Henri Matisse
If I close my eyes, I see things better than with my eyes open.Collection: Eye
When I paint green, it doesn't mean grass; when I paint blue, it doesn't mean sky.Collection: Mean
Starting to paint, I felt gloriously free, quiet, and alone.Collection: Quiet
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.Collection: Dream
Seek the strongest color effect possible... the content is of no importance.Collection: Art
I am curious about color as one would be visiting a new country, because I have never concentrated so closely on color expression. Up to now I have waited at the gates of the temple.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Photography
A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man.Collection: Artist
My models, my human figures, are never like extras in an interior. They are the main theme of my work. I depend absolutely on my model.Collection: Figures
After a half-century of hard work and reflection the wall is still there.Collection: Wall
Put a colour upon a canvas - it not only colours with that colour the part of the canvas to which the colour has been applied, but it also colours the surrounding space with the complementary.Collection: Space
The importance of an artist is to be measured by the quantity of new signs which he has introduced to the language of art.Collection: Art
I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends.Collection: Expression
Color helps to express light, not the physical phenomenon, but the only light that really exists, that in the artist's brain.Collection: Artist
I was very embarrassed when my canvases began to fetch high prices. I saw myself condemned to a future of nothing but Masterpieces.Collection: Fetch
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.Collection: Artist
Did not the artists of the great age of Japanese art change names many times during their careers? I like that; they wanted to safeguard their freedom.Collection: Change
A work of art must carry in itself its complete significance and impose it upon the beholder even before he can identify the subject-matter.Collection: Art
The splitting up of color [as Impressionists did] brought the splitting up of form and contour . . . Everything is reduced to a mere sensation of the retina, but one which destroys all tranquility of surface and contour. Objects are differentiated only by the luminosity that is given them.Collection: Color
What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape, but the human figure.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Artist
Cutting straight into color reminds me of the direct carving of the sculptor.Collection: Art
An artist who wants to transpose a composition onto a larger canvas must conceive it over again in order to preserve its expression; he must alter its character and not just fill in the squares into which he has divided his canvas.Collection: Character
If it is practiced by a man of taste, the photograph will have the appearance of art (but) the photographer must...intervene as little as possible, so as not to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses.Collection: Photography
I was driven on by.. A force which I see today as something alien to my normal life... so I have been no more than a medium as it were.Collection: Today
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.Collection: Art
I am unable to make any distinction between the feeling I get from life and the way I translate that feeling into painting.Collection: Feelings
Precision is not realityCollection: Reality
A colourist makes his presence known even in a simple charcoal drawing.Collection: Simple
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.Collection: Garden
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.Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Work Out
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.Collection: Writing
I dream of an art of balance, of quietness, something analogous to a good armchair.Collection: Dream
The artist begins with a vision - a creative operation requiring an effort.Collection: Artist
Each work of art is a collection of signs invented during the picture's execution to suit the needs of their position. Taken out of the composition for which they were created, these signs have no further use.Collection: Art
From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.Collection: Hands
Creation is the artist's true function; where there is no creation there is no art.Collection: Art
I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have for life and my way of expressing it.Collection: Feelings
The chief function of color should be to serve expression as well as possible.Collection: Expression
A work should contain its total meaning within itself and should impress it on the spectator before he even knows the subject.Collection: Artistic
I shan't get free of my emotion by copying the tree faithfully, or by drawing its leaves one by one in the common language, but only after identifying myself with it.Collection: Drawing
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.Collection: Art
Perhaps I might be satisfied, momentarily, with a work finished at one sitting, but I would soon get bored looking at it; therefore, I prefer to continue working on it so that later I may recognize it as a work of my mind.Collection: Bored
The wall around the window does not create two worlds.Collection: Wall
Do remember that one line does nothing; it is only in relation to another that it creates a volume.Collection: Doe
A certain color tones you up. It's the concentration of timbres.Collection: Color
From Bonheur de Vivre - I was thirty-five then - to this cut-out - I am eighty-two - I have not changed; not in the way my friends mean who want to compliment me, no matter what, on my good health, but because all this time I have looked for the same things, which I have perhaps realized by different means.Collection: Mean