"Art is a harmony which runs parallel with nature -- what is one to think of those imbeciles who say that the artist is always inferior to nature?"
Letter from Cézanne to Joachim Gasquet, 26 September 1897
"It's so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas."
"An art which isn't based on feeling isn't an art at all ... feeling is the principle, the beginning and the end; craft, objective, technique – all these are in the middle."
"Shadow is a color as light is, but less brilliant; light and shadow are only the relation of two tones."
"There are two things in the painter, the eye and the mind; each of them should aid the other."
"Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and color are not distinct, everything in nature is colored."
"Painting from nature is not copying the object, it is realizing one's sensations."
"The painter must enclose himself within his work; he must respond not with words, but with paintings."
"Painting, like any art, comprises a technique, a workmanlike handling of material, but the accuracy of a tone and the felicitous combination of effects depend entirely on the choice made by the artist."
"The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself."
"Style is not created through servile imitation of the masters; it proceed from the artist's own particular way of feeling and expressing himself."
"Genius is the ability to renew one's emotions in daily experience."
"The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality."
"Doubtless there are things in nature which have not yet been seen. If an artist discovers them, he opens the way for his successors. If I have left something unsaid, they will say it."
"God knows how the Old Masters got through those acres of work ... I exhaust myself, work myself to death trying to cover fifty centimeters of canvas."
"Painting is damned difficult ... you always think you've got it, but you haven't."
"I could paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing."
"Fruits ... like having their portrait painted. They seem to sit there and ask your forgiveness for fading. Their thought is given off with their perfumes. They come with all their scents, they speak of the fields they have left, the rain which has nourished them, the daybreaks they have seen."
"I want to die painting."
"Cézanne presented features of the landscape in an intensified and perhaps reduced form, so the result was abstraction. But this was no fantasy: It was what the painter actually sensed and felt; it was reality."
-- Richard Shiff, in Cézanne and Beyond Exhibition Catalog, p82
