Robert Henri Quotes

Art points to things. It's a way of giving people not the standard way of looking at the world.

Art is the way people see things, and I think it's great when individuals can find in fashion something they truly believe is artistic.

The artist is an interpreter of Nature. People learn to love Nature through pictures. To the artist, nothing is in vain; nothing beneath his notice. If he is great enough, he will exalt every subject which he treats.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Fine art is knowledge made visible.

I paint what I see, not what a camera would see.

To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.

Sketching is almost everything. It is the painter's identity, his style, his conviction, and then color is just a gift to the drawing.

Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible.

If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.

The true painter strives to paint what can only be seen through his world.

Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it?

Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which otherwise would remain unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.

A picture is the expression of an impression

A painter may be looking at the world in a way which is very different from everyone else. If he's a craftsman, he can get other people to see the world through his eyes, and so he enlarges our vision, perception, and there's great value in that.

I look at everything in an artistic way.

I realize that every picture isn't a work of art.

I'm an artist that's attracted to a specific way of seeing and a way of being.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

I prefer drawing the things I've written to handing them off to another artist. Turns out I'm a huge control freak - and because I write in thumbnails, the art is already happening by the time I start writing!

Knowing how to paint and to use one's colors rightly has not any connection with originality. This originality consists in properly expressing your own impressions.

If art has a purpose, it is to interpret life, reproduce it in fresh visions.

The mission of art is to represent nature not to imitate her.

Different directors offer you different things, and it's not necessarily the most obvious things.