Raoul Dufy
Quotations

"What I wanted to do was to carry my investigations further than those of the Impressionists. The Impressionists looked for the inter-relationships of flecks and patches of colour, and that in itself was good. Now, however, we need something more than the satisfaction of vision alone; we need to create the world of things unseen."

 

"In children's drawings there is something very important-if only in its earliest form- which must reappear with the experience of knowledge. You see, this is why-whatever people may say-school is necessary."

 

"With the tip of the brush a curve or a spiral is so easily made. It's not an unpleasant feeling."

 

"My eyes were made to efface what is ugly."

 

"How can I use these means [the pigments and brushes] to express not what I see, but what is, what exists for me, my reality?"

 

"I had discovered my own system. Its theory is simple. to study sunlight is a waste of time. Light in painting is something quite apart: it is composed, it is arranged, it is colored."

 

"All the laws you can lay down are only so many props to be cast aside when the hour of creation arrives."

 

"A painted landscape is not nature anyway. Art is a creation."

 

"Art is to render beauty accessible to all, by putting order into things and thought."

 

"One must not imitate the sun, one must make oneself into a sun. "