Notebook Notebook, 1993-

APPROACHES - In The Words Of . . . .

From: Ferrier, Jean-Louis, Director and Yann le Pichon, Walter D. Glanze [English Translation]. Art of Our Century, The Chronicle of Western Art, 1900 to the Present. New York: Prentice-Hall Editions. 1988.

Georges Rouault


1958 - Writings and Theories

If today there were beautiful stained glass windows like those of the Middle Ages, I would perhaps not have become a painter.

Art is deliverance, even in suffering. But for those outcasts who do not appreciate freedom of thought, art is a crime.

Greatness lies in conception, in the eye, the heart, and the hand of the artist, and not in the geometric dimensions of the work.

Blessed artist, even if your art is one of misfortune, pick up your load and move along on your pilgrimage, following any road.

Being an artist is a matter of offering one's self as payment, without fear of being accused of fanatical individualism. It is a matter of digging one's own furrow, in joy or in suffering, never providing for one's self, instead of always looking to the past or the present for guaranties and stuffing one's self with science.

Certain works of art are made to give rise to vociferous disapproval. I never intended for my work to cause scandal.

We are born alone and we die alone, neither wanting nor seeking to do so.

Painting lightly can produce magnificent results. It is not always by doing "masonry" to the canvas, by wielding the palette knife like a trowel, that we give quality to a painting.

We must defend ourselves essentially through our work.

Under the pretense of liberty, what shams, what superficiality, what a miserable parody! And under the pretense of traditional order, what sorry substitutes for the masters of the past!

Knowing everything is of no use to the artist unless he can leave his own living mark of greatness on what he sees and loves.

Ugliness is not always what the good apostles of unchanging beauty assume it to be. Rather it is the copying of a successful mediocrity a hundred thousand times over.

A drawing is the gushing forth of an awakening spirit.

I would like to have created with colors as pure as flames.

A painter who loves his art should carefully avoid spending too much time with critics and literary people. These individuals, probably unintentionally, deform things by trying to explain everything, taking thought, will, and artistic sensitivities and shearing them just as Delilah sheared Samson.

[An Exerpt From: Ferrier, Jean-Louis, Director and Yann le Pichon, Walter D. Glanze [English Translation]. Art of Our Century, The Chronicle of Western Art, 1900 to the Present. New York: Prentice-Hall Editions. 1988. p. 549]




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