Henri Matisse Quotes

It seemed to me that it was possible to translate light, forms, and character using nothing but color, without recourse to values.

The aim of our studies is to prove that color is the most relative means of artistic expression, that we never really perceive what color is physically.

It's too easy to say that orange is happy and black is sad. To me, black is perfect. You can fill it with the emotion you want to express.

In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is - as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.

Color must be thought, imagined, dreamed.

I paint what I think, not what I see.

The dominant invades the entire picture, as it were. In this way I seek to individualize the color, because I have come to believe that there is a living world of each color and I express these worlds.

Just as pure abstract art is not dogmatic, neither is it decorative.

Color is a matter of taste and of sensitivity.

Each color lives by its mysterious life.

There are people who don't respond to color. That's what painting is. It's color.

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

I first came up with the idea for the colour-chart pictures back in 1966, and my preoccupation with the topic culminated in 1974 with a painting that consisted of 4,096 colour fields. Initially I was attracted by the typical Pop Art aestheticism of using standard colour-sample cards; I preferred the unartistic, tasteful and secular illustration of the different tones to the paintings of Albers, Bill, Calderara, Lohse, etc.

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

I've never found anything to be lacking in a blurry canvas. Quite the contrary: you can see many more things in it than in a sharply focused image. A landscape painted with exactness forces you to see a determined number of clearly differentiated trees, while in a blurry canvas you can perceive as many trees as you want. The painting is more open.

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

Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear

Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with 'reality,' next to the 'real' world.

Color is crucial in painting, but it is very hard to talk about.

What a funny thing painting is. The abstract painters always insist on their connection with the visible reality, while the so called figurative artists insist that what they really care about, is the abstract qualities of life.

Color cannot stand alone.

abstract art is not the creation of another reality but the true vision of reality.

As a picture painted in yellow always radiates spiritual warmth, or as one in blue has apparently a cooling effect, so green is only boring.

Color is like cooking. The cook puts in more or less salt, that's the difference!

A painting or sculpture not modelled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone... but it is an incomplete art which privileges the intellect to the detriment of the senses.