Top 100 Robert Henri Quotes
#1. Artists must be men of wit, consciously or unconsciously philosophers; read, study and think a great deal of life ...
Robert Henri
#2. There are mighty few people who think what they think they think.
Robert Henri
#3. The most vital things in the look of a landscape endure only for a moment. Work should be done from memory; memory of that vital moment.
Robert Henri
#4. The ignorant are to be found as much among the educated as among the uneducated.
Robert Henri
#5. Realize that a drawing is not a copy. It is a construction in very different materials. A drawing is an invention.
Robert Henri
#6. Students work in schools making life studies for years, win prizes for life studies and find in the end that they know practically nothing of the human figure. They have acquired the ability to copy.
Robert Henri
#7. Be venturesome. Try new things that appeal to you. Examine others. Have a pioneer spirit. Prevent your drawing from being common. Put life into it.
Robert Henri
#8. I am interested in the size of your intention. It is better to overstate the important than to understate it.
Robert Henri
#9. Genius is not a possession of the limited few, but exists in some degree in everyone. Where there is natural growth, a full and free play of faculties, genius will manifest itself.
Robert Henri
#10. Art cannot be separated from life. It is the expression of the greatest need of which life is capable, and we value art not because of the skilled product, but because of its revelation of a life's experience.
Robert Henri
#11. Paint what you feel. Paint what you see. Paint what is real to you.
Robert Henri
#12. Knowledge of anatomy is a tool like good brushes.
Robert Henri
#13. A mountain seen in the haze of distance must nevertheless look a solid heavy mountain.
Robert Henri
#14. 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.
Robert Henri
#15. Perhaps whatever there is in my work that may be really interesting to others and surely what is interesting to me, is the result of a sometimes successful effort to free myself from any idea that what I produce must be art ...
Robert Henri
#16. A work of art is the trace of a magnificent struggle.
Robert Henri
#17. The fun of living is that we have to make ourselves, after all.
Robert Henri
#18. Each man must seek for himself the people who hold the essential beauty, and each man must eventually say to himself as I do, 'these are my people and all that I have I owe to them.
Robert Henri
#19. Do whatever you do intensely. The artist is the man who leaves the crowd and goes pioneering. With him there is an idea which is his life.
Robert Henri
#20. Don't worry about your originality. You couldn't get rid of it even if you wanted to. It will stick with you and show up for better or worse in spite of all you or anyone else can do.
Robert Henri
#21. Keep a bad drawing until by study you have found out why it is bad.
Robert Henri
#22. 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.
Robert Henri
#23. Do not worry about your originality. You could not get rid of it even if you wanted to.
Robert Henri
#24. In great art there is no beginning and end in point of time. All time is comprehended.
Robert Henri
#25. The reason for the survival of the award system is purely commercial.
Robert Henri
#26. You will never find yourself unless you quit preconceiving what you will be when you have found yourself.
Robert Henri
#28. To have ideas one must have imagination. To express ideas one must have science.
Robert Henri
#29. Things should all be moving toward the expression of a great idea.
Robert Henri
#30. It is a creation of your own mind, not the model. The model is dependent on your idea of her. Your canvas should be a thing created under the influence of her.
Robert Henri
#31. Each man must take the material that he finds at hand, see that in it there are the big truths of life, the fundamentally big forces, and then express in his art whatever is the cause of his pleasure.
Robert Henri
#32. Your painting is the marking of your progression into nature, a sensation of something you see way beyond the two pretty colors over there. Don't stop to paint the material, but push on to give the spirit.
Robert Henri
#33. 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.
Robert Henri
#34. A tree growing out of the ground is as wonderful today as it ever was. It does not need to adopt new and startling methods.
Robert Henri
#35. There are forms that can only be seen when you are near a painting, others only appear when you are far away.
Robert Henri
#36. Everything depends on the attitude of the artist toward his subject. It is essential.
Robert Henri
#37. The pernicious influence of the prize and medal giving in art is so great that it should be stopped. History proves that juries in art have been generally wrong.
Robert Henri
#38. The undercurrent and motive of all art is an individual man's idea. From each we expect what he has to give. We desire it. It is absolutely necessary for him to give it out.
Robert Henri
#39. It seems to me that before a man tries to express anything to the world he must recognize in himself an individual, a new one, very distinct from others.
Robert Henri
#40. Art need not be intended. It comes inevitably as the tree from the root, the branch from the trunk, the blossom from the twig. None of these forget the present in looking backward or forward. They are occupied wholly with the fulfillment of their own existence.
Robert Henri
#41. Painting should never look as if it were done with difficulty, however difficult it may actually have been.
Robert Henri
#42. A man must be master of himself and master of his word to achieve the full realization of himself as an artist.
Robert Henri
#43. Whatever you feel or think your exact state at the exact moment of your brush touching the canvas is in some way registered in that stroke.
Robert Henri
#44. There is only one reason for art in America, and that is that the people of America learn the means of expressing themselves in their own time, and their own land.
Robert Henri
#45. The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.
Robert Henri
#46. To be free, to be happy and to be fruitful, can only be attained through sacrifice of many common but overestimated things.
Robert Henri
#47. 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.
Robert Henri
#48. Don't worry about the rejections. Everybody that's good has gone through it. Don't let it matter if your works are not "accepted" at once. The better or more personal you are the less likely they are of acceptance.
Robert Henri
#49. Renoir had not only a great interest in human character, in human feeling, but had also a great love for the people he painted.
Robert Henri
#50. Be a warhorse for work and enjoy even the struggle against defeat.
Robert Henri
#51. The great painter has something to say. He does not paint men, landscapes, or furniture; but an idea.
Robert Henri
#52. Art is certainly not a pursuit for anyone who wants to make money.
Robert Henri
#53. No work of Art is really ever finished. They only stop at good places.
Robert Henri
#55. Color is only beautiful when it means something.
Robert Henri
#56. All manifestations of art are but landmarks in the progress of the human spirit toward a thing but as yet sensed and far from being possessed.
Robert Henri
#58. Some one has defined a work of art as a "thing beautifully done." I like it better if we cut away the adverb and preserve the word "done," and let it stand alone in its fullest meaning. Things are not done beautifully. The beauty is an integral part of their being done.
Robert Henri
#59. Houses, housetops, like human beings have wonderful character. The lives of housetops. The wear of the seasons. The country is beautiful, young, growing things. The majesty of trees. The backs of tenement houses are living documents.
Robert Henri
#60. Get the few main lines and see what lines they call out.
Robert Henri
#61. If you do not act on a suggestion at first, you grow dull to its message.
Robert Henri
#62. We read books. They make us think. It matters very little whether we agree with the books or not.
Robert Henri
#63. A GREAT PAINTER will know a great deal about how he did it, but still he will say, "How did I do it?" The real artist's work is a surprise to himself.
Robert Henri
#64. Personal experimentation is revealing, and once you get into it, immensely engaging.
Robert Henri
#65. Self-education only produces expressions of self.
Robert Henri
#66. The only sensible way to regard the art life is that it is a privilege you are willing to pay for ... You may cite honors and attentions and even money paid, but I would have you note that these were paid a long time after the creator had gone through his struggles.
Robert Henri
#68. I have heard it very often said that an artist does not need intelligence, that his is the province of the soul
Robert Henri
#69. The artist should be intoxicated with the idea of the thing he wants to express.
Robert Henri
#70. All outward success, when it has value, is but the inevitable result of an inward success of full living, full play and enjoyment of one's faculties.
Robert Henri
#71. To paint is to know how to put nothing on canvas, and have it look like something when you stand back.
Robert Henri
#72. Manet did not do the expected. He was a pioneer. He followed his individual whim. Told the public what he wanted it to know, not the time worn things the public already knew and thought it wanted to hear again. The public was very much offended.
Robert Henri
#73. To award prizes is to attempt to control the course of another man's work. It is a bid to have him do what you will approve. It affects not only the one who wins the award, but all those who in any measure strive for it.
Robert Henri
#74. 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.
Robert Henri
#75. Finished persons are very common - people who are closed up, quite satisfied that there is little more to learn
Robert Henri
#76. In certain books - some way in the first few paragraphs you know that you have met a brother.
Robert Henri
#77. An artist must first of all respond to his subject, he must be filled with emotion toward that subject and then he must make his technique so sincere, so translucent that it may be forgotten, the value of the subject shining through it.
Robert Henri
#78. Develop your visual memory. Draw everything you have drawn from the model from memory as well.
Robert Henri
#79. When we respect the nude, we will no longer have any shame about it.
Robert Henri
#80. There is always a commanding and simple line around each head. Learn to have a love for the big simple line.
Robert Henri
#81. Art appreciation, like love, cannot be done by proxy: It is a very personal affair and is necessary to each individual.
Robert Henri
#82. If the artist's will is not strong he will see all kinds of unessential things.
Robert Henri
#84. Completion does not depend on
material representation. The work is done when that special thing has been said.
Robert Henri
#86. The pictures which do not represent an intense interest cannot expect to create an intense interest.
Robert Henri
#87. Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.
Robert Henri
#88. Each sensation is precious, protect it, cherish it, keep it. Never give it away. You must develop that balance which allows all of the world to come in to you, and only that which you have expressed in your art to move back out again into the world.
Robert Henri
#89. If you think of a school drawing while you work, your drawing will look like one.
Robert Henri
#90. Beauty is an intangible thing; can not be fixed on the surface, and the wear and tear of old age on the body cannot defeat it. Nor will a "pretty" face make it, for "pretty" faces are often dull and empty, and beauty is never dull and it fills all spaces.
Robert Henri
#91. I paint for the sole purpose of magnifying the privilege of being alive.
Robert Henri
#92. Many receive a criticism and think it is fine; think they got their money's worth; think well of the teacher for it, and then go on with their work just the same as before. That is the reason much of the wisdom of Plato is still locked up in the pages of Plato.
Robert Henri
#93. Art is an outsider, a gypsy over the face of the earth.
Robert Henri
#94. The true artist regards his work as a means of talking with men [and women], of saying his say to himself and to others. It is not a question of pay ...
Robert Henri
#95. Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing.
Robert Henri
#96. I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living.
Robert Henri
#97. The end will be what it will be. The object is intense living, fulfillment; the great happiness in creation.
Robert Henri
#98. An artist must have imagination. An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic.
Robert Henri
#99. Art is an extension of language - an expression of sensations too subtle for words.
Robert Henri
#100. The brain can be a wonderful tool, can be a willing slave, as has been evidenced by some men, but of course it works poorly when it has not the habit of usage. An automobile can become a source of delight, but the first time you drive you are as apt to go up a tree as to go up the road.
Robert Henri
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