Henri Matisse Quotes

Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.

Light is a thing that cannot be reproduced, but must be represented by something else - by color.

It seemed to me that it was possible to translate light, forms, and character using nothing but color, without recourse to values.

Shut your eyes, wait, think of nothing. Now, open them ... one sees nothing but a great coloured undulation. What then? An irradiation and glory of colour. This is what a picture should give us ... an abyss in which the eye is lost, a secret germination, a coloured state of grace ... loose conciousness. Descend with the painter into the dim tangled roots of things, and rise again from them in colours, be steeped in the light of them.

A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.

I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.

In art, as in science, reductionism does not trivialize our perception - of color, light, and perspective - but allows us to see each of these components in a new way.

I know colors like some people know a melody. And the tunes of my favorite musicians energizes me when I work.

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

The starting point of a picture for any painter is a matter of colors and form...I believe that the poetry of art - if that is what one may call it - is a matter of animating these forms and colors.

By using patches of color and tone it is possible to capture every natural impression in the simplest way, freshly and immediately.

The painter has to unlearn the habit of thinking that things seem to have the color which common sense says they 'really' have, and to learn the habit of seeing things as they appear.

As an artist I would like to eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color.

Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.

Colored planes, by their position and size as well as by their value, express only relationships, not forms.

Color, which is the poet's wealth, is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.

Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing.

The painter thinks in terms of form and color. The goal is not to be concerned with the reconstitution of an anecdotal fact, but with constitution of a pictorial fact.

There is a logic of colors, and it is with this alone, and not with the logic of the brain, that the painter should conform.

Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?

I simply try to put down colors which render my sensation

Color is one of the great things in the world that makes life worth living to me and as I have come to think of painting it is my efforts to create an equivalent with paint color for the world, life as I see it.

Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colors, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look and listen.

The role of the painter . . . is to project that which sees itself in him.

Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese absolutely enchanted me, for they took away all sense of subject... It was the poetry of color which I felt, procreative in its nature, giving birth to a thousand things which the eye cannot see, and distinct from their cause.