Quotes About Expression

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.

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

What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape, but the human figure. It is through it that I best succeed in expressing the almost religious feeling I have towards life.

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

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.

You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.

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

Exactitude is not truth.

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.

I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have for life and my way of expressing it.

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

I am unable to make any distinction between the feeling I get from life and the way I translate that feeling into painting.

Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting should begin by cutting out his own tongue

Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul

The importance of an artist is to be measured by the quantity of new signs which he has introduced to the language of art.

It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.

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.

The essential thing is to spring forth, to express the bolt of lightning one senses upon contact with a thing. The function of the artist is not to translate an observation but to express the shock of the object on his nature; the shock, with the original reaction.

El artista comienza con una visión, una operación creativa que requiere un esfuerzo. La creatividad requiere coraje.

Creativity takes courage

An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc." -Henri Matisse, artist (31 Dec 1869-1954)

Qui cache son fou, meurt sans voix

The mere ambition to write a poem is enough to kill it.

He who hides his madman dies voiceless.