“Give me that palette.... those two woodcocks.... turn this one's head to the left.... give me back my palette.... I can't paint that beak.... Quick, some paint.... change the position of those woodcocks…”

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

quote from a letter written by Félix Fénéon, published in 'Le Bulletin des artistes' 15th December 1919
this quote is expressing Renoir's last painter-remark, 30 November 1919, three days before he died.
after 1900

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Pierre-Auguste Renoir 44

French painter and sculptor 1841–1919

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist

1970s - 1980s, interview with Deborah Salomon in 'New York Times', 1989

“It's a sort of infantile thing, painting. Paint in a sense is a certain infantile thing. I mean in the handling. I start out using a brush but then I can't take the time because the idea doesn't correspond, it gets stuck when the brush goes out of paint in a certain length of time. So I have to go back and by then I might have lost the rest of it. So I take my hand and I do it. Or I have those wonderful things that came in later: paint sticks... So I had to find things that I could use, like my hands or the paint sticks... And I did those charts, big palettes... two or three paintings with palettes and all of the colours – pink, flesh, brown, red for blood. And I think with most painters you can think and it can change very fast, the impetus of what something is. It's instinctive in a certain kind of painting, not as if you were painting an object or special things, but it's like coming through the nervous system. It's like a nervous system. It's not described, it's happening. The feeling is going on with the task.”

Cy Twombly (1928–2011) American painter

Source: 2000 - 2011, Cy Twombly, 2000', by David Sylvester (June 2000), p. 179

“Just start, your palette will help you. (if you worried about a painting or dread to start painting”

Johannes Warnardus Bilders (1811–1890) painter from the Northern Netherlands

version in original Dutch: Begin maar, je palet helpt je wel voort. (als je tobde over een schilderij of ertegenop zag om te beginnen)
Quoted by Maria Bilders-van Bosse, in her letter to A.C. Loffelt, 23 June 1895; from an excerpt of this letter https://rkd.nl/nl/explore/excerpts/763 in RKD-Archive, The Hague
his usual reaction if you worried about a painting or dread to start painting
posthumous quotes

“Starry starry night,
Paint your palette blue and grey
Look out on a summer's day with eyes that know the darkness in my soul…”

Don McLean (1945) American Singer and songwriter

Song lyrics, American Pie (1971), Vincent

“If I paint a girl in the sunlight, it's the sunlight I am painting, not the real girl; and even fort hat I should have the sunlight on my palette. I don't care for an accidental effect of light and shade, a thing of 'mere charm.”

André Derain (1880–1954) French painter and engraver

Source: The Wild Men of Paris', 1910, p. 407

“It took me a long time to understand my water lilies... I planted them for pleasure, and grew them without thinking of painting them.. You don't absorb a landscape in a day... And then, all of a sudden, I had the revelation of the enchantment of my pond. I took up my palette.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

in Marc Elder, A Giverny, chez Claude Monet (1924); as quoted in: Vivian Russell (1998) Monet's Water Lilies: The Inspiration of a Floating World. p. 19
1920 - 1926

“Lighten your palette [his remark to Cézanne circa 1873, to encourage Cézanne to use bright colors], paint only with the three primary colours and their derivatives.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

As quoted in Cezanne his Life and Art, Jack Linssey, – Evelyn, Adams and Mackay, London, 1969, p. 154-55
Pissarro 'guided' the wild Cézanne for a few years in painting landscape; for a decade or so in the mid-19th century they often worked side by side and influenced each other
1870's

“I'll give you something to remember ME by… The back of my head!”

Ellen Schreiber (1967) American writer

Source: The Coffin Club

“My primary concern is visual form. The visual meaning may be discovered afterwards – by those who look for it. Two meanings have been ascribed to these American Flag paintings of mine. One position is: 'He's painted a flag so you don't have to think of it as a flag but only as a painting'. The other is: 'You are enabled by the way he has painted it to see it as a flag and not as a painting.”

Jasper Johns (1930) American artist

Actually both positions are implicit in the paintings, so you don't have to choose.
The Insiders, Rejection en Rediscovery of Man in the Arts of our Time, Selden Rodman, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1960, Chapter 6.
1960s

“You [the interviewer Edouard Roditi, in 1958] have probably understood that I had always been mainly a plain-air painter, though I also painted portraits and still-life compositions. At first I experienced great difficulty with my brushwork – I mean with that the French call 'la touche de pinceau'. So Kandinsky taught me how to achieve the effects that I wanted with a palette knife. In the view from my window in Sèvres, that I painted in 1906, when we were together in France, you can see how well he taught me. Later of course, here in Murnau, I learned to handle brushes, too, but I managed this by following Kandinsky's example, first with a palette knife, than with brushes.”

Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) German painter

Source: Interview by Edouard Roditi (1958), p. 120

“Give me that palette.... those two woodcocks.... turn this one's head to the left.... give me back my palette.... I can't paint that beak.... Quick, some paint.... change the position of those woodcocks…”

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Pierre-Auguste Renoir 44

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