Henri Matisse Quotes

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

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

Drawing is putting a line around an idea.

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

There are flowers everywhere, for those who bother to look.

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.

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.

Seek for the boldest color possible, content is irrelevant.

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

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

An artist must never be a prisoner. Prisoner? An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc.

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.

Don't try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out.

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.

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.

A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful.

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.

I'm growing old, I delight in the past.

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

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

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.

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.

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

A certain blue enters your soul. A certain red has an effect on your blood-pressure.

I simply try to put down colors which render my sensation

It is not enough to place colors, however beautiful, one beside the other; colors must also react on one another. Otherwise, you have cacophony.

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

He who loves, flies, runs, and rejoices; he is free and nothing holds him back.

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.

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.

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

Creation begins with vision.

The chief function of color should be to serve expression as well as possible.

My choice of colors does not rest on any scientific theory; it is based on observation, on feeling, on the experience of my sensibility. Inspired by certain pages of Delacroix, an artist like Signac is preoccupied with complementary colors, and the theoretical knowledge of them will lead him to use a certain tone in a certain place. But I simply try to put down colors which render my sensation.

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

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.

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.

When you're out of will power you call on stubbornness, that's the trick.

Drawing is of the Spirit and color of the Senses.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Precision is not reality

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.

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

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