Quotes & Sayings About Matisse

I think Picasso is more feminine than Matisse. — Gary Hume

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. — Henri Matisse

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. — Henri Matisse

Anything that is not necessary to the painting damages it. Henri Matisse — Volkmar Essers

I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues. — Don DeLillo

Cutting into color reminds me of the sculptor's direct carving. — Henri Matisse

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

No one would want to pay a penny for an empty canvas by me. But it would be quite another if the empty canvas were signed by a great artist. I would be surprised if an empty canvas by Picasso or Matisse signed and inscribed with the words, 'I wanted to paint such and such on this canvas, but did not do so,' would not fetch thousands ... After all, with an empty canvas, the possibilities are limitless, and so perhaps is the cash. — Semir Zeki

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

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

In their pursuit of the same supreme end, Matisse and Picasso stand side by side, Matisse representing color and Picasso form. — Wassily Kandinsky

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

My little Renoirs. Matisse describes having seen Renoir make these tiny canvases. When he had finished working, he would use up the color left in his brushes on them. — Jean Cocteau

Sing, Muse, of high, molded ceilings and built-in bookcases chockablock with hardcovers! Sing of armchairs with scarlet upholstery and highboys lacquered like mirrors and the elegant shadows of potted palms! Sing of a chandelier made entirely of antlers! Of what looked to be a genuine Matisse on the wall above the hearth! — Garth Risk Hallberg

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

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

Nothing can be accomplished without love. — Henri Matisse

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

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

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

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. — Henri Matisse

My mother was a Bloomsbury figure: a great friend of TS Eliot, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell. My grandmother, Mary Hutchinson, gave her life to works of art, being an admirer of Matisse and Giaometti, whom I collected as a young man because of her. — Jacob Rothschild

An artist must not feel under any constraint. — Henri Matisse

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

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

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. — Henri Matisse

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

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. — Henri Matisse

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.
— 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

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

We both disliked rude rickshwalas, shepu bhaji in any form, group photographs at weddings, lizards, tea that has gone cold, the habit of taking newspaper to the toilet, kissing a boy who'd just smoked a cigarette et cetra.
Another list. The things we loved: strong coffee, Matisse, Rumi, summer rain, bathing together, Tom Hanks, rice pancakes, Cafe Sunrise, black-and-white photographs, the first quiet moments after you wake up in the morning. — Sachin Kundalkar

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

Matisse was very clear about saying that you have to blow your own trumpet and explain yourself, which I think has been slightly forgotten. — Howard Hodgkin

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

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

Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul — Henri Matisse

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 ... — Henri Matisse

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. — Henri Matisse

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. — Henri Matisse

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

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. — Henri Matisse

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

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

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

It was Matisse who took the first step into the undiscovered land of the ugly. — Gelett Burgess

Dad always said a person must have a magnificent reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it.
Unless your name is something along the lines of Mozart, Matisse, Churchill, Che Guevara or Bond - James Bond - you best spent your free time finger painting or playing shuffeboard, for no one, with the exception of your flabby-armed mother with stiff hair and a mashed potato way of looking at you, will want to hear the particulars of your pitiable existence, which doubtlessly will end as it began - with a wheeze. — Marisha Pessl

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

I love the work of Matisse and Picasso, but I don't have enough millions to own one. And I don't really believe in owning art, anyway. — Ravi Shankar

Before he did all those lovely line drawings, Matisse would make really detailed charcoal drawings and tear them up. He wouldn't leave them about ... I understand what he was doing: discovering what's there ... to make the line meaningful, to find a linear solution ... — David Hockney

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

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

When I paint green, it doesn't mean grass; when I paint blue, it doesn't mean sky. — Henri Matisse

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things. — Henri Matisse

Art comes from art: I remember going to the Matisse show and seeing how Matisse had taken one of his own paintings, worked from it and transformed it, and that had led on to the next one and the next. — Anthony Caro

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

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. — Henri Matisse

But a generation that does not aspire to seriousness, to meaning, is unworthy to walk in the shadow of those who have gone before, I mean those who have struggled and surmounted, I mean those who have aspired, I mean Rembrandt, I mean Turner, I mean Michelangelo and Matisse ... I mean obviously Rothko. — John Logan

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. — Henri Matisse

I've photographed everybody from Matisse to Isamu Noguchi. — Carl Van Vechten

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

Creation begins with vision. — 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

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

Matisse draws what I call the essence of the plants. He leaves a shape open. He'll do a leaf and not close it. Everybody used to say, oh, I got it all from Matisse, and I said, 'Not really.' — Ellsworth Kelly

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

Drawing is of the spirit; color is of the senses. — Henri Matisse

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. — Henri Matisse

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. — Henri Matisse

It is comparatively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture by allowing one colour to dominate, or by muting all the colours. Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby. — John Berger

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. — Henri Matisse

Creative takes courage -Henri Matisse — J. L. Silvermist

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

As an artist you have to find something that deeply interests you. It's not enough to make art that is about art, to look at Matisse and Picasso and say, how can I paint like them? You have to be obsessed by something that can't come out in any other way, then the other things - the skill and technique - will follow. — Anselm Kiefer

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

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. — Henri Matisse

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints. — A.S. Byatt

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

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

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

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. — Henri Matisse

I wanted to paint in a folk-artist-y way. My heroes were Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Rembrandt. I think Picasso is about as a modern as I got. But I incorporated things that they rejected as well as movements that happened later. — Joni Mitchell

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

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. — Henri Matisse

Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He copies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He's convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt. — Pablo Picasso

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

Jazz is rhythm and meaning. — Henri Matisse

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

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. — Henri Matisse

Drawing is putting a line around an idea. — Henri Matisse

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

The main function of color should be to serve expression. — Henri Matisse

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

Every so often every artist feels, 'I'll never paint again. The muse has gone out the window.' In 1985, I hardly painted at all for three months, and it was agonizing. I looked at reproductions. I stared at Matisse. I stared at the Old Masters. I stared at the Quattrocento. And I thought to myself - Don't push it! If you try too hard to get at something, you almost push it away. — Helen Frankenthaler