Quote #39

Painting is not very difficult when you don't know how; but when you know, oh! then, it's another matter.

More from Edgar Degas

  1. Be sure to give the same expression to a person's face that you give to his body.
  2. It requires courage to make a frontal attack on nature through the broad planes and the large lines and it is cowardly to do it by the face…
  3. Work a great deal at evening effects, lamplight, candlelight, etc. The intriguing thing is not to show the source of the light but the effe…
  4. Everybody has talent at twenty-five. The difficult thing is to have it at fifty.
  5. Make people's portraits in familiar and typical attitudes.
  6. But it's true, isn't it Pauline, that people imagine that the artists and their models spend their time getting up to all sorts of obscenit…
  7. You must do over the same subject ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must appear accidental, even a movement.
  8. Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk. Why shouldn't painting be too?

All Edgar Degas quotes