Henri Matisse Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Henri Matisse on Wise Famous Quotes.
There's nothing clinically wrong with me, only an emotional imbalance - I pass too quickly from the wildest enthusiasm to the blackest despair.
I am unable to make any distinction between the feeling I get from life and the way I translate that feeling into painting.
It is not enough to place colors, however beautiful, one beside the other; colors must also react on one another. Otherwise, you have cacophony.
The portrait is one of the most curious art forms. It demands special qualities in the artist, and an almost total kinship with the model.
The importance of an artist is to be measured by the quantity of new signs which he has introduced to the language of art.
For my part I have never avoided the influence of others. I would have considered it cowardice and a lack of sincerity toward myself.
A work should contain its total meaning within itself and should impress it on the spectator before he even knows the subject.
There are wonderful things in Jazz, the improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.
I was very embarrassed when my canvases began to fetch high prices. I saw myself condemned to a future of nothing but Masterpieces.
I have simply wished to assert the reasoned and independent feeling of my own individuality within a total knowledge of tradition.
My choice of colors does not rest on any scientific theory, it is based on observation, on feeling, on the experience of my sensibility.
Drawing is ... not an exercise of particular dexterity, but above all a means of expressing intimate feelings and moods.
I have to create an object which resembles the tree. The sign for a tree, and not the sign that other artists may have found for the tree.
A young woman has young claws, well sharpened. If she has character, that is. And if she hasn't so much the worse for you.
My models, my human figures, are never like extras in an interior. They are the main theme of my work. I depend absolutely on my model ...
When an artist or student draws a nude figure with painstaking care, the result is drawing, and not emotion.
Don't try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out.
An artist is an explorer. He has to begin by self-discovery and by observation of his own procedure. After that he must not feel under any constraint.
I would like to recapture that freshness of vision which is characteristic of extreme youth when all the world is new to it.
Color was not given to us in order that we imitate Nature. It was given to us so that we can express our emotions.
A new painting is a unique event, a birth, which enriches the universe as it is grasped by the human mind, by bringing a new form into it.
The use of expressive colors is felt to be one of the basic elements of the modern mentality, an historical necessity, beyond choice.
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.
When I eat a tomato I look at it the way anyone else would. But when I paint a tomato, then I see it differently.