People Don't Realize What They

Everyone Wants To Understand Art. Why Not Try To Understand The Song Of A Bird? Why Does One Love The Night, Flowers, Everything Around One, Without Trying To Understand Them? But In The Case Of A Painting People Have To Understand. If Only They Would Realize Above All That An Artist Works Of Necessity, That He Himself Is Only A Trifling Bit Of The World, And That No More Importance Should Be Attached To Him Than To Plenty Of Other Things Which Please Us In The World, Though We Can't Explain Them. People Who Try To Explain Pictures Are Usually Barking Up The Wrong Tree.

What Is A Face, Really? Its Own Photo? Its Make-up? Or Is It A Face As Painted By Such Or Such Painter? That Which Is In Front? Inside? Behind? And The Rest? Doesn't Everyone Look At Himself In His Own Particular Way? Deformations Simply Do Not Exist.

To Know What You’re Going To Draw, You Have To Begin Drawing... When I Find Myself Facing A Blank Page, That’s Always Going Through My Head. What I Capture In Spite Of Myself Interests Me More Than My Own Ideas.

But When I Am Alone, I Do Not Have The Effrontery To Consider Myself An Artist At All, Not In The Grand Old Meaning Of The Word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya Were Great Painters. I Am Only A Public Clown-a Mountebank. I Have Understood My Time And Have Exploited The Imbecility, The Vanity, The Greed Of My Contemporaries. It Is A Bitter Confession, This Confession Of Mine, More Painful Than It May Seem. But At Least And At Last It Does Have The Merit Of Being Honest.

What Is Conserved In The Ground? Stone, Bronze, Ivory, Bone, Sometimes Pottery. Never Wood Objects, No Fabric Or Skins. That Completely Skews Our Notions About Primitive Man.