlit crystal landscapes of his verse, with their pensive flowers, were symbols in which his own fevered spirit was expressed, images in which his passion rested.

Were you up early enough to see the sun rise? It was glorious this morning. Like Monet painted it. I know it’s totally cliché for an art teacher to say Monet’s her favorite, when I could pick Berthe Morisot or Alfred Sisley, or a non-impressionist, but Monet’s colors are like—looking at his water lilies collection is like seeing the full potential of my soul on display. They make me happy and peaceful and hopeful all at the

When his wife had written him letter after letter in a pathetic, incoherent, child-like scrawl constantly begging him to take her home, he had formed, as he admitted, a callus to enable him to get through the inane tragedy of life. Unshackled by suffering from worldly concerns, he cared chiefly at this moment for art and had already decided to bring the Post-Impressionists to London.

In the Post-Impressionists, Fry perceived a new expressiveness of design, a new search for structure, scale, interval and proportion.

With the impressionists I like to stand very, very close " Gabriel said, stopping his face barely an inch from the canvas. "The colors here are chaotic; it makes no sense. Then as you slowly move"-- he stepped back just a half step, and then another --"you can see the colors come together. No longer chaos, they work together; they become something greater. I think life is like this: in the moment, you can't make sense of it, but later, at the distance, it will all become clear.

Limoges platter that had been their aunt’s, several small impressionist

February 10: With Joe DiMaggio’s help, Marilyn is released from Payne Whitney. Ralph Roberts picks Marilyn up. She sits in the backseat with Dr. Kris, and Marilyn berates Kris for betraying her trust. Marilyn is admitted to Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center for three weeks of recuperation. Roberts remembers Dr. Kris saying, “I did a terrible thing, a terrible, terrible thing. Oh God, I didn’t mean to, but I did.” Marilyn’s friend, the photographer Sam Shaw, writes from Paris to Marilyn’s 444 East 57th Street address, offering her a room at his home. “We would have called during the recent turmoil but didn’t know where you were. . . . There are some great art shows at this moment in Paris. Come over. An especially big Goya show of his prints. Marvelous impressionist show etc. and a pip of a Kandinski [sic].

The “postmodernist” label has been attached to a wide variety of writers, including the philosopher Gilles Deleuze; his frequent collaborator the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari; sociologist Jean Baudrillard; psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan; and Luce Irigaray, whose writings deal with topics in many fields. So multifarious are these various manifestations of the postmodernist spirit that I can give only a very broad and impressionistic characterization of the attitudes and outlooks that tie them together.