Robert Henri Quotes

What drives the creative person is that we see it all.

It is harder to see than it is to express. The whole value of art rests in the artist's ability to see well into what is before him. ... The model will serve equally for a Rembrandt drawing or for anybody's magazine cover. A genius is one who can see. The others can often 'draw' remarkably well. ... Those who get their technique first, expecting sight to come to them later, get a technique of a very ready-made order.

The artist tries to see what there is to be interested in... He has not created something, he has seen something.

An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Directing is so interesting. You know, it just sort of encompasses everything that you see, that you know, that you've felt, that you have observed.

Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.

The point of departure must always be a vision of the truth. The eye is the route of the soul, and the pencil or brush must sincerely and naïvely reproduce what it sees.

An artist's business is only to see.

I once taught art to adults in a night course. I had a woman who painted her back yard, and she said it was the first time she had ever really looked at it. I think everyone sees beauty. Art is a way to respond

Observe Everything. Communicate Well. Draw, Draw, Draw.

Seeing is in some respect an art, which must be learnt.

The camera is for us a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy ... people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.

There is creation in the eye.

Organized perception is what art is all about.

Speaking, when you have something to say, is like looking. But who looks? If people could see properly, and see whole, they would all be painters. And it's because people have no idea how to look that they hardly ever understand.

Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.

At the heart of art is learning to see

Sight is a faculty; seeing is an art.

(Art is) the residue of vision.

This thing called the camera, that takes everything in equally, taught me a lot about how to see.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Insight is the first condition of Art.

A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.

The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique.