I found considerable recognition in the words that Dufy wrote in 1947: “The work of art is not always born of a well-conceived plan, it is during the course of the work that it emerges from the struggle occurring between the desire for order and the logic necessary to its construction, and from the taste for disorder and anarchy that is at the bottom of every artist’s heart. (...)
I have found the essence of my painting in the journey and in the search; this what gives my work that air of wandering for which it might be reproached, but I have always preferred studying and analysing to establishing and exploiting a formula (...) that is why I prefer people to pay attention to the mechanism of my means rather than consider the anecdote, which is not the true aim of my paintings; the story in itself does not matter, it is the way of telling it that counts.“
Dufy apparently was having his own ‘odyssey’, constantly looking for innovation in his work, rejecting the easy and rapid use of marketable solutions.