Robert Henri Quotes

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

It's hard to predict and to say what goes on inside the minds of an artist, but that's what makes them an artist. That sense of creativity. That thing that makes them tick is probably the very thing that pushes them to the extremes that sometimes can cause, you know, fatalities and things that, you know, that end up not being good.

If you cut a painter's hands off, he'd still feel the urge to pick up a brush.

To me that's what art is about - when you don't really have any control over your desires to do it.

Painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement.

Only be an artist if you have no choice!

Art is a beautiful world to get into. Once you are there, it is very difficult to get out of it. Like, once you start painting, you don't want to leave your brush and colours.

I think that-that anyone, the painter, the musician, the writer works in a-a kind of an-an insane fury. He's demon-driven. He can get up feeling rotten, with a hangover, or with-with actual pain, and-and if he gets to work, the first thing he knows, he don't remember that pain, that hangover-he's too busy.

That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman--the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.

Not that painting would have been a release. The reason for doing it is the desire to create. I've got to do it! I've seen that, I can still remember it, I've got to paint it.

The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.

I feel lucky that I've been able to make a living from painting any idea that comes into my head.

Art is something you can't teach, but you can inspire it.

I'm very interested to see how this new painting will go - I know I want it big and stark, and as I said, I follow the muse, and that's when it always works perfectly for me.

My compulsion is to create things.

I liked drawing and painting, because the only failure would be to listen to the doubters who wanted me to stop drawing and painting because 'you aren't going to make a living doing that.' I liked looking in art books at the work of painters.

Filmmakers are going to make films, just like painters are going to paint.

I don't paint to live, I live to paint.

The real artist has no idea that he is sacrificing himself for art. He does what he does for one reason and one reason only-he can't help doing it.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

When I was in high school, I was going to be a painter because I had a facility for painting. I could do it, but I didn't have anything to say in that medium.

In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?

But where there is no art show, I would still be painting.

Any musician who can stop may be a musician, but they're no artist. If it's in your blood, it can't stop flowing.

I'm the kind of person who lives my art. It's not that I want to necessarily do it: it's that I have to. It's always been that way. That's how I write songs, and it's always been this way.