Robert Henri Quotes

If you stand too close to a painting - all you see are patches of color, if you stand too far back, you can't see any of the detail.

There is no object so large but that at a great distance from the eye it does not appear smaller than a smaller object near.

There are three aspects to perspective. The first has to do with how the size of objects seems to diminish according to distance: the second, the manner in which colors change the farther away they are from the eye; the third defines how objects ought to be finished less carefully the farther away they are.

A mountain still in the distance can appear as a molehill.

I find it impossible to think of a picture save as a window, and my first concern about a window is to find out what it looks out on... and there is nothing I love so much as something which stretches away from me out of sight.

Paintings and fightings are best seen at a distance.

Perspective is nothing more than a rational demonstration applied to the consideration of how objects in front of the eye transmit their image to it, by means of a pyramid of lines. The Pyramid is the name I apply to the lines which, starting from the surface and edges of each object, converge from a distance and meet in a single point.

Everybody thinks they know what art should be. But very few of them have the sense that is necessary to experience painting, that is the sense of sight, that sees colors and forms as living reality in the picture.

A great painting is a great painting.

A friend who is far away is sometimes much nearer than one who is at hand. Is not the mountain far more awe-inspiring and more clearly visible to one passing through the valley than to those who inhabit the mountain?

Now, I love painting. I love looking. I love the fact that they don't move. They constantly change with the light. They are sort of patient.

Painting does what we cannot do - it brings a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane.

I love Monet - I've nicknamed him King Blob. When you go up to the painting, it's a series of blobs - amazing.

Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.

Double Spectacles

I really like the language of painting.

I love the way painting is so full of illusionistic possibilities.

For painting, I like strong lines, powerful pieces.

I'm good at shapes. If I'm not close, even if it's big, I can't read it.

I gravitate toward contemporary art. I love great paintings, sculpture, photography, some video art.

I have always been concerned with painting that simultaneously insists on a flat surface and then denies it.

[Pablo] Picasso really changed my life. It's strange to say so, but I started to see some Picasso paintings very early. I was very young, and he was not so much known.

Art first of all is optical. That's where the material of our art is: in what our eyes think.

I see paintings everywhere. I look at stuff and it looks like painting to me.

Ten properties of an object, according to Leonardo: light and dark, color and substance, form and position, distance and nearness, movement and stillness.