Robert Henri quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Robert Henri

Robert Henri Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Robert Henri on Wise Famous Quotes.

You will never find yourself unless you quit preconceiving what you will be when you have found yourself.

Has your drawing the meaning you saw in the model at first?

A common defect of modern art study is that too many students do not know why they draw.

When we respect the nude, we will no longer have any shame about it.

Finished persons are very common - people who are closed up, quite satisfied that there is little more to learn

Whatever you feel or think your exact state at the exact moment of your brush touching the canvas is in some way registered in that stroke.

To have ideas one must have imagination. To express ideas one must have science.

I am interested in the size of your intention. It is better to overstate the important than to understate it.

Artists must be men of wit, consciously or unconsciously philosophers; read, study and think a great deal of life ...

A drawing should be a verdict on the model. Don't confuse a drawing with a map.

It's a wrong idea that a master is a finished person. Masters are very faulty; they haven't learned everything and they know it.

All is as beautiful as we think it.

Many things that come into the world are not looked into. The individual says 'My crowd doesn't run that way.' I say, don't run with crowds.

The reason for the survival of the award system is purely commercial.

Work always as if you were a master, expect from yourself a masterpiece.

Life is finding yourself. It is a spirit development.

All outward success, when it has value, is but the inevitable result of an inward success of full living, full play and enjoyment of one's faculties.

There is always a commanding and simple line around each head. Learn to have a love for the big simple line.

There are forms that can only be seen when you are near a painting, others only appear when you are far away.

Everything depends on the attitude of the artist toward his subject. It is essential.

Art is certainly not a pursuit for anyone who wants to make money.

The picture that looks as if it were done without an effort may have been a perfect battlefield in its making.

The pictures which do not represent an intense interest cannot expect to create an intense interest.

A GREAT PAINTER will know a great deal about how he did it, but still he will say, "How did I do it?" The real artist's work is a surprise to himself.

In certain books - some way in the first few paragraphs you know that you have met a brother.

Colors are beautiful when they are significant.

Paint what you feel. Paint what you see. Paint what is real to you.

Knowledge of anatomy is a tool like good brushes.

Develop your visual memory. Draw everything you have drawn from the model from memory as well.

Paint like a fiend when the idea possesses you.

In great art there is no beginning and end in point of time. All time is comprehended.

There is weakness in pretending to know more than you know or in stating less than you know.

Keep a bad drawing until by study you have found out why it is bad.

Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.

After all, the goal is not making art. It is living a life. Those who live their lives will leave the stuff that is really art.

Feel the dignity of a child. Do not feel superior to him, for you are not.

Why do we love the sea? It is because it has some potent power to make us think things we like to think.

If you work from memory, you are most likely to put in your real feeling.

There are mighty few people who think what they think they think.

A man must be master of himself and master of his word to achieve the full realization of himself as an artist.

There is nothing in all the world more beautiful or significant of the laws of the universe than the nude human body.

The most vital things in the look of a landscape endure only for a moment. Work should be done from memory; memory of that vital moment.

Look for echoes. Sometimes the same shape or direction will echo through the picture.

What we need is more sense of the wonder of life and less of this business of making a picture.

We are troubled by having two selves, the inner and the outer. The outer one is rather dull and lets great things go by.

Battle against obscurity

I paint for the sole purpose of magnifying the privilege of being alive.

Realize that a drawing is not a copy. It is a construction in very different materials. A drawing is an invention.

If you think of a school drawing while you work, your drawing will look like one.

To paint is to know how to put nothing on canvas, and have it look like something when you stand back.

Those who express even a little of themselves never become old-fashioned.

Get the few main lines and see what lines they call out.

Your only hope of satisfying others is in satisfying yourself. I speak of a great satisfaction, not a commercial satisfaction.

Renoir had not only a great interest in human character, in human feeling, but had also a great love for the people he painted.

Color is only beautiful when it means something.

Art appreciation, like love, cannot be done by proxy: It is a very personal affair and is necessary to each individual.

Self-education only produces expressions of self.

Art is an outsider, a gypsy over the face of the earth.

A mountain seen in the haze of distance must nevertheless look a solid heavy mountain.

Count on big lines to express your ideas.

You pass people on the street, some are for you, some are not.

Do whatever you do intensely.

There are pictures that manifest education and there are pictures that manifest love.

We read books. They make us think. It matters very little whether we agree with the books or not.

Your style is the way you talk in paint.

The ignorant are to be found as much among the educated as among the uneducated.

Do not worry about your originality. You could not get rid of it even if you wanted to.

Cherish your own emotions and never under-value them.
We are not here to do what has already been done.

Things should all be moving toward the expression of a great idea.

I have heard it very often said that an artist does not need intelligence, that his is the province of the soul

A Curve does not exist in its full power until contrasted with a straight line.

The artist should be intoxicated with the idea of the thing he wants to express.

If you do not act on a suggestion at first, you grow dull to its message.

A picture should be the expression of the will of the painter.

By my teaching I hope to inspire you to personal activity and to present your vision.

It is harder to see than it is to express. The whole value of art rests in the artist's ability to see well into what is before him.

All the past up to a moment ago is your legacy. You have a right to it.

A weak background is a deadly thing.

The model is not to be copied, but to be realized.

Do not expect pictures to say the expected; some of the best will have surprises for you, which will, at first, shock you.

The great painter has something to say. He does not paint men, landscapes, or furniture; but an idea.

The fun of living is that we have to make ourselves, after all.

All manifestations of art are but landmarks in the progress of the human spirit toward a thing but as yet sensed and far from being possessed.

Those who cannot begin do not finish.

No work of Art is really ever finished. They only stop at good places.

Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing.

We make our discoveries while in the state [of high functioning] because then we are clear-sighted.

The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.

Pretend you are dancing or singing a picture. A worker or painter should enjoy his work, else the observer will not enjoy it.

I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living.

The artist should have a powerful will. He should be powerfully possessed by one idea

If the artist's will is not strong he will see all kinds of unessential things.

The end will be what it will be. The object is intense living, fulfillment; the great happiness in creation.

All real works of art look as though they were done in joy.

Fight with yourself when you paint, not with the model. A student is one who struggles with himself for order.

The good thing about painting from memory is that so much is forgotten.

Completion does not depend on
material representation. The work is done when that special thing has been said.

Be a warhorse for work and enjoy even the struggle against defeat.

Reality is obtained not by imitation, but by producing the sense of nature.

Art is an extension of language - an expression of sensations too subtle for words.