Creativity Quote by Paul Klee

Nature, for Klee, won’t stop talking. It overdelivers: infinite textures, patterns, accidents, weather, growth, decay. The result isn’t clarity but noise - a flood of information that can seduce an artist into mere transcription. Calling nature “garrulous” is a sly demotion of the Romantic idea that the natural world is automatically coherent and morally instructive. Klee treats it like an overenthusiastic storyteller whose details obscure the plot.

So the artist must be “taciturn” - not silent in output, but disciplined in selection. Taciturnity here is a methodology: edit ruthlessly, reduce the chatter to a charged signal. That subtext matters because Klee’s era was defined by competing visual languages. Photography had already made literal depiction cheap; modernism was busy dismantling academic realism; abstraction and expression were asking what painting is for when it no longer has to be a mirror. Klee’s answer isn’t “ignore nature,” but “translate it.” The artist doesn’t echo the world’s speech; they compress it into form.

There’s also an ethical undertone: restraint as seriousness. In a culture tipping into propaganda, spectacle, and mass reproduction, “taciturn” suggests a refusal to shout. Klee, teaching at the Bauhaus and working through Europe’s political convulsions, insists that art earns its authority by what it withholds. Nature offers everything; the artist proves themselves by choosing.