Henri Matisse Quotes

I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.

I'm a painter, that's where I started out, at four years old, that was my first love as far as expression. So, I'm not a painter in the sense of, "Please come see my paintings" but, I do understand the value of not looking over the artist's shoulder while the work is in progress.

Artists can no more speak about their work, than plants can speak about horticulture.

Preliminary drawings or sketches in oil or pastel often have an immediacy and emotional appeal far greater than the final canvas.

The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

In any art, you don't know in advance what you want to say - it's revealed to you as you say it. That's the difference between art and illustration.

An artist observes, selects, guesses, and synthesizes.

Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.

The artist is called a creator.

The collaboration which sometimes follows is seldom based on good will: usually on desire, rage, fear, pity or longing. The modern illusion concerning painting (which post-modernism has done nothing to correct) is that the artist is the creator. Rather he is a reciever. What seems like creaton is the act of giving form to what he has recieved.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

The frame is the reward of the artist.

The idea is that what an artist lives through should broaden his notion of what it is possible for a human being to live through, and that new understanding should then get into and expand the work.

A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.

The interesting thing about this is I don't know what my vision [ in Salome the play and Salomaybe] is yet about. I'm sensing something and I'm going along with it. It reminds me of a painting, the way Jackson Pollack painted - Jackson Pollack, the great, great artist.

Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.

Becoming an artist does not merely mean learning something, acquiring professional techniques and methods. Indeed, as someone has said, in order to write well you have to forget the grammar.

The art is just really mysterious. If I understood it more, maybe I would write more.

I was being an artist, being sensitive and technical as artists are. I'm sure Leonardo Da Vinci did that. Artists don't always feel the same as others feel about their work.

I seldom have my stuff up unless I'm testing it. If I'm worrying about a painting, I put it up and see if I detest it quickly or slowly. Otherwise I have things by other artists.

The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

I have to go with what the painting says to me. The painting is always informing me. I'm its servant; it's not mine. I'm doing what it wants.