Odilon Redon Quotations

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt.

The painter is not an intellectual if, when he has painted a nude woman, he gives us the idea that she is just about to put her clothes back on.

I have placed there a little door opening on to the mysterious. I have made stories.

The value of art lies in its power to increase our moral force or establish its heightening influence.

The fundamental grey which differentiates the masters, expresses them and is the soul of all colour.

I have a feeling only for shadows

My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.

One must respect black. Nothing prostitutes it.

Nothing in Art is achieved by will alone. It is achieved by docilely submitting to the subconscious.

It is difficult to judge one's contemporaries; perhaps it is impossible to understand them.

I am repelled by those who voice the word 'nature', without having any trace of it in their hearts.

The artist yields often to the stimuli of materials that will transmit his spirit.

Artists who approach perfection do not have many ideas.

All my originality consists?in giving life in human fashion to beings which are impossible according to the laws of possibility.

The good work proceeds with tenacity, intention, without interruption, with an equal measure of passion and reason and it must surpass that goal the artist has set for himself.

My originality consists in putting the logic of the visible to the service of the invisible.

Like music my drawings transport us to the ambiguous world of the indeterminate.

I am certain about what I will never do - but not about what my art will render.

What distinguishes the artist from the dilettante? Only the pain the artist feels. The dilettante looks only for pleasure in art.

The Artist submits from day to day to the fatal rhythm of the impulses of the universal world which encloses him, continual centre of sensations, always pliant, hypnotized by the marvels of nature which he loves, he scrutinizes. His eyes, like his soul, are in perpetual communion with the most fortuitous of phenomena.

It is precisely from the regret left by the imperfect work that the next one can be born.

I await joyous surprises while working, an awakening of the materials that I work with and that my spirit develops.

I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted before an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual appearance; but the day left me sad and with an unsatiated thirst. The next day I let the other source run, that of imagination, through the recollection of the forms and I was then reassured and appeased.

True art lies in a reality that is felt.