![]() “Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great. “No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination. “My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impression of nature. “Maybe I am not very human - what I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house. I use as little oil as I can possibly help, and that's my method. “It's to paint directly on the canvas without any funny business, as it were, and I use almost pure turpentine to start with, adding oil as I go along until the medium becomes pure oil. ![]() “In its most limited sense, modern, art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period. “In general it can be said that a nation's art is greatest when it most reflects the character of its people. ![]() “If the technical innovations of the Impressionists led merely to a more accurate representation of nature, it was perhaps of not much value in enlarging their powers of expression. “If the picture needs varnishing later, I allow a restorer to do that, if there's any restoring necessary. “I use a retouching varnish which is made in France, Libert, and that's all the varnish I use. “I trust Winsor and Newton and I paint directly upon it. “I think that zinc white has a property of scaling and cracking. “I have tried to present my sensations in what is the most congenial and impressive form possible to me. “I find linseed oil and white lead the most satisfactory mediums. “I find in working always the disturbing intrusion of elements not a part of my most interested vision, and the inevitable obliteration and replacement of this vision by the work itself as it proceeds. “I believe that the great painters with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions. ![]() “After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface. Stairway at 48 rue de Lille, Paris 1906. ![]()
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