Humans tell their children to paint the earth in one colour alone. They imagine the sky in blue, the grass in green, the sun in yellow, and the earth entirely in brown. If only they knew they have rainbows under their feet.

Life below the surface is neither simple nor monotonous. The subterranean, contrary to what most people think, is bustling with activity. As you tunnel deep down, you might be surprised to see the soil take on unexpected shades. Rusty red, soft peach, warm mustard, lime green, rich turquoise … Humans teach their children to paint the earth in one colour alone. They imagine the sky in blue, the grass in green, the sun in yellow and the earth entirely in brown.

Nevertheless, we react to one a bit differently than we do to Rothko’s hovering panels or Barnett Newman’s stripes, though Whistler does approach their extremity of abstraction; part of our pleasure lies in recognizing bridges and buildings in the mist, and in sensing the damp riverine silence, the glimmering metropolitan presence. … The painting - a single blurred stripe of urban shore - is additionally daring in that the sky and sea are no shade of blue, but, instead, an improbable, pervasive cobalt green. Human vision is here taken to its limits, and modern painting, as a set of sensations realized in paint, is achieved.

Nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.

Painting is the grandchild of Nature.

Painted Things I love my work and take pains with it. But today
I find the slow pace of composition discouraging.
The weather has got into me. It just gets darker
and darker. Non-stop wind and rain.
I’d rather watch than write.
I’m looking at this painting now:
it shows a handsome boy lying near a spring,
out of breath from running.
Such a beautiful boy! And such a divine noon
which has taken him and induced him to sleep!
I sit and gaze like this for a long time.
Immersed again in art, I recover from the labour of creating it.

Can you sing with all the voices of the mountain? Can you paint with all the colors of the wind?

See how beautifully these are coloured: you see here mauve, magenta, and all the chemical colours recently introduced, applied to candles.

Painters understand nature & love her & teach us to see.

Recently I've been working very hard and quickly; in this way I try to express the desperately fast passage of things in modern life.

Yesterday, in the rain, I painted a large landscape with fields as far as the eye can see, viewed from a height, different kinds of greenery, a dark green field of potatoes, the rich purple earth between the regular rows of plants, to one side a field of peas white with bloom, a field of clover with pink flowers and the little figure of a mower, a field of tall, ripe, fawn-coloured grass, then some wheat, some poplars, on the horizon a last line of blue hills at the foot of which a train is passing, leaving an immense trail of white smoke over the greenery. A white road crosses the canvas, on the road a little carriage and some white houses with bright red roofs alongside a road. Fine drizzle streaks the whole with blue or grey lines.

The forests had put on their sober brown and yellow, while some trees of the tenderer kind had been nipped by the frosts into brilliant dyes of orange, purple and scarlet.

No moon, sun, diamond, hands — fingertip, dot, ray, gauze, sea.
pine green, pink glass, eye,
mine, eraser, mud, mother, I am coming.

Good painters imitate nature, but bad ones spew it up.