Henri Matisse Quotations | Page 2

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.

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

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

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Seek the strongest color effect possible... the content is of no importance.

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.

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

I am unable to make any distinction between the feeling I get from life and the way I translate that feeling into painting.

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

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

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.

I didn't expect to recover from my second operation but since I did, I consider that I'm living on borrowed time. Every day that dawns is a gift to me and I take it in that way. I accept it gratefully without looking beyond it. I completely forget my physical suffering and all the unpleasantness of my present condition and I think only of the joy of seeing the sun rise once more and of being able to work a little bit, even under difficult conditions.

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

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.

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...

Photographs will always be impressive because they show us nature, and all artists will find in them a world of sensations. The photographer must therefore intervene as little as possible, so as not to cause photography to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses, notwithstanding its defects.

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

A certain blue enters your soul

It is through the human figure that I best succeed in expressing the nearly religious feeling that I have towards life.

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

The truly original artist invents his own signs.

Color was not given to us in order that we imitate Nature. It was given to us so that we can express our emotions.

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

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

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

Arrival = Prison, and the artist must never be a prisoner.

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.

An artist is an explorer. He has to begin by self-discovery and by observation of his own procedure. After that he must not feel under any constraint.

My curves are not crazy.

For my part I have never avoided the influence of others. I would have considered it cowardice and a lack of sincerity toward myself.

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

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

In art, truth and reality begin when one no longer understands what one is doing or what one knows, and when there remains an energy that is all the stronger for being constrained, controlled and compressed.

To arrive is to be in prison.

There are wonderful things in Jazz, the improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.

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

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

The main function of color should be to serve expression.

If my story were ever to be written truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone.

An artist who wants to transpose a composition onto a larger canvas must conceive it over again in order to preserve its expression; he must alter its character and not just fill in the squares into which he has divided his canvas.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

The use of expressive colors is felt to be one of the basic elements of the modern mentality, an historical necessity, beyond choice.

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.

Drawing is of the spirit; color is of the senses.

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

I am curious about color as one would be visiting a new country, because I have never concentrated so closely on color expression. Up to now I have waited at the gates of the temple.

I do not repudiate any of my paintings but there isn't one of them that I would not redo differently, if I had it to redo. My destination is always the same but I work out a different route to get there.

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

Modern art spreads joy around by its color, which calms us.

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

One gets into a state of creativity by conscious work.

The wall around the window does not create two worlds.

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.

Never ruin a good painting with the truth.

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

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.

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

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.

Art is an escape from reality.

All art worthy of the name is religious.

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 am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have for life and my way of expressing it.

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.

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

The splitting up of color [as Impressionists did] brought the splitting up of form and contour . . . Everything is reduced to a mere sensation of the retina, but one which destroys all tranquility of surface and contour. Objects are differentiated only by the luminosity that is given them.

Precision is not reality

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

I simply try to put down colors which render my sensation

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.

I have to create an object which resembles the tree. The sign for a tree, and not the sign that other artists may have found for the tree.

Seek for the boldest color possible, content is irrelevant.

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

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 artist begins with a vision - a creative operation requiring an effort.

Hatred, rancor, and the spirit of vengeance are useless baggage to the artist. His road is difficult enough for him to cleanse his soul of everything which could make it more so.

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.

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...

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.

Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements which the painter uses to express his sentiments. In a picture every separate part will be visible and... everything which has no utility in the picture is for that reason harmful.

Put a colour upon a canvas - it not only colours with that colour the part of the canvas to which the colour has been applied, but it also colours the surrounding space with the complementary.

A colourist makes his presence known even in a simple charcoal drawing.

Did not the artists of the great age of Japanese art change names many times during their careers? I like that; they wanted to safeguard their freedom.

Truly, I'm not joking when I thank my lucky stars for the awful operation I had, since it has made me young again and philosophical which means that I don't want to fritter away the new lease on life I've been given.

The sign for which I forge an image has no value if it doesn't harmonize with other signs, which I must determine in the course of my invention and which are completely peculiar to it.

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

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.

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.

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

The model for me is a touchstone, it is a door which I must break open in order to reach the garden in which I am alone and feel good, even the model exists only for what use I can make of it.

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...

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

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.

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