Bauer Palladio Gardens, Giudecca, Venice [May 2017].
One of four gardens restored by
Henri Matisse:
‘In all my studies I’ve made from my own ideas, there’s never been a faux pas because I’ve always unconsciously had a feeling for the goal; I’ve made my way towards it the way one heads north, following the compass. What I’ve done, I’ve done by instinct, always with my sights on a goal I still hope to reach today. I’ve completed my apprenticeship now. All I ask is four or five years to realise that goal.’
‘For a young painter, life is difficult. If he’s sincere, if he’s entirely taken up with what he’s researching, he can’t do painting that flatters art lovers. If he’s concerned with success, he works with just one idea: pleasing people and selling. He loses the support of his own conscience and is dependent on how others are feeling. He neglects his gifts and eventually loses them.’
‘You come out by your own means. The essential thing is to come out, to express that feeling of falling head over heels for a thing; the artist’s job is not to transpose something he’s seen but to express the impact the object made on him, on his constitution, the shock of it and the original reaction. Painting’s an uphill task and if you want to find out what you are capable of, you can’t dillydally on the way.’
from Chatting with Henri Matisse. The Lost 1941 Interview, edited by Serge Guilbaut, interview by Pierre Courthion, translated by Chris Miller, published by the Getty Research Institute [2013]
Photograph by Mary McCaughey