Henri Matisse Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence. — Henri Matisse

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 — Henri Matisse

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

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter - a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue. — Henri Matisse

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. — Henri Matisse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Henri Matisse

What matters most to me? To work with my model until I have it enough in me to be able to improvise, to let my hand run free ... — Henri Matisse

What I am after, above all, is expression. — Henri Matisse

I simply try to put down colors which render my sensation — Henri Matisse

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

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

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. — Henri Matisse

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. — Henri Matisse

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

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 ... — Henri Matisse

Exactitude is not truth. — Henri Matisse

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

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

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

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. — Henri Matisse

The wall around the window does not create two worlds. — Henri Matisse

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. — Henri Matisse

My curves are not crazy. — Henri Matisse

Would not it be best to leave room to mystery? — Henri Matisse

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. — Henri Matisse

The sign is determined at the moment I use it and for the object of which it must form a part. For this reason I cannot determine in advance signs which never change, and which would be like writing: that would paralyze the freedom of my invention. — Henri Matisse

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

I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me. — Henri Matisse

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

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. — Henri Matisse

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. — Henri Matisse

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 ... — Henri Matisse

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

A young woman has young claws, well sharpened. If she has character, that is. And if she hasn't so much the worse for you. — Henri Matisse

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. — Henri Matisse

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. — Henri Matisse

One gets into a state of creativity by conscious work. — Henri Matisse

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

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

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. — Henri Matisse

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

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. — Henri Matisse

An artist is an explorer. — Henri Matisse

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 ... — Henri Matisse

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

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

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

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. — Henri Matisse

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

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. — Henri Matisse

A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful. — Henri Matisse

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

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. — Henri Matisse

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. — Henri Matisse

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

Never ruin a good painting with the truth. — Henri Matisse

I'm growing old, I delight in the past. — Henri Matisse

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. — Henri Matisse

I dream of an art of balance, of quietness, something analogous to a good armchair. — Henri Matisse

Color exists in itself, possessing its own beauty. — Henri Matisse

Jazz is rhythm and meaning. — Henri Matisse

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. — Henri Matisse

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

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. — Henri Matisse

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. — Henri Matisse

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. — Henri Matisse

The truly original artist invents his own signs. — Henri Matisse

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. — Henri Matisse

Work cures everything. — Henri Matisse

All art worthy of the name is religious. — Henri Matisse

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

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

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

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

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

Cezanne, you see, is a sort of God of painting. — Henri Matisse

In love, the one who runs away is the winner. — Henri Matisse

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 ... — Henri Matisse

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

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. — Henri Matisse

Another word for creativity is courage. — Henri Matisse

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. — Henri Matisse

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. — Henri Matisse

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

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

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. — Henri Matisse

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

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

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

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

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. — Henri Matisse