Pierre Bonnard citations

“My first pictures were done by instinct, the others with more method perhaps. Instinct which nourishes method can often be superior to a method which nourishes instinct.”

“Painting has to get back to its original goal, examining the inner lives of human beings.”

“I am just beginning to understand what it is to paint. A painter should have two lives, one in which to learn, and one in which to practice his art.”

“Imagination is merely the exploitation of our memory.”

“I have all my subjects to hand. I go back and look at them. I take notes. Then I go home. And before I start painting I reflect, I dream.”

“I should have sent you news of myself long ago, for I know how much pleasure one derives from a letter during one's first days in the regiment. One needs it to be reminded that one is something more than a registered number and that in the past one's existence was different from that of beast. Anyway that is how I felt about the army. I was unable to connect my present existence with my former life as a civilian.... Here [in Paris in his studio in La Rue Pigalle] I am leading a studious and quite exemplary life... I am working on an important picture which is progressing well and which will be exhibited, I hope, at the [Salon des] 'Indépendants. In addition I am planning to do a screen which will also be shown at the exhibition. Otherwise nothing is happening. I may go with Vuillard to see a music publisher, but I do not expect any success as yet in that direction. I have abandoned chromolithography (ouf!) for the moment, but I shall take it up again whenever I feel impelled to interrupt my oil painting, in order to vary my pleasure's.”

“I work in the mornings and in the afternoons I go to the Latin Quarter. It is a long way from the Batignolles district to the Pantheon: Fortunately there is the Metro. It amuses me to see the people squashed together, and among them are some pretty faces which I draw in the evenings, from memory, in my sketchbook.”

“A painting that is well composed is half-finished.”

“Color does not add a pleasant quality to design - it reinforces it.”

“One does not always sing out of happiness.”

“Draw you pleasure, paint your pleasure, and express your pleasure strongly.”

“a figure should be a part of the background against which it is placed”

“Art is not nature.. There was a lot more to be got out of color.”

“The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world… the picture… which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him.”

“You reason colour more than you reason drawing Colour has a logic as severe as form.”

“The painter's only solid ground is the palette and colors, but as soon as the colors achieve an illusion, they are no longer judged.”

“Color does not add a pleasant quality to design - it reinforces it.”

“The principal subject is the surface, which has its color, its laws over and above those of object.”

“It's not a matter of painting life, it's a matter of giving life to painting.”

“How many days have I spent alone with my cat… and when I say alone, I mean without a material being, for my cat is a mystical companion, a spirit.”

“It seemed to me that it was possible to translate light, forms, and character using nothing but color, without recourse to values.”

“One always talks of surrendering to nature. There is also such a thing as surrendering to the picture.”

“What I am after is the first impression - I want to show all one sees on first entering the room - what my eye takes in at first glance.”