Robert Henri Quotes

I haven't the slightest idea what art is, but to be a painter is something of which you have to prove.

Artists should never look at pictures, but should stutter in a language of their own.

Everything an artist spits is art.

While one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal. The first personality, which no one should copy.

I have long begged off the question of my albums reflecting where I am 'at' personally. There is more inaccuracy in that approach than accuracy.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

You reach deep down and bring up what feels absolutely authentic to you as you move along with the book, but you don't know everything about it. You can't.

The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world.

It seems to be a characteristic of all great work that it creators wear a cloak of imprecision.

I've always sort of marveled at our ability to chat and match, because of, I come, honestly I think of myself of as a little bit of hack, and think like that, and I think of her [Mia Michaels] as an artist.

Poems come from incomplete knowledge.

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!

I do remember at my very first opening in 1979 another artist coming up to me, and he was haranguing me, saying, "Did you really intend for these things to be so dumb? You just put it there and took a picture of it." He wouldn't let it go. So that's what made me think about the dumbness aspect more.

An artist’s job is to captivate… if we stumble into truth, we got lucky.

Both the man of science and the man of art live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it. Both, as a measure of their creation, have always had to do with the harmonization of what is new with what is familiar, with the balance between novelty and synthesis, with the struggle to make partial order in total chaos.... This cannot be an easy life.

I don't know of any good work of art that doesn't have a mystery.

An artist must be very careful not to look for models. As soon as one artist takes another as model, he is lost. There is no other point of departure than reality.

To create is to relate. We trust in the artist in everybody to make his own connections, his own juxtapositions.

It's true that I can write a song and not really be sure what the meaning of it is.

The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.

I think that artists provide questions, not answers. We provide provocations rather than fully formed objects.

If you think about it enough to have a really articulate answer, you're not doing it right. That's how I feel about art. If your thought process could take you to knowing exactly what you're doing and why, there would be no point in making the art. It would become like propaganda. It's more nebulous than that.

An artist must find his expression closely linked to his individual experience or else follow in the old grooves resulting in lifeless forms.