Creativity Quote by Edgar Degas

Degas is taking a quiet swing at the cult of perfect observation. In an era when academic training prized faithful copying and photography was beginning to flex its mechanical authority, he argues for a more radical realism: the kind that admits the mind is always editing. “Copy what one sees” sounds dutiful, almost clerical. “Draw what one now only sees in one’s memory” is a dare. Memory is not a storage unit; it’s a filter, a distiller, a bias machine. Degas treats that distortion as an artistic advantage, not a flaw.

The key word is “transformation.” He’s not romanticizing imagination as pure invention, but positioning it as a collaborator with recall. Subtext: the best image isn’t the one that proves you were there; it’s the one that proves you understood what being there felt like. That tracks with Degas’s dancers and bathers, scenes that look casually seized yet are famously constructed. The off-center angles and cropped bodies read like glimpses, but they’re engineered through repetition and revision - closer to mental replay than direct transcription.

Context matters: Degas sits adjacent to Impressionism but never fully buys its outdoorsy, on-the-spot myth. He prefers the studio, the rehearsal, the afterimage. This line doubles as a defense of labor and selection. Drawing from memory forces you to choose what stays and what disappears, which is another way of saying it forces you to reveal your values. The “far better” isn’t moral; it’s aesthetic. Degas is betting that art wins when it stops pretending to be a camera and starts admitting it’s a mind.