Summer is upon us! Here are ten inspirational quotes for this sultry season:

1. “I have gone into roses and have over a thousand planted. There is nothing like making pictures with real things.”– Mary Cassatt

2. “Wherever I go I need a period of incubation so that I may learn the essence of nature, which never wishes to be understood or yield herself.”– Paul Gauguin

3. “It seemed to me as though the flower I was painting was the only thing in the world. And when the bloom came out, I felt as though a skyscraper had gone up overnight.”– Georgia O’Keeffe

4. “With almost every breath I take I get a new sense of the linden tree, of ripened wheat, of hay, of mignonette. If I can paint three good pictures then I shall go gladly, with flowers in my hair.”– Paula Modersohn-Becker

5. “The cypresses are always occupying my thoughts. I should like to make something of them like the canvases of the sunflowers, because it astonishes me that they have not yet been done as I see them.”– Vincent van Gogh

6. “I use bear paws on storage jars, water jars, and mixing bowls, because the bear always knows where the water is.”– Margaret Tafoya

7. “The artist is the confidante of Nature. Each corolla in the grass is an affectionate word addressed to him by Nature.”– Auguste Rodin

8. “When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects are before you. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here is a streak of yellow, and paint it all exactly until it yields your own naive impression of the scene.”– Claude Monet

9. “See how the trees detach themselves from the sky in a vigorous green? Yet they are wrapped in a bluish tone–the air circulating between their branches.”– Rosa Bonheur

10. “The heat off the Italian plain was quite incredible. It shattered any possibility of a topographical rendering of it. The important thing was to get an equivalent sensation on the canvas.”– Bridget Riley

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