The Blue Period Quotes

“How come art exists at all? And why do artists do this and not something else? There must be more to it than prettiness or hoped-for esteem. As he’d once suggested to Germaine, maybe so many academics, drawing instructors, art dealers, and critics corrupted what the ancients naturally understood. Perhaps “primitive” artists comprehended far more than today’s tastemakers can imagine—that there’s something in humans’ will to create the universe depends”
― Luke Jerod Kummer, The Blue Period

“Pablo hated school. Why, he thought, learn letters and numbers when there aren’t any in my pictures?”
― Luke Jerod Kummer, The Blue Period

“But no one had been able to adequately capture the thing about her she herself most admired—how she could say more with her eyebrows than all the books in the Bibliothèque Nationale. She was proud of those prominent crescents and used them to great effect in daily life.”
― Luke Jerod Kummer, The Blue Period

“Careful, friend,” Pablo warned. “A gun’s like a penis. You never know what somebody might do with one, especially when they’re drunk or in love.”
― Luke Jerod Kummer, The Blue Period

“Blue is many things,” the man said to his son. “I’ll tell you, when a little boy is very sick, his mama and papa pray to the Virgin and promise to dress him in this color. They ask her help because Mary knows what it is to lose a child.”
― Luke Jerod Kummer, The Blue Period

“Pablo recognizes the brushwork and cramped composition, but also how both something torturous and transcendent are conveyed. He’s seen this artist before. “This is that painter you spoke of with Manyac on the first day, the deranged one with syphilis.”
― Luke Jerod Kummer, The Blue Period

“they were made from quick, curving flicks of the artist’s wrist using thick impasto. There is an urgency in these manic brushstrokes that Pablo admires, the whirling together of rapid streaks of pure bold color squeezed straight from the tube. The blues are intense, the mood rueful, throbbing, eternal. “Don’t punch a hole through the thing, would you? It’s not mine,” squawks Vollard, suddenly at the entranceway behind Pablo. “Just a little something borrowed from a collector friend.” “I have never seen anything like it,” Pablo,”
― Luke Jerod Kummer, The Blue Period

“there’s a valley with little houses nestled around”
― Luke Jerod Kummer, The Blue Period

“Pablo recognizes the brushwork and cramped composition, but also how both something torturous and transcendent are conveyed. He’s seen this artist before. “This is that painter you spoke of with Manyac on the first day, the deranged one with syphilis.” “So some venereologist says. The fellow’s name was Vincent. Gave him a showing a few”
― Luke Jerod Kummer, The Blue Period

“The buildings, limned in black, are the same vivid blues as the painting’s sky—Prussian, ultramarine, cobalt. Lanterns in their windows create little boxy panes of bright yellow. Above the horizon, amid spinning eddies of foreboding cloud, shine bright, magnificent stars. Pablo examines them from only a couple of inches away and can tell they were made from quick, curving flicks of the artist’s wrist using thick impasto. There is an urgency in these manic brushstrokes that Pablo admires, the whirling together of rapid streaks of pure bold color squeezed straight from the tube. The blues are intense, the mood rueful, throbbing, eternal. “Don’t punch a hole through the thing, would you? It’s not mine,” squawks Vollard, suddenly at the entranceway behind Pablo. “Just a little something borrowed from a collector friend.” “I have never seen anything like it,” Pablo, still mesmerized, says at last. “I expect not,” Vollard replies. “If you can paint the same, though, perhaps you’ll become rich before this man’s estate does. A Dutchman, dead now, a suicide, I believe. They never found”
― Luke Jerod Kummer, The Blue Period

“Hanging on the opposite wall is a painting, the only one down here. It’s hard to tell if the object in the canvas’s foreground is a giant cypress or a towering black flame. Pablo gathers nearer. There is so much movement within the picture frame, he finds he cannot stare at any single point for long. In the distance behind the dark spire in the center, though, there’s a valley with little houses nestled around a high-steepled church, not unlike scenes Pablo witnessed from the train window as he rode”
― Luke Jerod Kummer, The Blue Period

“Barcelona and the Catalans wanted out.”
― Luke Jerod Kummer, The Blue Period

“The blues are intense, the mood rueful, throbbing, eternal.”
― Luke Jerod Kummer, The Blue Period