Testimonials

“Look around at the immense creation of nature and you will find laws, unlike in their aspects and yet alike in their effect, which generate all human emotions.” – Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)

“Let us go forth and study beautiful nature… let us strive to express ourselves according to our personal temperaments. Time and reflection, moreover, modify little by little our vision. [...]

“Color is all a question of taste and sensibility. You must have something to say—if not, you might as well pack up. One isn’t a painter if one doesn’t love painting more than anything else [...]

“We retain traces of different depth and for different lengths of time of the impressions we have obtained from nature. The selection of these impressions determines all the characteristics of [...]

“Expressive simplicity can only be attained contrariwise inasmuch as one gradually learns to eliminate all superfluous details. Because one has learned to master them one may suppress them. That [...]

“A work of art is the trace of a magnificent struggle.” – Robert Henri (1865-1929)

“The observer should be carried through a canvas, each part should be tied up with another part.” – Robert Henri (1865-1929)

“Good composition is like a suspension bridge, each line adds strength and takes none away. Thus a work of art is finished from the beginning…” – Robert Henri (1865-1929)

“Every touch you put down is part of a construction. All that is not related to the basic idea is destructive to the canvas. The laws of composition should be those of growth. The work should [...]

“All real works of art look as though they were done in joy.” – Robert Henri (1865-1929)

“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 (1865-1929)

“Work for simplicity of color. Don’t see the colors too much by themselves. There is a golden mean in color, a spectral relation. People who have sense of color have sense of texture. Color [...]

“It is not the way you put paint on, but what you ask of it that counts. Your style is the way you talk in paint.” – Robert Henri (1865-1929)

“If your attitude is negligent, if you are not awake to the possibilities you will not see them. Nature does not reveal herself to the negligent.” – Robert Henri (1865-1929)

“A man possessed of an idea, working like fury to hold his grip on it and to fix it on canvas may not stop to see just how he is doing the work; nor may he consider what might be any [...]

“In every human being there is the artist, and whatever his activity, he has an equal chance with any to express the result of his growth and his contact with life. I don’t believe any real [...]

“Art is simply a result of expression during right feeling. It’s a result of a grip on the fundamentals of nature, the spirit of life, the constructive force, the secret of growth, a real [...]

“To appreciate and get a great deal from a work of art does not mean to find the expected in it, nor does it mean, necessarily to accept or follow it wholly, in part, or at all. Every work is one [...]

“An artist must educate himself, he cannot be educated, he must test things out as they apply to himself; his life is one long investigation of things and his own reaction to them. If he is to be [...]

“No way has been devised for measuring the value of a work of art. History proves that juries in art have been generally wrong. With few exceptions the greatest artists have been repudiated by [...]

“Pictures explain themselves. They are their own describers. Sometimes it does happen, that the writer, in his effort to describe a picture, reveals himself; and if his philosophy is interesting [...]

“The more simply you see, the more simply you will render. People see too much, scatteringly. A landscape has got to mean a great deal to anyone before it can be painted in any worth-while way. [...]

“Never change the course of a line until you have to. Never change the plane of a form until you have to. Never change the tone of a colour or form until you have to. If you follow these [...]

“When you have made a sketch, close your box—walk away—then open your box. Maybe you will see that you have deflected from your original idea. What you have painted is not what seized you in the [...]

“Some people study hard for a long time, then they “graduate” and sink back into the little they have learned.” – Robert Henri (1865-1929)

“The most beautiful art is the art which is freest from the demands of convention, which has a law to itself, which as technique is a creation of a special need.” – Robert Henri (1865-1929)

“Artists must be men of wit, consciously or unconsciously philosophers, read, study, think a great deal of life, be filled with the desire to declare and specify their particular and most [...]

“The great thing is what happens between colours.” – Robert Henri (1865-1929)

“Technique is to me merely a language, and as I see life more and more clearly, growing older, I have but one intention and that is to make my language as clear and simple and sincere as is [...]

“It is not too much to say that art is the noting of the existence of order throughout the world, and so, order stirs imagination and inspires one to reproduce this beautiful relationship [...]

“A man should not care about whether the thing he wishes to express is art or not, whether it is a picture or not, he should only care that it is a statement of what is worthy to put into [...]

“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 appreciation of art should not be considered as merely a pleasurable pastime. To apprehend beauty is to work for it. It is a mighty and an entrancing effort, and the enjoyment of a picture [...]

“The great artist has not reproduced nature, but has expressed by his extract the most choice sensation it has made upon him.” – Robert Henri (1865-1929)

“Beauty is no material thing. Beauty cannot be copied. Beauty is the sensation of pleasure on the mind of the seer. No thing is beautiful. But all things await the sensitive and imaginative mind [...]

“Pictures must be miraculous: the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended. He is an outsider. The picture must be for him, as for anyone experiencing [...]

“Ever since the beginning there have been artists who have found in the simple life about them the wonderful and the beautiful, and through the fact of this inspiration have sensed the way to [...]

“Few paintings express one idea. They are generally drifting composites wandering through…the easy driftings of the view of the artist. They present the subject, but the parts are seen under [...]

“The landscape painter must walk in the fields with an humble mind. No arrogant man was ever permitted to see nature in all her beauty.” – John Constable (1776-1837)

“I studied the art of the ancients and that of the moderns using no systematized approach and without preconceived ideas. I no more wanted to imitate the former than I sought to copy the latter… [...]

“Painting, art in general, enchants me. It is my life. What else matters? When you put all your soul into a work, all that is noble in you, you cannot fail to find a kindred soul who understands [...]

“The artist stands face to face with nature without thinking of himself; he receives everything from it, lets himself be impressed by it without afterthought, and abandons himself to the joy of [...]

“Shall I tell you what I think are the two qualities of art? It must be indescribable and it must be inimitable (unique)… The work of art must seize upon you, wrap you up in itself, carry [...]

“There are many ways of seeing things. When you saw the thing and it looked beautiful to you, you saw it beautifully. Paint it as it looked then.” – Robert Henri (1865-1929)

“The further one removes oneself from nature and still remains natural, the greater the art….” – Emil Nolde (1867-1956)

“The presence of the object, the motif, is very disturbing to the painter at the time he is painting. Since the starting point of a picture is an idea, if the object is there at the moment he is [...]

“But this marvelous world which we bring forth by means of our sympathy and penetrate through our intuition, will we ever come to know it? Perhaps we will be able to lift the vague indications of [...]

“When I was young, I believed…that painting was a sort of reaction which reconstructed the spectacle before our eyes, preserving our memory of it, or that it allowed us to reconstruct or imagine [...]

“I want to get to the stage where nobody can tell how a picture of mine is done. What’s the point of that? Simply that I want nothing but emotion to be given off by it.” – Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

“All civilization and culture are the results of the creative imagination or artist quality in man. The artist is the man who makes life more interesting and beautiful, more understandable or [...]