Andre Derain quotes

The substance of painting is light. (Andre Derain)
I do not innovate. I transmit.
Andre Derain
I have found a boat, small with two sails, that would make me happy. Unfortunately, I need one hundred francs.... and I haven't got it! If you want, I could give you two canvases which you could sell, just to make you some many and you could give me the hundred francs... Kahnweiler [Paris' art-dealer] is the only one who gives me money, and just what we need to live on.
Andre Derain
The Japanese see things that way. They don't paint sunlight, they don't cast shadows that perplex one and falsify the true shape of things. The Egyptian figures have simplicity, dignity, directness, unity; they express motion almost as if by a conventional formula, like writing itself, so direct it is. So I seek a logical method of rendering my idea.
Andre Derain
What, after all, is a pretty woman? It's a mere subjective impression – what you yourself think of her. That's what I paint, another kind of beauty of my own.
Andre Derain
These Africans being primitive, uncomplex, uncultured, can express their thought by a direct appeal tot he instinct. Their carvings are informed with emotions. So Nature gives me the material with which to construct a world of my own, governed, not by literal limitations, but by instinct and sentiment.
Andre Derain
There is only one kind of painting: landscape. It is the most difficult. It has also, I believe, the most simple kind of composition. Because no one can stop us from imagining the world in the way that pleases us most.
Andre Derain
If I paint a girl in the sunlight, it's the sunlight I am painting, not the real girl; and even fort hat I should have the sunlight on my palette. I don't care for an accidental effect of light and shade, a thing of 'mere charm.
Andre Derain
There is often more psychic appeal in a so-called ugly woman than there is in a pretty one; and, in my ideal, I reconstruct her to bring that beauty forth in terms of line or volume.
Andre Derain