Robert Henri Quotes

Great art direction is NOT the same thing as great film direction!

Good composition is like a suspension bridge - each line adds strength and takes none away.

I just really wanted to do art, except when I was taking those photographs of people I would make the clothes that I would photograph them in so I could control the whole thing.

The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.

To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

Visual elements are, of course, the director's job.

This is about relationships, about the placement of potent colors and the canvas sparkling through. I want the eye to dance across the canvas but direct you, too.

Every song that I compose has to satisfy the music director in me.

Just give us 50 years where we're the only ones who are allowed to profit from art, and then you can do whoever you want. In fact, I'll buy you the paint. Whatever you want. Just give us 50 years. 50 years. That's it.

Nothing in art should seem accidental, not even movement

I don't wait on the music industry to qualify me or give me my paycheck. I go about my business as an artist and I believe that my value is in my product and in my art form, and that's why I can't be stopped, because I began producing my record by myself, without a record company.

The faculty of art is to change events; the faculty of science is to foresee them. The phenomena with which we deal are controlled by art; they are predicted by science.

How can you put out a meaningful drama when every fifteen minutes proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper? No dramatic art form should be dictated and controlled by men whose training and instincts are cut of an entirely different cloth. The fact remains that these gentlemen sell consumer goods, not an art form.

Art is manipulation without intervention.

Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose.

And after drawing comes composition. A well-composed painting is half done

As a writer you're holding a dog. You let the dog run about. But you finally can pull him back. Finally, I'm in control. But the great excitement is to see what happens if you let the whole thing go. And the dog or the character really runs about, bites everyone in sight, jumps up trees, falls into lakes, gets wet, and you let that happen. That's the excitement of writing plays-to allow the thing to be free but still hold the final leash.

It is simply impossible to control a large painting with the edge in the same way that you can control a small one.

Being movie director you've got the art department, you've got the actors, you've got the camera department, you've got make-up and hair, and props. You've got your finger in all these pies, and you're making sure that everything cooks at the right temperature.

Frame in terms of what you want to have in the picture, not about making a nice picture, that anybody can do.

You never really know what the director has got in his mind as far as the scene visually and art direction wise.

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.

Writers do the self-censoring before they even get to the studio executive, because they know the film will not run that gauntlet. They, because they want to get their films made, they censor it.

I don't get particularly precious about things like this, though. Like the record company said, "We need a radio edit that delivers the hook" - I don't even know what they consider the hook in that song ["Oh No"] - "that delivers the hook sooner." So I'm like, "Okay. I see that." And they were all walking on eggshells, like is this going to be sacrilegious to me or something, to mess with this art I've created? And I'm like, "Great. I get to tinker with it, I get to mess with my song some more."