Explore Quotes by Henri Matisse

The artist begins with a vision - a creative operation requiring effort. Creativity takes courage.

I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colors is black.

Art should be something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.

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.

Truth and reality in art do not arise until you no longer understand what you are doing and are capable of but nevertheless sense a power that grows in proportion to your resistance.

I have always sought to be understood and, while I was taken to task by critics or colleagues, I thought they were right, assuming I had not been clear enough to be understood. This assumption allowed me to work my whole life without hatred and even without bitterness toward criticism, regardless of its source. I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends. 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.

In art, truth and reality begin when one no longer understands what one is doing or what one knows, and when there remains an energy that is all the stronger for being constrained, controlled and compressed.

Don't wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working.

My choice of colors does not rest on any scientific theory, it is based on observation, on feeling, on the experience of my sensibility.

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

A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful.

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

Color exists in itself, possessing its own beauty.

Purer colors... have in themselves, independently of the objects they serve to express, a significant action on the feelings of those who look at them.

The chief function of color should be to serve expression as well as possible.

It is with color that you render light, though you must also feel this light, have it within yourself.

Color, even more than drawing, is a means of liberation.

Seek for the boldest color possible, content is irrelevant.

Drawing is putting a line around an idea.

An artist must not feel under any constraint.

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.