Robert Henri

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

Know what the old masters did. Know how they composed their pictures, but do not fall into the conventions they established. These conventions were right for them, and they are wonderful. They made their language. You make yours. All the past can help you.

The sketch hunter moves through life as he finds it, not passing negligently the things he loves, but stopping to know them, and to note them down in the shorthand of his sketchbook.

You form a society: that limits you. Adopt a name, and you've limited yourself again; draw up a constitution and bylaws and you've made a groove, a rut, that hampers your growth. You think you can fix your course and move straight along it. But sometimes the important thing is to strike out sidewise.

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.

Do not let the fact that things are not made for you, that conditions are not as they should be stop you. Go on anyway. Everything depends on those who go on anyway.

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

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature.

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

Your style is the way you talk in paint.

Art when really understood is the province of every human being. It is simply a question of doing things, anything, well. It is not an outside, extra thing.

I can think of no greater happiness than to be clear-sighted and know the miracle when it happens. And I can think of no more real life than the adventurous one of living and liking and exclaiming the things of one's own time.

An artist's job is to surprise himself. Use all means possible.

The object, which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence. In such moments activity is inevitable, and whether this activity is with brush, pen, chisel, or tongue, its result is but a by-product of the state, a trace, the footprint of the state.

When the motives of artists are profound, when they are at their work as a result of deep consideration, when they believe in the importance of what they are doing, their work creates a stir in the world.

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

Let every student enter the school with this advice. No matter how good the school is, his education is in his own hands. All education must be self education.

Find out what you really like if you can. Find out what is really important to you. Then sing your song. You will have something to sing about and your whole heart will be in the singing.

Painting should never look as if it were done with difficulty, however difficult it may actually have been.

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

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