Henri Matisse Quotes

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.

Painting is drawing, with the additional means of color. Painting without drawing is just 'coloriness,' color excitement. To think of color for color's sake is like thinking of sound for sound's sake. Color is like music. The palette is an instrument that can be orchestrated to build form.

Through art, you create your own world.

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you'd rather be in.

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.

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

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

I crave to be able to photograph the way a painter paints - in a loose, expressive way.

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

I'm not a lyric writer to make statements. What I enjoy doing is making paintings with lyrics, creating colorful images. I think that's more what entertainment and music should be.

If I paint something, I don't want to have to explain what it is.

The more tools we have directors and cinematographers will be able to express more and create different worlds and feelings. It's like having more instruments in an orchestra.

My art, like my acting, is a profound expression of poetic license.

What counts most is finding new ways to get the world down in paint on my own terms.

I don't paint women, I paint pictures. . . What I am after above all is expression. If in a portrait I put eyes, a nose, a mouth, there isn't much use; on the contrary it paralyses the imagination of the spectator, and obliges us to see the person in a certain way.

In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation.

I'm not a poet. I'm not up onstage to get something off my chest. I'm making musical statements, or, most of the time, musical questions for people to figure out, and I'm not going to get in the way of that.

The way an actor is trained doesn't ultimately have much bearing on my work. I'm interested in the actor as artist.

I love photography and I love the art of photography. So when I'm working with high-level art photographers, I give them artistic freedom because I want that for myself when it's my turn to do my work and I never try and control it or say I'll only do this or I want it like that.

I believe that the problem of how you depict something is a formal problem. It's an interesting one and it's a permanent one; there's no solution to it. There are a thousand and one ways you can go about it. There's no set rule.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

By the combination of lines and colors, under the pretext of some motif taken from nature, I create symphonies and harmonies that represent nothing absolutely real in the ordinary sense of the word but are intended to give rise to thoughts as music does.

For a poet, making poems is a way of viewing the world, being in the world, breathing.

If artists do see fields blue they are deranged, and should go to an asylum. If they only pretend to see them blue, they are criminals and should go to prison.