15 Quotes by Joaquin Sorolla

The older I become, the more I realize that drawing is the most important of all the problems of picture-making.

I hate darkness. Claude Monet once said that painting in general did not have light enough in it. I agree with him. We painters, however, can never reproduce sunlight as it really is. I can only approach the truth of it.

All the mistakes committed by artists are due to their having separated themselves from truth, believing that their imagination is stronger. There is nothing stronger than nature. With nature in front of us we can do everything well.

When an artist begins to count strokes instead of regarding nature he is lost. This preoccupation with technique, at the expense of truth and sincerity, is the principal fault I find in much of the work of modern painters.

With all its excesses, the modern impressionistic movement has given us one discovery, the color violet. It is the only discovery of importance in the art world since Velazquez.

If ever a painter wrought a miracle of illusion with brush and pigment that painter was Velazquez in his Las Meninas, at the Prado in Madrid.

Go to nature with no parti pris. You should not know what your picture is to look like until it is done. Just see the picture that is coming.

As far as outdoor work is concerned, a studio is only a garage; a place in which to store pictures and repair them, never a place in which to paint them.

No, mes amis, impressionism is not charlatanry, nor a formula, nor a school. I should say rather it is the bold resolve to throw all those things overboard.