Henri Matisse - Artist Quotes

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An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythms, by effort that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language.

Henri Matisse
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.

Henri Matisse
When an artist or student draws a nude figure with painstaking care, the result is drawing, and not emotion.

Henri Matisse
The artist begins with a vision — a creative operation requiring effort. Creativity takes courage.

Henri Matisse
The arts have a development which comes not only from the individual but also from a whole acquired force, the civilization which precedes us. One cannot do just anything. A talented artist cannot do whatever he pleases. If he only used his gifts, he would not exist. We are not the masters of what we produce. It is imposed on us.

Henri Matisse
The simplest means are those which best enable an artist to express himself. His means of expression must derive almost all of necessity from his temperament.

Henri Matisse
Color helps to express light, not the physical phenomenon, but the only light that really exists, that in the artist's brain.

Henri Matisse
The importance of an artist is to be measured by the quantity of new signs which he has introduced to the language of art.

Henri Matisse
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.

Henri Matisse
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.

Henri Matisse
The role of the artist, like that of the scholar, consists of seizing current truths often repeated to him, but which will take on new meaning for him and which he will make his own when he has grasped their deepest significance.

Henri Matisse
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.

Henri Matisse
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.

Henri Matisse
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.

Henri Matisse