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In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head.

Edvard Munch

The Academies of Art are nothing but great painting factories – those with talent are fed in at one end, and they come out as mechanical painting machines.
EDVARD MUNCH

Academics Art Factory Greatness Painting Talent
Certainly a chair can be just as interesting as a human being. But first the chair must be perceived by a human being… You should not paint the chair, but only what someone has felt about it.
EDVARD MUNCH

Feeling Human Interest Painting Yourself
I sense a scream passing through nature. I painted the clouds as actual blood. The colour shrieked.
EDVARD MUNCH

Cloud Myself Nature Scream
What is art? Art grows from joy and sorrow, but mostly from sorrow. It grows from human lives.
EDVARD MUNCH

Art Growth Human Joy Live Sorrow
If what you want to paint is the emotive mood in all its strength then you must not sit and stare at everything and depict it exactly as one sees it.
EDVARD MUNCH

Emotion Oneself Paint See Strength
Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye. it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.
EDVARD MUNCH

Eyes Nature Soul Visible
I learned early about the misery and dangers of life, and about the afterlife, about the external punishment which awaited the children of sin in Hell.
EDVARD MUNCH

Children Dangerous Hell Learning Misery Sin
From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.
EDVARD MUNCH

Flower Forever Growth Myself
I should have considered it wrong to have finished the Frieze before the room for its accommodation and the funds for its completion were available.
EDVARD MUNCH

Available Complete Consider Fund Room Wrong
And I would often wake up at night and stare widely into the room: Am I in Hell?
EDVARD MUNCH

Hell Myself Room Stare Wake Up
Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness.
EDVARD MUNCH

Detail Empty Memories Painting Photograph Simplicity
Any number of holier-than-thou honorable realists walk around in the belief that they have accomplished something, simply because they tell you for the hundredth time that a field is green and a red-painted house is painted red.
EDVARD MUNCH

Accomplishment Belief Holy Honor Walk
When I paint a person, his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness.
EDVARD MUNCH

Enemy Finding Goodness Painting Person Portrait
The viewers must come to understand the sacredness of painting, so they will remove their hats as if they were in church.
EDVARD MUNCH

Painting Removal Understand View
I don’t believe in an art that is not born out of man’s need to open his heart.
EDVARD MUNCH

Art Believe Born Heart Man Need Open
But can they great works get rid of the worm that lies gnawing at the roots of my heart? No, never.
EDVARD MUNCH

Greatness Heart Lying Root Work
No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.
EDVARD MUNCH

Breathe Love Paint Reading Suffering Woman
Colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas.
EDVARD MUNCH

Canvas Color Live
Death is pitch-dark, but colors are light. To be a painter, one must work with rays of light.
EDVARD MUNCH

Darkness Death Light Painting Work
By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.
EDVARD MUNCH

Color Form Life Photograph Seek Vibrate
The way one sees is also dependent upon one’s emotional state of mind. This is why a motif can be looked at in so many ways, and this is what makes art so interesting.
EDVARD MUNCH

Art Interesting Mindset Myself See Sight Way
A work of art can only come from the interior of man. Art is the form of the image formed upon the nerves, heart, brain and eye of man.
EDVARD MUNCH

Art Brain Eyes Interior Man Work
Without fear and illness, I could never have accomplished all I have.
EDVARD MUNCH

Accomplishment Fear Myself Sick
Art comes from joy and pain, But mostly from pain.
EDVARD MUNCH

Art Creation Joy Pain
There is a battle that goes on between men and women. Many people call it love.
EDVARD MUNCH

Battle Love Man Woman
Oil-painting is a developed technique. Why go backwards?
EDVARD MUNCH

Art Development Style Technique
I do not paint what I see, but what I saw.
EDVARD MUNCH

Myself Paint See

In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head.

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In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head.

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