An indigestion of greenness....

...One must have constantly before one's eyes the very presence of life. the sky, the earth, a piece of paper, a passing figure, a cobweb. That is why one must not discriminate between things. There is no rank among them. One must take one's good where one finds it....

The painter passes through states of fullness and of emptying. That is the whole secret of art. I take a walk in the forest of Fontainbleu. There I get an indigestion of greenness. I must empty this sensation into a picture. Green dominates in it. The painter paints as if in urgent need to discharge hiimself of his sensations and his visions....

It is not what the artist does that counts, but what he is.... What interests me is the uneasiness of Cezanne, the real teaching of Cezanne, the torments of van Gogh, that is to say the drama of the men.


-from Picasso's Guernica: the Genesis of a Painting (U. of California, 1962)