Henri Matisse Quotations | Page 2

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

The main function of color should be to serve expression.

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

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

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

To arrive is to be in prison.

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.

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

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

My curves are not crazy.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The truly original artist invents his own signs.

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

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

A certain blue enters your soul

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

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 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...

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

What I dream of is an art of balance.

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

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.

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.

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.

Work cures everything.

Jazz is rhythm and meaning.

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

My models, my human figures, are never like extras in an interior. They are the main theme of my work. I depend absolutely on my model...

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

Creation begins with vision.

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.

What I am after, above all, is expression.

Would not it be best to leave room to mystery?

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

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

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 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.

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

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

An artist is an explorer.

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.

Seeing is in itself a creative act which requires effort.

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.

Another word for creativity is courage.

Nothing can be accomplished without love.

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

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

Color exists in itself, possessing its own beauty.

From Bonheur de Vivre - I was thirty-five then - to this cut-out - I am eighty-two - I have not changed; not in the way my friends mean who want to compliment me, no matter what, on my good health, but because all this time I have looked for the same things, which I have perhaps realized by different means...

An artist must not feel under any constraint.

Drawing is putting a line around an idea.

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

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

Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul.

The artists must see all things as if he were seeing them for the first time. All his life he must see as he did when he was a child.

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

A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Exactitude is not truth.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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