Art & Creativity Quote by Edgar Degas

Degas is giving you a paradox with a painter's smirk: competence is the enemy of aliveness. "Only when he no longer knows what he is doing" isn't a celebration of ignorance; it's an attack on the kind of mastery that calcifies into habit. The line points to that late-stage moment in a studio practice when technique stops being a tool and starts becoming an automatic pilot, producing work that is "correct" but dead. Degas is arguing that the good stuff arrives when the artist has pushed past what he can consciously control and enters a state where intention loosens and perception takes over.

The subtext is almost combative, and it fits Degas's reputation as both a relentless draftsman and a skeptic of easy spontaneity. He wasn't preaching mystical inspiration so much as describing the hard-won conditions under which risk becomes possible. You practice until your hands know too much; then you disrupt them. Not knowing becomes a tactic: you change the angle, the medium, the lighting, the model's pose, the deadline. You make it hard to rely on your signature moves.

Context matters: Degas worked alongside the Impressionists but never fully accepted their brand of breezy immediacy. His art is built on discipline, revision, and a kind of controlled cruelty toward his own work. That gives the quote its bite. It's less "trust the process" than "sabotage your certainty". The painter does good things when he stops performing expertise and starts chasing the image again, with all the vulnerability that implies.