Henri Matisse Quotes

In the beginning you must subject yourself to the influence of nature. You must be able to walk firmly on the ground before you start walking on a tightrope.

Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

When you're out of willpower, you can call on stubbornness.

I am made of all that I have seen.

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 ...

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

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

Perhaps I might be satisfied, momentarily, with a work finished at one sitting, but I would soon get bored looking at it; therefore, I prefer to continue working on it so that later I may recognize it as a work of my mind.

Composition, the aim of which is expression, alters itself according to the surface to be covered. If I take a sheet of paper of given dimensions, I will jot down a drawing which will have a necessary relation to its format.

A certain blue enters your soul

All art worthy of the name is religious.

Drawing is putting a line around an idea.

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

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

Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul

My curves are not crazy.

To arrive is to be in prison.

Would not it be best to leave room to mystery?

Creation is the artist's true function; where there is no creation there is no art.

A rapid rendering of a landscape represents only one moment of its existence. I prefer, by insisting upon its essential character, to risk losing charm in order to gain greater stability.

When a painting is finished, it's like a new born child, and the artist himself must have time for understanding. How then do you expect an amateur to understand that which the artist dos not yet comprehend.

I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends.

An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language.

There are always flowers for those who want to see them.

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.

I was very embarrassed when my canvases began to fetch high prices. I saw myself condemned to a future of nothing but Masterpieces.

What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape: it is the human figure.

I do not distinguish between the construction of a book and that of a
painting and I always proceed from the simple to the complex. - 1946

With color one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft.

Creativity takes courage.

Beauty comes from the balance between two and three dimensions, between abstraction and representation - I seek the equilibrium behind changing appearances.

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

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

If I close my eyes, I see things better than with my eyes open.

Fit the parts together, one into the other, and build your figure like a carpenter builds a house. Everything must be constructed, composed of parts that make a whole ...

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.

The truly original artist invents his own signs.

If it is practiced by a man of taste, the photograph will have the appearance of art (but) the photographer must ... intervene as little as possible, so as not to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses.

Cutting into color reminds me of the sculptor's direct carving.

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.

The artist has to look at life as he did when he was a child. If he loses that faculty, he cannot express himself in an original, that is, a personal way.

I have simply wished to assert the reasoned and independent feeling of my own individuality within a total knowledge of tradition.

When I put a green, it is not grass. When I put a blue, it is not the sky.

From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.

It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color - not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.

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

Each work of art is a collection of signs invented during the picture's execution to suit the needs of their position. Taken out of the composition for which they were created, these signs have no further use.

The importance of an artist is to be measured by the quantity of new signs which he has introduced to the language of art.

After a half-century of hard work and reflection the wall is still there.

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.

This is why journeys are useful, they enlarge the space that is around us.

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

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.

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

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.

Precision is not reality

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

I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colors is black.

The Barnes Foundation is the only sane place to see art in America.

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

A work of art must carry in itself its complete significance and impose it upon the beholder even before he can identify the subject-matter ...

The living model, the naked body of a woman, is the privileged seat of feeling, but also of questioning ... The model must mark you, awaken in you an emotion which you seek in turn to express.

Color, even more than drawing, is a means of liberation.

A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man ...

I don't know whether I believe in God or not. I think, really, I'm some kind of a Buddhist. But the essential thing is to put oneself in a frame of mind which is close to that of prayer.

Expression is not a matter of passion mirrored on the human face or revealed by a violent gesture. When I paint a picture, its every detail is expressive.

Everything that we see in our daily lives is more or less distorted by acquired habits and this is perhaps more evident in an age like ours when cinema posters and magazines present us every day with a flood of ready-made images which are to the eye what prejudices are to the mind. The effort to see things without distortion demands a kind of courage; and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he were seeing it for the first time.

The arts have a development which comes not only from the individual but also from a whole acquired force, the civilization which precedes us. One cannot do just anything. A talented artist cannot do whatever he pleases. If he only used his gifts, he would not exist. We are not the masters of what we produce. It is imposed on us.

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

Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium.

The essential thing is to work in a state of mind that approaches prayer.

I shan't get free of my emotion by copying the tree faithfully, or by drawing its leaves one by one in the common language, but only after identifying myself with it.

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.

The residuum of another's expression can never be related to one's own feeling.

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

My choice of colors does not rest on any scientific theory, it is based on observation, on feeling, on the experience of my sensibility.

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

Exactitude is not truth.

The role of the artist, like that of the scholar, consists of seizing current truths often repeated to him, but which will take on new meaning for him and which he will make his own when he has grasped their deepest significance.

A picture must possess a real power to generate light and for a long time now I've been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light.

I simply try to put down colors which render my sensation

Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illumination the fog that surround

Seek for the boldest color possible, content is irrelevant.

All that is not useful in a picture is detrimental. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety; for superfluous details would, in the mind of the beholder, encroach upon the essential elements.

Jazz is rhythm and meaning.

From the first shock of the contemplation of a face depends the principal sensation which guides me throughout the entire execution of a portrait.

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

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.

A certain color tones you up. It's the concentration of timbres.

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.

Art is an escape from reality.

Instinct must be thwarted just as one prunes the branches of a tree so that it will grow better.

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.

A work should contain its total meaning within itself and should impress it on the spectator before he even knows the subject.

I would like to recapture that freshness of vision which is characteristic of extreme youth when all the world is new to it.

A new painting is a unique event, a birth, which enriches the universe as it is grasped by the human mind, by bringing a new form into it.

Color helps to express light, not the physical phenomenon, but the only light that really exists, that in the artist's brain.

I have been no more than a medium, as it were.

Creative people are curious, flexible, and independent with a tremendous spirit and a love of play.