Henri Matisse Quotes

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.

Photography has been a passion of mine since I was 15. After my kids were born I found myself incorporating my photography into different art endeavors and from there it just blossomed.

Everything must work in concert. Composition is important, but so are many other things, from content to the way colours work with or against each other.

When words leave off, music begins.

I'm a photographer, period. I love photography, the immediacy of it. I like the craft, the idea of saying 'I'm a photographer.'

Artistic tricks divert from the effect that an artist endeavors to produce, and even excellent elements such as bullets, arrows, brackets, ornate initials, are at best superficial ornamentation unless logically employed.

I just love the world of photography.

Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.

In painting, you don't have to go through a process of opinion; it speaks directly, and either it works, or it doesn't.

Music is in everything I do.

I will always, forever, write songs, and wherever they're meant to be is where they'll be.

I definitely think the best songs are written when you feel something strongly.

Nothing can stop a great song, so just keep songwriting.

To take photographs is putting one's head, one's eye, and one's heart on the same axis

Drawing and composition are the same thing.

I make a composition with a white and a black, and make adjustments when the white has become a paper and the black a shadow.

The art of making art, is putting it together.

We talk too much. We should talk less and draw more.

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.

If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.

As you are working on ideas, you are in a bubble, working on your images. What's important to me in my work, I like this idea of communicating through a piece of art so works don't have to be exchanged. They're okay and they're helpful but most importantly that the image will convey something in my mind that I was trying to communicate and then you have that connection.

What makes poetry? A full heart, brimful of one noble passion.

To paint is to love again, and to love is to live life to the fullest.

Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of character; it is just as credible that a stupid person should sing beautifully as that a clever person should do so.

Of course, it may be that the arts of writing and photography are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is that he maycommunicate a thought or an impression to his reader without the reader's realizing that he has been dragged through a series of hazardous or grotesque syntactical situations. In photography the goal seems to be to prove beyond a doubt that the cameraman, in his great moment of creation, was either hanging by his heels from the rafters or was wedged under the floor with his lens in a knothole.