"One day I noticed that I could go on working art my motif no matter what the weather might be. I no longer needed the sun, for I took my light everywhere with me."
Georges Braque was a major 20th-century French painter, collagist, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. His most notable contributions were in his alliance with Fauvism from 1905, and the role he played in the development of Cubism. Braque's work between 1908 and 1912 is closely associated with that of his colleague Pablo Picasso. Their respective Cubist works were indistinguishable for many year
"Picasso and I said things to each other during those particular years [c. 1908 -1913] that nobody would any longer know how to say, that nobody would be able to understand any.. ..things that would be incomprehensible, and which gave us so much pleasure."
"I couldnt portray a women in all her natural loveliness.. ..I havent the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appears to me in terms of volume of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty interpret my subjective impression. Nature is mere a pretext for decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art. I want to express the absolute, not merely the factitious woman."
"Speaking purely for myself, I can say that it was my very acute feeling for the matière, for the substance of painting, which pushed me into thinking about the possibilities of the medium. I wanted to create a kind of substance by means of brush-work. But that is the kind of discovery which one makes gradually, though once a beginning had been made other discoveries follow. Thus it was that I subsequently began to introduce sand, sawdust and metal filings into my pictures. For I suddenly saw the extent to which colour is related to the substance.. .So my great delight was the material character which I could give to my pictures by introducing these extraneous elements. In short, they provided me with a means of getting further away from idealism in representing the things with which I was concerned."
"Art is polymorphic. A picture appears to each onlooker under a different guise."
"The painter thinks in terms of form and color. The goal is not to be concerned with the reconstitution of an anecdotal fact, but with constitution of a pictorial fact."
"It is the act of painting, not the finished painting."