Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse
Henri-Émile-Benoît Matissewas a French artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth31 December 1869
CountryFrance
creativity independent play
Creative people are curious, flexible, and independent with a tremendous spirit and a love of play.
inspirational life beautiful
Creativity takes courage.
dream spiritual art
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.
freedom artist constraints
An artist must not feel under any constraint.
inspirational happiness work
Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us.
artist light color
Color helps to express light, not the physical phenomenon, but the only light that really exists, that in the artist's brain.
color four made
My pictures are made up of four or five colors that collide with one another…
courage optimistic looks
To look at something as though we had never seen it before requires great courage.
views sky tree
We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we study a tree, the sky or a thought, because we too are linked to the entire universe.
essence painting form
There is no interruption between my older paintings and my cutouts. Just that with an increasing sense of the absolute, and more abstraction, I have achieved a form that is simplified to its essence.
mean cutting two
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...
brother believe men
Ever since there have been men, man has given himself over to too little joy. That alone, my brothers, is our original sin. I should believe only in a God who understood how to dance.
color feelings looks
Purer colors... have in themselves, independently of the objects they serve to express, a significant action on the feelings of those who look at them.
organization trying sound
Colours have their own distinctive beauty that you have to preserve, just as in music you try to preserve sounds. It is a question of organization, of finding the arrangement that will keep the beauty and freshness of the colour