Emil Nolde Quotes
1867–1956 Germany
Emil Nolde (7 August 1867 – 13 April 1956) was a German painter. He was one of the first Expressionists and a short two years member of Die Brücke.
Random Emil Nolde quote
16 quotes
Pictures are spiritual beings. The soul of the painter lives within them.
How glad I am to be almost alone as an artist among artists, with the whole swarm of artists somewhere else.
..colors are my notes for fashioning sounds and chords with and against one another.
Dualism is particularly important in both my paintings and my graphics.
It [the city Berlin] stinks of perfume, they have water on their brains and they live as food for bacilli and shamelessly like dogs.
'The most perfect art was Greek art. Raphael is the greatest of all masters in painting'. Such were the doctrines of every art teacher only twenty or thirty years ago.
Yellow can paint happiness and also pain.. .Every color harbors its soul within, delighting or repelling and inspiring me.
I produce a form, an impression of light, a beauty of tones.. .The etchings are now full of life, an ecstasy, a dance, a gentle motion and fluctuation in tones.
The materials, the colors, were like friendship and love, both wanting to fulfill themselves in the most beautiful form.
Therefore etching produces a different result from the ten drawings of the same character.. .[The etchings are] better, in that they are fresher, bolder, and freer..
You speak of errors.. .Men who are so correct and flawless are mostly boring; small weaknesses can be loved.. .One chief characteristic of the etchings gives me much pleasure: because out of them streams forth a tremendous life.
It was in mid-summer [1906]. The colors of the flowers attracted me irresistibly and almost sudden I was painting. My first small gardens paintings were born.
They [his own fantasies he made in strange pencil drawings then] hover before me now in drifting color, more beautiful than I can possibly paint them.. ..I yearn for the day when I will have found my color harmonies, my harmonies.
In the working of wood and for the determining of its character I had had enough experience in my five-year pursuit of woodcutting. I also always gladly let the various charming grainings and sometimes the knots become involved in the printing.
Nobody had made the same full use of the properties of acids and metal in this way before. Having drown on the copper-plate and left areas of it bare, I laid it in the bath of acid and achieved effects that astonished even me, full of subtle nuances.
If I were tied to the letter of the Scriptures and rigid dogma, I believe I could not have painted these profoundly felt paintings about the Eucharist and the 'Pentecost' [religious paintings, he made c. 1909-11) I had to be artistically free - not have God before me. like a steely Assyrian ruler, but God in me, hot and holy like Christ's love.