Gauguin works a lot – I very much like a still life with yellow background and foreground. He’s working on a portrait of me which I don’t count as one of his undertakings that don’t come to anything.
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ResetWe’re sparing nothing of what we have, in order to obtain some rich effect of color. And I believe that the idea of earning something as much for the pals as for ourselves will give us confidence. And in our business dealings, although we have no fixed plan, everything we do will nevertheless be based on that deep sense that we have of the present injustice suffered by the artists whom we know, and of the desire to change it as far as we can. With that idea, we can work with calmness and determination, and in short, we have nothing to fear from anyone. I’m working on a portrait of our mother because the black photograph was making me too impatient.
Here you have portraitists, living for so long side by side and they don’t agree on posing for each other and they’ll separate without having portrayed each other. Well! I’m not pressing the point.
Because instead of trying to render exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily in order to express myself forcefully. Well, let’s let that lie as far as theory goes, but I’m going to give you an example of what I mean. I’d like to do the portrait of an artist friend who dreams great dreams, who works as the nightingale sings, because that’s his nature. This man will be blond. I’d like to put in the painting my appreciation, my love that I have for him. I’ll paint him, then, just as he is, as faithfully as I can — to begin with. But the painting isn’t finished like that. To finish it, I’m now going to be an arbitrary colorist. I exaggerate the blond of the hair, I come to orange tones, chromes, pale lemon. Behind the head — instead of painting the dull wall of the mean room, I paint the infinite. I make a simple background of the richest, most intense blue that I can prepare, and with this simple combination, the brightly lit blond head, against this rich blue background achieves a mysterious effect, like a star in the deep azure.
There’s no better or shorter way to improve my work than to do figures. Also, I always feel confidence when doing portraits, knowing that that work is much more serious — that’s perhaps not the word — but rather is the thing that enables me to cultivate what’s best and most serious in me.
If at the age of forty I do a painting of figures or portraits the way I feel it, I think that will be worth more than a more or less serious success now.
At the moment I'm furnishing the studio in such a way as always to be able to put someone up. Because there are 2 small rooms upstairs, which look out on a very pretty public garden, and where you can see the sunrise in the morning. I’ll arrange one of these rooms for putting up a friend, and the other one will be for me.
I want nothing there but straw-bottomed chairs and a table and a deal bed. The walls whitewashed, the tiles red. But in it I want a great wealth of portraits and painted studies of figures, which I plan to do as I go along. I have one to start with, the portrait of a young Belgian Impressionist; I’ve painted him as something of a poet, his refined and nervous head standing out against a deep ultramarine background of the night sky, with the twinkling of the stars.
I prefer to wait for the generation to come, which will do in portraits what Claude Monet is doing in landscape, the rich, bold landscape in the style of Guy de Maupassant. Now I know that I myself am not one of those people, but didn’t the Flauberts and Balzacs make the Zolas and Maupassants? So here’s to — not us — but the generation to come.
Private collection, Switzerland
