Art & Creativity Quote by Raoul Dufy

Dufy is quietly rejecting the idea that painting should be a neutral record of the world. He frames his job as a double exposure: the eye collects the visible facts, while the heart edits, intensifies, and rearranges them into something truer to lived experience. That pairing matters. By naming both organs, he claims legitimacy for emotion without pretending it’s ineffable; feeling becomes a way of seeing, not a decorative afterthought.

The line also reads like a manifesto tucked inside a confession. Dufy came up as modernism was splintering the old hierarchy of “accurate” representation. After brushing against Fauvism’s liberated color and Cubism’s loosened structure, he developed a signature brightness: seaside scenes, orchestras, city fêtes rendered with buoyant line and chromatic pleasure. In that context, “the way I see” is a defense against the inevitable accusation that his work is merely pretty. He’s saying: the exuberance is not an escape from reality; it’s my reality, filtered through temperament.

There’s subtextual stubbornness here, too. Dufy doesn’t pledge to show things as they are, or as they should be, but as they land on him. It’s an argument for subjectivity as craft: the painter’s responsibility isn’t to be objective, but to be exacting about his own perception. The heart, in this formulation, isn’t sentimentality. It’s the internal weather system that determines the light.