Robert Henri quotes

Why do we love the sea? It is because it has some potent power to make us think things we like to think.
-- Robert Henri

#Beach #Ocean #Thinking

Do whatever you do intensely.
-- Robert Henri

#Focus #Enthusiasm

Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.
-- Robert Henri

#Beautiful #Bird #Flying

An artist's job is to surprise himself. Use all means possible.
-- Robert Henri

#Jobs #Mean #Artist

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressive creature. He becomes interesting to other people. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and opens ways for better understanding. Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, he opens it and shows there are still more pages possible.
-- Robert Henri

#Life #Book #Artist

There are pictures that manifest education and there are pictures that manifest love.
-- Robert Henri

#Creative #Manifest

The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.
-- Robert Henri

#Inspiring #Art #Creativity

I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living.
-- Robert Henri

#Art #Mean #Bad Ass

A common defect of modern art study is that too many students do not know why they draw.
-- Robert Henri

#Art #Drawing #Students

Lines are results, do not draw them for themselves.
-- Robert Henri

#Drawing #Lines #Results

Do not worry about your originality. You could not get rid of it even if you wanted to.
-- Robert Henri

#Passion #Worry #Originality

Cherish your own emotions and never undervalue them.
-- Robert Henri

#Emotional #Emotion #Cherish

Art appreciation, like love, cannot be done by proxy.
-- Robert Henri

#Appreciation #Art #Done

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

#Color #Two #Giving

Good composition is like a suspension bridge - each line adds strength and takes none away.
-- Robert Henri

#Bridges #Add #Lines

A GREAT PAINTER will know a great deal about how he did it, but still he will say, “How did I do it?
-- Robert Henri

#Painter #Deals #Stills

Paint what you feel. Paint what you see. Paint what is real to you.
-- Robert Henri

#Real #Paint #Feels

Do not let the fact that things are not made for you, that conditions are not as they should be stop you. Go on anyway. Everything depends on those who go on anyway.
-- Robert Henri

#Goes On #Facts #Made

The great painter has something to say. He does not paint men, landscapes, or furniture; but an idea.
-- Robert Henri

#Men #Ideas #Landscape

The fun of living is that we have to make ourselves, after all.
-- Robert Henri

#Fun

Paint like a fiend when the idea possesses you.
-- Robert Henri

#Ideas #Paint

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature.
-- Robert Henri

#Artist #Self #Alive

All is as beautiful as we think it.
-- Robert Henri

#Beautiful #Thinking

There are people who buy pictures because they were difficult to do, and are done. Such pictures are often only a record of pain and dull perseverance. Great works of art should look as though they were made in joy. Real joy is a tremendous activity, dull drudgery is nothing to it.
-- Robert Henri

#Perseverance #Art #Pain

To paint is to know how to put nothing on canvas, and have it look like something when you stand back.
-- Robert Henri

#Looks #Canvas #Paint

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

#Worry #Sticks #Originality

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

#Men #Artist #Ideas

Color is only beautiful when it means something.
-- Robert Henri

#Beautiful #Mean #Color

Art is, after all, only a trace – like a footprint which shows that one has walked bravely and in great happiness.
-- Robert Henri

#Art #Footprint #Art Is

There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual- become clairvoyant. We reach then into reality. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. It is in the nature of all people to have these experiences; but in our time and under the conditions of our lives, it is only a rare few who are able to continue in the experience and find expression for it.
-- Robert Henri

#Reality #Expression #People

All real works of art look as though they were done in joy.
-- Robert Henri

#Art #Real #Joy

A Curve does not exist in its full power until contrasted with a straight line.
-- Robert Henri

#Drawing #Curves #Lines

There is no art without contemplation.
-- Robert Henri

#Art #Contemplation #Contemplating

Good composition is like a suspension bridge; each line adds strength and takes none away... Making lines run into each other is not composition. There must be motive for the connection. Get the art of controlling the observer – that is composition.
-- Robert Henri

#Running #Art #Bridges

When we respect the nude, we will no longer have any shame about it.
-- Robert Henri

#Beauty #Shame

In a tree there is a spirit of life, a spirit of growth and a spirit of holding its head up.
-- Robert Henri

#Tree #Growth #Spirit

Develop your visual memory. Draw everything you have drawn from the model from memory as well.
-- Robert Henri

#Memories #Draws #Wells

There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom.
-- Robert Henri

#Usual #Moments #Moments In Our Lives

The artist should have a powerful will. He should be powerfully possessed by one idea
-- Robert Henri

#Powerful #Artist #Ideas

Today must not be a souvenir of yesterday, and so the struggle is everlasting. Who am I today? What do I see today? How shall I use what I know, and how shall I avoid being victim of what I know? Life is not repetition.
-- Robert Henri

#Struggle #Yesterday #Use

It's a wrong idea that a master is a finished person. Masters are very faulty; they haven't learned everything and they know it.
-- Robert Henri

#Ideas #Masters #Persons

Painting should never look as if it were done with difficulty, however difficult it may actually have been.
-- Robert Henri

#Looks #Done #May

There are mighty few people who think what they think they think.
-- Robert Henri

#Thinking #People

Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing.
-- Robert Henri

#Drawing #Lines #Models

If a certain activity, such as painting, becomes the habitual mode of expression, it may follow that taking up the painting materials and beginning work with them will act suggestively and so presently evoke a flight into the higher state.
-- Robert Henri

#Expression #May #Painting

In great art there is no beginning and end in point of time. All time is comprehended.
-- Robert Henri

#Art #Beginnings And Ends #All Time

An artist must have imagination. An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic.
-- Robert Henri

#Artist #Imagination #Use

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

#Song #Heart #Singing

What we need is more sense of the wonder of life and less of this business of making a picture.
-- Robert Henri

#Needs #Wonder