I am very depressed and deeply disgusted with painting. It is really a continual torture.
Interpretation
Monet expresses his struggles and dissatisfaction with painting, highlighting the emotional turmoil it brings him.
In this quote, Claude Monet reveals the intense personal conflict he experiences as an artist. Despite his fame and success, he feels overwhelmed by a sense of despair and frustration regarding his craft, suggesting that the artistic process can be both a source of joy and a painful struggle. This duality captures the essence of the artist's journey, where creativity often coexists with internal challenges and dissatisfaction.
In practice
In a discussion about the challenges of artistic expression, one might say, 'As Claude Monet described, I understand how one can feel deeply disgusted with their own work.'
When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, house, a field....Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you.
Zaandam has enough to paint for a lifetime.
The effect of sincerity is to give one's work the character of a protest. The painter, being concerned only with conveying his impression, simply seeks to be himself and no one else.
The light constantly changes, and that alters the atmosphere and beauty of things every minute.
Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face.
I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
Fashion is a language that creates itself in clothes to interpret reality.
Everything I do is a matter of heart, body and soul. For me, designing is an expression of who I am as a woman, with all the complications, feelings and emotions.
I believe that filmmaking - as, probably, is everything - is a game you should play with all your cards, and all your dice, and whatever else you've got. So, each time I make a movie, I give it everything I have. I think everyone should, and I think everyone should do everything they do that way.
For artists and intellectuals today, what is most needed is to be clear about social responsibility, because that is what most people automatically give up. Just to protect yourself as an individual is very political. You don't have to march on Tiananmen, but you do have to be clear-minded, to find your own means of expression.
Color is a plastic means of creating intervals... color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now between formal tensions and color tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony.
You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese.
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