Top 199 Quotes & Sayings by Henri Matisse - Page 2

Drawing is . . . not an exercise of particular dexterity, but above all a means of expressing intimate feelings and moods.

Creation begins with vision.

The artist begins with a vision - a creative operation requiring effort. Creativity takes courage.

Simple colours can affect the intimate feelings with all the more force because they are simple.

I don't paint women, I paint pictures. . . What I am after above all is expression. If in a portrait I put eyes, a nose, a mouth, there isn't much use; on the contrary it paralyses the imagination of the spectator, and obliges us to see the person in a certain way.

To look at something as though we had never seen it before requires great courage.

When an artist or student draws a nude figure with painstaking care, the result is drawing, and not emotion.

A certain blue enters your soul

The effort to see things without distortion takes something like courage and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he saw it for the first time.

My pictures are made up of four or five colors that collide with one another.

To arrive is to be in prison.

Truth and reality in art begin at the point where the artist ceases to understand what he is doing and capable of doing - yet feels in himself a force that becomes steadily stronger... and more concentrated.

When I paint green, it doesn't mean grass; when I paint blue, it doesn't mean sky.

If drawing belongs to the world of spirit and color to that of the senses, you must draw first to cultivate the spirit.

We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we study a tree, the sky or a thought, because we too are linked to the entire universe.

You want to paint? First of all you must cut off your tongue because your decision takes away from you the right to express yourself with anything but your brush.

If people knew what Matisse, supposedly the painter of happiness, had gone through, the anguish and tragedy he had to overcome to manage to capture that light which has never left him, if people knew all that, they would also realize that this happiness, this light, this dispassionate wisdom which seems to be mine, are sometimes well-deserved, given the severity of my trials.

What's so astonishing about not understanding? There are so many things in art, beginning with art itself, that one doesn't understand. A painter doesn't see everything that he has put in his painting.

Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say.

Colours have their own distinctive beauty that you have to preserve, just as in music you try to preserve sounds. It is a question of organization, of finding the arrangement that will keep the beauty and freshness of the colour

You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.

The essential thing is to spring forth, to express the bolt of lightning one senses upon contact with a thing. The function of the artist is not to translate an observation but to express the shock of the object on his nature; the shock, with the original reaction.

The truly original artist invents his own signs.

The energy within you is stronger than ever for being held back, compressed, and said No to.

To draw is to make an idea precise. Drawing is the precision of thought.

I cannot copy nature in a servile way; I am forced to interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture. From the relationship I have found in all the tones there must result a living harmony of colors, a harmony analogous to that of a musical composition.

A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful.

All art worthy of the name is religious.

Drawing is of the Spirit and color of the Senses.

Ever since there have been men, man has given himself over to too little joy. That alone, my brothers, is our original sin. I should believe only in a God who understood how to dance.

What I am after, above all, is expression.

It is my dream to create an art which is filled with balance, purity and calmness, freed from a subject matter that is disconcerting or too attention-seeking. In my paintings, I wish to create a spiritual remedy, similar to a comfortable armchair which provides rest from physical expectation for the spiritually working, the businessman as well as the artist.

Seeing is in itself a creative act which requires effort.

The whole arrangement of my picture is expressive. The place occupied by the figures or objects, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything plays a part.

I never retouch a sketch: I take a canvas the same size, as I may change the composition somewhat. But I always strive to give the same feeling, while carrying it on further.

When I eat a tomato I look at it the way anyone else would. But when I paint a tomato, then I see it differently.

There is no interruption between my older paintings and my cutouts. Just that with an increasing sense of the absolute, and more abstraction, I have achieved a form that is simplified to its essence.

It is with color that you render light, though you must also feel this light, have it within yourself.

When I started to paint I felt transported into a kind of paradise... In everyday life I was usually bored and vexed... Starting to paint I felt gloriously free.

Cezanne, you see, is a sort of God of painting.

With greater completeness and abstraction, I have attained a form filtered to its essentials.

...for whether we want to or not, we belong to our time and we share in its opinions, its feelings, even its delusions.

I simply try to put down colors which render my sensation

It has always bothered me that I don't paint like everyone else

Art should be something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.

...I am driven on by an idea that I really only grasp as it grows with the picture.

It would be a mistake to ascribe this creative power to an inborn talent. In art, the genius creator is not just a gifted being, but a person who has succeeded in arranging for their appointed end, a complex of activities, of which the work is the outcome. The artist begins with a vision — a creative operation requiring an effort. Creativity takes courage.

One must, of course, have one's entire experience behind one and not have lost the freshness of instinct.

Above all, an artist must never be too easily satisfied with what he has done.

Exactitude is not truth. [Fr., L'exactitude n'est pas la verite.]

Truth and reality in art do not arise until you no longer understand what you are doing and are capable of but nevertheless sense a power that grows in proportion to your resistance.

Hatred is a parasite that devours all. One doesn't build upon hatred, but upon love.

...The more a picture has to give, the greater it is.

All my efforts go into creating an art that can be understood by everyone.

The portrait is one of the most curious art forms. It demands special qualities in the artist, and an almost total kinship with the model.

Purer colors... have in themselves, independently of the objects they serve to express, a significant action on the feelings of those who look at them.

There's nothing clinically wrong with me, only an emotional imbalance - I pass too quickly from the wildest enthusiasm to the blackest despair.

Love wants to rise, not to be held down by anything base... He who loves flies, runs, and rejoices; he is free and nothing holds him back. Derive happiness from yourself, from a good day's work, from the clearing that it makes in the fog that surrounds us.

Starting to paint, I felt gloriously free, quiet, and alone.

I want to reach that condensation of sensations that constitutes a picture.