Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid, brilliant and original draughtsmanship. As a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but principally as a painter, Matisse is one of the best-known artists of the 20th century.
Let this list of 18 quotations by the French artist Henri Matisse lead you to an inspirational day. Recharge yourself with motivational nature, artist, mind sayings, and satisfy your hunger for a better life.
What are the best Henri Matisse quotes?
We've made this hand-picked collection of quotes to show you what is Henri Matisse truly willing to say and leave for generations. Whether an inspirational quote or a motivational message about giving your best, we can all benefit from the wisdom, captured within these words.
There are always flowers for those who want to see them.
It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color - not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.
There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.
Don't wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working.
I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.
Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.
Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us.
The use of expressive colors is felt to be one of the basic elements of the modern mentality, an historical necessity, beyond choice.
The essential thing is to work in a state of mind that approaches prayer.
When a painting is finished, it's like a new born child, and the artist himself must have time for understanding. How then do you expect an amateur to understand that which the artist dos not yet comprehend.
Slowly I discovered the secret of my art.
It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say.
It would be a mistake to ascribe this creative power to an inborn talent.
In art, the genius creator is not just a gifted being, but a person who has succeeded in arranging for their appointed end, a complex of activities, of which the work is the outcome. The artist begins with a vision — a creative operation requiring an effort. Creativity takes courage.
Creative people are curious, flexible, and independent with a tremendous spirit and a love of play.
When an artist or student draws a nude figure with painstaking care, the result is drawing, and not emotion.
Composition, the aim of which is expression, alters itself according to the surface to be covered. If I take a sheet of paper of given dimensions, I will jot down a drawing which will have a necessary relation to its format.
There are wonderful things in Jazz, the improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.
Hatred, rancor, and the spirit of vengeance are useless baggage to the artist.
His road is difficult enough for him to cleanse his soul of everything which could make it more so.
Cezanne, you see, is a sort of God of painting.
With color one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft.
Creation is the artist's true function; where there is no creation there is no art.
The residuum of another's expression can never be related to one's own feeling.
What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape, but the human figure.
Color was not given to us in order that we should imitate Nature.
It was given to us so that we can express our emotions.
A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful.
The sign for which I forge an image has no value if it doesn't harmonize with other signs, which I must determine in the course of my invention and which are completely peculiar to it.
Beauty comes from the balance between two and three dimensions, between abstraction and representation - I seek the equilibrium behind changing appearances.
I have been no more than a medium, as it were.
Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements which the painter uses to express his sentiments. In a picture every separate part will be visible and... everything which has no utility in the picture is for that reason harmful.
To draw is to make an idea precise. Drawing is the precision of thought.
It is my dream to create an art which is filled with balance, purity and calmness, freed from a subject matter that is disconcerting or too attention-seeking. In my paintings, I wish to create a spiritual remedy, similar to a comfortable armchair which provides rest from physical expectation for the spiritually working, the businessman as well as the artist.
I do not repudiate any of my paintings but there isn't one of them that I would not redo differently, if I had it to redo. My destination is always the same but I work out a different route to get there.
Starting to paint, I felt gloriously free, quiet, and alone.
A picture must possess a real power to generate light and for a long time now I've been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light.
Love wants to rise, not to be held down by anything base.
.. He who loves flies, runs, and rejoices; he is free and nothing holds him back. Derive happiness from yourself, from a good day's work, from the clearing that it makes in the fog that surrounds us.
Photographs will always be impressive because they show us nature, and all artists will find in them a world of sensations. The photographer must therefore intervene as little as possible, so as not to cause photography to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses, notwithstanding its defects.
Truth and reality in art begin at the point where the artist ceases to understand what he is doing and capable of doing - yet feels in himself a force that becomes steadily stronger... and more concentrated.
Simple colours can affect the intimate feelings with all the more force because they are simple.
There's nothing clinically wrong with me, only an emotional imbalance - I pass too quickly from the wildest enthusiasm to the blackest despair.
The sign is determined at the moment I use it and for the object of which it must form a part. For this reason I cannot determine in advance signs which never change, and which would be like writing: that would paralyze the freedom of my invention.
Art should be something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.
...for whether we want to or not, we belong to our time and we share in its opinions, its feelings, even its delusions.
The living model, the naked body of a woman, is the privileged seat of feeling, but also of questioning... The model must mark you, awaken in you an emotion which you seek in turn to express.
When you're out of will power you call on stubbornness, that's the trick.
Exactitude is not truth.
[Fr., L'exactitude n'est pas la verite.]
The model for me is a touchstone, it is a door which I must break open in order to reach the garden in which I am alone and feel good, even the model exists only for what use I can make of it.
Ever since there have been men, man has given himself over to too little joy.
That alone, my brothers, is our original sin. I should believe only in a God who understood how to dance.
To arrive is to be in prison.
Color, even more than drawing, is a means of liberation.
Arrival = Prison, and the artist must never be a prisoner.
One must, of course, have one's entire experience behind one and not have lost the freshness of instinct.
