Henri Matisse Quotes about Art

There are always flowers for those who want to see them.

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

Art is an escape from reality.

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.

Would not it be best to leave room to mystery?

Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul.

...The more a picture has to give, the greater it is.

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.

Work cures everything.

It is not enough to place colors, however beautiful, one beside the other; colors must also react on one another. Otherwise, you have cacophony.

I want to reach that condensation of sensations that constitutes a picture.

Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say.

I wouldn't mind turning into a vermilion goldfish.

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

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.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

You study, you learn, but you guard the original naivete. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.

I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.

A painting in an interior spreads joy around it by the colors, which calm us.

It would be a mistake to ascribe this creative power to an inborn talent. In art, the genius creator is not just a gifted being, but a person who has succeeded in arranging for their appointed end, a complex of activities, of which the work is the outcome. The artist begins with a vision — a creative operation requiring an effort. Creativity takes courage.

An artist must never be a prisoner. Prisoner? An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc.

Seek the strongest color effect possible... the content is of no importance.

All art worthy of the name is religious.

What's so astonishing about not understanding? There are so many things in art, beginning with art itself, that one doesn't understand. A painter doesn't see everything that he has put in his painting.

All my efforts go into creating an art that can be understood by everyone.