Miller wrote on April 23, 1867, "I am just a farmer, a farmer among farmers. "
Miller "imposed" the necessity of labor on almost every man and woman in his paintings (except portraits), saying that "our programme is labor"
"I have to put my whole life on art."
"Art is not a pastime. Art is a struggle, a machine wheel with a complex structure that crushes people. I am not a philosopher, and I do not aspire to be free from suffering, nor to find a formula that will make me otherworldly and look down on the world. Pain may be the kind of thing that gives the artist the most expressiveness. “
"I will never neglect winter. Oh, the sorrow of the wilderness and the forest! If you don't pay attention to it, the loss is too great. ”
"What we care about is whether the artist achieves his purpose and his style, not whether he fits into some kind of comment."
"I will never bow down to anyone, nor will I let anyone impose the art of the Paris Salon on me. I was born a farmer and will die as a farmer. I will stay in my own land and will never give way to a place the size of a wooden shoe.
Miller's requirements for the beauty of oil painting are clarity and power. "I'd rather say nothing than act powerlessly."
"You can paint without color, but without harmony you will achieve nothing."
"It's fair to say that anything would be beautiful if it were in the right place at the right time."
Authors and other comments:
Romain Rolland: The ultimate purpose of Miller's thought and creation is to express the pain and hardship of labor, and at the same time, in this solemn and serious pain, to express the full poetry and magnificence of life.
Like other painters of his generation, he endured poverty, loneliness and the coldness of the world. But what sets him apart from others is that what comes with him when he endures bad luck is a kind of inner peace, a kind of inner peace that is beyond but kind. Human stupidity, resentment, and selfishness could not interfere with his enviable inner peace.
Hersmans: In most landscape painters, the dirt is superficial, but in Miller's it is profound.
My reading experience:
1 "I don't want to get rid of my pain," this attitude alarmed me.
2 "You can paint without color", reminding me once again that I don't have color theory for painting.
3 Finally understand why Van Gogh admired Miller, because they were just as benevolent, as sincere, as unmoved by the world, as faithful to art, and as human as they were.
