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Matisse Art Quotations

Sonal Panse
Henri Matisse was a famous French painter. Apart from painting, he was also a sculptor and draftsman. Given are some of his famous quotes.
1. "After a half-century of hard work and reflection the wall is still there."
2. "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."
3. "A young painter who cannot liberate himself from the influence of past generations is digging his own grave."
4. "Creativity takes courage."
5. "What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter."
6. "One gets into a state of creativity by conscious work."
7. "Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul."
8. "A picture must possess a real power to generate light, and for a long time now I've been conscious of expressing myself through light, or rather in light."
9. "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."
10. "Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is."
11. "A new painting is a unique event, a birth, which enriches the universe as it is grasped by the human mind, by bringing a new form into it."
12. "In art, truth and reality begin when you no longer understand anything you do or know and there remains in you an energy, that much stronger for being balanced by opposition, compressed, condensed. Then you must present it with the greatest humility."
13. "A certain color tones you up. It's the concentration of timbres."
14. "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."
15. "In most cases success equals prison... An artist should never be: prisoner of himself, prisoner of a manner, prisoner of a reputation, prisoner of success."
16. "With greater completeness and abstraction, I have attained a form filtered to its essentials."
17. "Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting should begin by cutting out his tongue."
18. "From the first shock of the contemplation of a face depends the principal sensation which guides me throughout the entire execution of a portrait."
19. "Drawing is of the spirit; color is of the senses."
20. "I do not repudiate any of my paintings, but there is not one of them that I would not redo differently."
21. "I would like to recapture that freshness of vision which is characteristic of extreme youth when all the world is new to it."
22. "In the beginning you must subject yourself to the influence of nature. You must be able to walk firmly on the ground before you start walking on a tightrope."
23. "It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color - not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression."
24. "An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm, by efforts that will prepare the mastery which will later enable him to express himself in his own language."
25. "Creative people are curious, flexible, persistent and independent with a tremendous spirit of adventure and a love of play."
26. "Exactitude is not truth."
27. "I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me."
28. "A large part of the beauty of a picture arises from the struggle which an artist wages with his limited medium."
29. "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."
30. "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."
31. "The residuum of another's expression can never be related to one's own feeling."
32. "I am simply conscious of the forces I am using and I am driven on by an idea that I really only grasp as it grows with the picture."
33. "It is through the human figure that I best succeed in expressing the nearly religious feeling that I have towards life."
34. "All that is not useful in a picture is detrimental. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety; for superfluous details would, in the mind of the beholder, encroach upon the essential elements."
35. "Put a color upon a canvas - it not only colors with that color the part of the canvas to which the color has been applied, but it also colors the surrounding space with the complementary."
36. "In art, the genuine 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."
37. "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."
38. "I was very embarrassed when my canvases began to fetch high prices. I saw myself condemned to a future of nothing but Masterpieces."
39. "Remember, a line cannot exist alone; it always brings a companion along. Do remember that one line does nothing; it is only in relation to another that it creates a volume."
40. "A colorist makes his presence known even in a simple charcoal drawing."
41. "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."
42. "Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us."