"..before I die I should like to bring two paintings to completion. What matters is to touch the limit, the essence of things."
Giorgio Morandi was an Italian painter and printmaker widely known for his subtly muted still-life paintings of ceramic vessels, flowers, and landscapes.
"...[enabled] to touch the core, the essence of things. Even in as simple a subject, a great painter can achieve a majesty of vision and an intensity of feeling to which we immediately respond. [1937, referring to a still life by Cézanne and a river-sight with sandbank by Monet ]"
"This enabled me to understand the need to abandon myself totally to my instinct, trusting my own energy and forgetting any preconceived style while I work."
"If you could see what these flowers are. [Morandis remark, circa 1917 - to the writer Raimondi from Bologna, indicating flowers in the corner of a reproduction of a painting by w:El Greco – beneath the feet of angels and saints]). No modern painter has painted flowers like these. Perhaps only Renoir"
"Among the painters of our day who have helped me develop are Carlo Carra [famous Futurist painter] and Ardengo Soffici; their work and writings have in my opinion been a beneficial influence on where Italian art is going today."
"Though aware of just how hard it will be to attain the distant goal I have glimpsed, I am sustained by the certainty that the path I am following is the right one. I repudiate nothing in my past.. .Consciousness has always guided me in my work and I am comforted by the knowledge that in all my endeavors, even in the moments of greatest uncertainty, my personality has always managed to come through."
"I am now working on a still life with a bottle and other objects spread out on a plane and it seems to be turning out well."