Creativity Quote by Raoul Dufy

An artist claiming his eyes were "made" to erase ugliness isn’t indulging in innocence; he’s announcing an ethic. Dufy turns perception into an act of editing, with the viewer not as a neutral recorder but as an active compositor. The verb "erase" matters: it’s not that ugliness doesn’t exist, it’s that it gets worked over, revised, pushed out of frame. In one stroke he elevates style from decoration to moral stance, a refusal to grant the harsh and the sordid the last word.

The line also smuggles in a quiet defiance against the modern expectation that serious art must be grim, raw, or diagnostic. Dufy’s work - all buoyant color, quick contour, scenes of leisure and music - is often misread as escapism. Here he reframes it as intentional: beauty is not avoidance but selection. His "eyes" aren’t passive organs; they’re tools, trained to translate the world into a livable register.

Context sharpens the edge. Dufy lived through industrial acceleration, World War I, and World War II, periods that made ugliness both literal and ideological. Saying your gaze was "made" for erasure reads like self-programming in an era when reality itself felt hijacked. There’s also an implied cost: to erase is to omit, to risk prettifying, to be accused of denial. Dufy’s wager is that joy and light are not naive - they’re a form of resistance, an insistence that seeing can still be an act of freedom.