Henri Matisse Short Quotes

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[I wouldn't mind turning into] a vermilion goldfish.

Henri Matisse
I simply put down colours which render my sensation.

Henri Matisse
A painter has really no serious enemies like his bad paintings.

Henri Matisse
A certain color tones you up. It's the concentration of timbres.

Henri Matisse
A colourist makes his presence known even in a simple charcoal drawing.

Henri Matisse
To draw is to make an idea precise. Drawing is the precision of thought.

Henri Matisse
I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends.

Henri Matisse
Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.

Henri Matisse
The residuum of another's expression can never be related to one's own feeling.

Henri Matisse
He who loves, flies, runs, and rejoices; he is free and nothing holds him back.

Henri Matisse
I am driven on by an idea that I really only grasp as it grows with the picture.

Henri Matisse
A certain blue enters your soul. A certain red has an effect on your blood-pressure.

Henri Matisse
Hatred is a parasite that devours all. One doesn't build upon hatred, but upon love.

Henri Matisse
With greater completeness and abstraction, I have attained a form filtered to its essentials.

Henri Matisse
Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us.

Henri Matisse
Drawing with scissors: To cut to the quick in color reminds me of the direct cutting of sculptors.

Henri Matisse
Do remember that one line does nothing; it is only in relation to another that it creates a volume.

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

Henri Matisse
For me all is in the conception. I must therefore have a clear vision of the whole from the beginning.

Henri Matisse
I want anyone tired, worn down, driven to the limits of endurance, to find calm and repose in my painting.

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

Henri Matisse
The things that are acquired consciously permit us to express ourselves unconsciously with a certain richness.

Henri Matisse
Rules have no existence outside of individuals: otherwise a good professor would be as great a genius as Racine.

Henri Matisse
For whether we want to or not, we belong to our time and we share in its opinions, its feelings, even its delusions.

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
We are born with the sensibility of a period of civilization. We are not masters of our production; it is imposed upon us.

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
I have simply wished to assert the reasoned and independent feeling of my own individuality within a total knowledge of tradition.

Henri Matisse
The use of expressive colors is felt to be one of the basic elements of the modern mentality, an historical necessity, beyond choice.

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