Henri Matisse Quotes

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

I don't paint women, I paint pictures. . . What I am after above all is expression. If in a portrait I put eyes, a nose, a mouth, there isn't much use; on the contrary it paralyses the imagination of the spectator, and obliges us to see the person in a certain way.

Art is the expression of imagination, not the reproduction of reality.

Through art, you create your own world.

Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together, in a single imaginary being, circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.

There are websites of 'True Detective' artwork out there now, and it's beautiful. And I don't want to take that away from anybody. I know what it means to me. But I don't want to take away anyone's interpretation of the show.

Art is the most beautiful of all lies.

Sometimes I think that there's a fine line between impressionistic and messy.

I think everything's fair in art and how you perceive a character.

If I paint something, I don't want to have to explain what it is.

Not all paintings are abstract; they're not all Jackson Pollock. There's value in a photograph of a man alone on a boat at sea, and there is value in painting of a man alone on a boat at sea. In the painting, the painting has more freedom to express an idea, more latitude in being able to elicit certain emotion.

My art, like my acting, is a profound expression of poetic license.

If you look at ancient Chinese paintings, you see mountains, but they are not real mountains; it is something the artists imagined.

Everyone knows that yellow, orange, and red suggest ideas of joy and plenty. I can paint you the skin of Venus with mud, provided you let me surround it as I will.

In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation.

As an artist I would like to eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color.

If artists do see fields blue they are deranged, and should go to an asylum. If they only pretend to see them blue, they are criminals and should go to prison.

Poets and painters have the power to dare, I mean to dare to do whatever they may approve of.

There is no model, there is only color.

I was trying. I was crawling. I was coming into myself. I was trying to in some ways get beyond - what is the word that I'm looking for? - metaphorical language in painting, and to create something that was more indexical. And what I mean by that is that when you go to the library there's an index card that refers to a book that's actual and real in the world. So that index relates to something real.

A color which would be 'dirty' if it were the color of a wall, needn't be so in a painting.

Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction.

The idea of space is given to the artist to change if he can. The subject matter in the abstract is space.

Painting is drawing, with the additional means of color. Painting without drawing is just 'coloriness,' color excitement. To think of color for color's sake is like thinking of sound for sound's sake. Color is like music. The palette is an instrument that can be orchestrated to build form.