Robert Henri Quotes

An artist is someone who makes art... He didn't invent it.

If you want to paint the inner life, you paint it from the exterior. From the exterior, you breathe the inner life into your painting.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

To create a work of art is to create the world.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there'd be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you.

A drawing is an autobiographical record of one's discovery of an event - either seen, remembered or imagined. A 'finished' work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.

Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite - getting something down.

Shading is more like copying. And certainly I do copy, but I'm making drawings, and I'm not trying to make them with the shading.

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

In art, theories are as useful as a doctor's prescription; one must be sick to believe them.

The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself.

Ironically, my paintings don't photograph well.

Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found.

When you use the language of 'fact checking' to talk about a film, I think you're sort of fundamentally misunderstanding how art works. You don't fact check Monet's 'Water Lilies.' That's not what water lilies look like; that's what the sensation of experiencing water lilies feel like. That's the goal of the piece.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.

When I first drew him I had eyes in there and it didn't look right.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

If we talk about art in general... all the works of art, each one of them could reflect a moment in the history of mankind, the time in which it was created.

We look at the Mona Lisa and say we're going to do our version of the Mona Lisa. We mirror it. But exaptation would say that painting the Mona Lisa would lead to a whole new place... Bugs Bunny.

I suppose I consider my work a kind of picture making.

When you draw, you copy the world don't you? You remake it on paper, but it isn't the same. It's yours. No one else could have created it just like that. When I make poems, I use the words we all use, but the order and the sound create a new power. This wood is someone's creation. We stumble through it's tendrils, as if we're crawling through the synapses of his mind.