Henri Matisse Quotes

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

I'm interested in art, and I think about the process of making art. It's part of my personality, my experience of the world, so it ends up in the movies. It's where my head is.

All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!

As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.

You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

Since childhood, I have been painting, for no special reason, numerous dots and nets, drawing from the hallucinations that seem to appear endlessly. I can't explain why if you ask me.

The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature.

I wonder if the artist ever lives his life--he is so busy recreating it.

I'm a painter, that's where I started out, at four years old, that was my first love as far as expression. So, I'm not a painter in the sense of, "Please come see my paintings" but, I do understand the value of not looking over the artist's shoulder while the work is in progress.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

When an artist explains what he is doing, he usually has to do one of two things: either scrap what he has explained, or make his work fit in with the explanation.

I looked at Rembrandt and Superman, Matisse and Bugs Bunny, and began to make my own pictures.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

To be an artist, you need to play inside your work.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite - getting something down.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

The pictures I make come from every blink of my lashes.

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

I guess artists are living inspiration. There's something very pure about a person that fantasizes. I like hearing their stories, watching them work. Their take on the world interests me. It's not unified.

I always feel like the art's there and I just see it, so it's not really a lot of work.

I have to take it as a given that I have got a certain ability to do something. I can be an artist, which is take something and transform it into another thing. I can just see something, and I can see my painting.

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.