Henri Matisse Quotes

Only the human figure exists; landscape is, and should be, no more than an accessory; the painter exclusively of landscape is nothing but a bore.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

I'd say mostly I paint hot chicks.

I don't really think about a visual aspect to the work at all; I just think about making the piece. And everything that occurs visually comes out of the subject matter you are dealing with so that I find it difficult to treat the visual element as a separate entity.

I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.

I have never painted a self-portrait. I am less interested in myself as a subject for a painting than I am in other people, above all women... There is nothing special about me. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night... Who ever wants to know something about me... ought to look carefully at my pictures.

Painting allows me to use other portions of my brain pleasurably. Irony plays no part in what or how I paint. I paint the particular subject matter not to make polemical points but because I am interested in the human imprint on the landscape. I paint the landscape of my time and place with the stuff in it.

What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape, but the human figure.

Oh! I must somehow manage to do a figure in a few strokes.

I have tried to draw the human effigy (and all the other subjects dealt with in my paintings) in an immediate and effective way without any reference to the aesthetic.

Pictures must be miraculous: the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended.

To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

I am an artist. For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It's coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul. And you are like in some kind of possession, where you are doing anything to get the visual. You become another person. You're becoming an artist in action. And then a lot of miracles come. A lot of discovering. It's a very complicated thing.

Color is the essence of painting, which the subject always killed.

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.

When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.

In literary art, as in the art of the architect, the painter, the musician, signs that the artist is thinking of his own achievement more than of his subject always offend me.

Photography is not cute cats, nor nudes, motherhood or arrangements of manufactured products. Under no circumstances it is anything ever anywhere near a beach.

My drawings are the result of my sculpture.

Painting pictures is simply the official, the daily work, the profession, and in the case of the watercolours I can sooner afford to follow my mood, my spirits.

Drawing is the root of everything.

I have been sent more ridiculous press notices. People are frequently comparing my work with Van Gogh... I do hope I do not get bloated and self-satisfied. When proud feelings come I step up over them to the realm of work, to the thing I want, the liveness of the thing itself.

The mind of a painter should be like a mirror which is filled with as many images as there are things placed before him.

I still make paintings and use the figure; it's hard to do and hard to succeed. On some levels, because I am working with black figures and black pigment, it's even harder because I have to be more responsible for the image. I try to be really careful about the presence the figure projects.

When you think of painting as painting it is rather absurd. The real world is before us - glorious sunlight and activity and fresh air, and high speed motor cars and television, all the animation - a world apart from a little square of canvas that you smear paint on.