Henri Matisse Quotes

It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.

Another word for creativity is courage.

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

Exactitude is not truth.

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

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

The truly original artist invents his own signs.

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

In love, the one who runs away is the winner.

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

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.

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 do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.

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

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

I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have a light joyousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost me.

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 I am after, above all, is expression.

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

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

Expression for me does not reside in passions glowing in a human face or manifested by violent movement. The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive; the place occupied by my figures, the empty space around them, the proportions, everything has its share.

To arrive is to be in prison.

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

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

Art is an escape from reality.

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.

Seeing is in itself a creative act which requires effort.

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

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

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

My curves are not crazy.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 young painter who cannot liberate himself from the influence of past generations is digging his own grave.

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.

You study, you learn, but you guard the original naivete. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.

I was driven on by.. A force which I see today as something alien to my normal life... so I have been no more than a medium as it were.

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.

Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting should begin by cutting out his own tongue

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

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

Do remember that one line does nothing; it is only in relation to another that it creates a volume.