Henri Matisse Quotes

A fine artist is one who makes familiar things new and new things familiar.

Everything that we see in our daily lives is more or less distorted by acquired habits and this is perhaps more evident in an age like ours when cinema posters and magazines present us every day with a flood of ready-made images which are to the eye what prejudices are to the mind. The effort to see things without distortion demands a kind of courage; and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he were seeing it for the first time.

Sarah Vaughan is one of my greatest heroes. She personifies what an artist is all about, taking risks, daring to go beyond the boundaries of safety and convention. It takes courage to share your vulnerability.

Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.

In every artist there is a touch of audacity without which no talent is conceivable.

This, I thought, is how great visionaries and poets see everything- as if for the first time. Each morning they see a new world before their eyes; they do not really see it, they create it.

Artists can have greater access to reality; they can see patterns and details and connections that other people, distracted by the blur of life, might miss. Just sharing that truth can be a very powerful thing.

A man is an artist only at certain moments, by an effort of will. Objects have the same appearance for everybody.

An artist's business is only to see.

Seeing the world anew, as if it were new, is as old as writing. It's what all painters are trying to do, to see what's there, to see it in a way that renews it. It becomes more and more urgent as the planet gets worn flat and forest after forest is slain to print the paper for people's impressions to be scrawled down on. It becomes harder and harder to be original, to see things with an innocent eye. Innocence is much tied up with it. As the planet gets progressively less innocent, you need a more innocent eye to see it.

I’m an artist who is always looking for what is possible. I’m always looking to extend the boundaries.

The artist has only to trust his eyes.

[W]hat counts is that one perceives excellence and dares to give it expression, which sounds little but is in fact a great deal.

An artist is a person who has invented an artist.

An artist must have imagination. An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic.

When you're working with other artists, it's often a mix of your ideas with somebody else's, which can be extremely fruitful. But then it's also interesting to present the completely undiluted vision of what I imagine music could be. I care about both my own music and collaboration equally, and I pretty much split my time equally, as well.

A great artist ... takes what he did not make and makes of it something that only he can make.

The artists must see all things as if he were seeing them for the first time. All his life he must see as he did when he was a child.

If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.

Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.

for what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that others cannot hear?

The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.

The artist tries to see what there is to be interested in... He has not created something, he has seen something.

All artists are of necessity in some measure contemplative.

I feel that any man that tries, any man that comes out with something we like, is a good man. A man doesn't have to be Leonardo Da Vinci to be sincere.