"Realize that a drawing is not a copy. It is a construction in very different materials. A drawing is an invention."
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Quote collection
Robert Henri quotes (page 3 of 9)
171 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"You form a society: that limits you. Adopt a name, and you've limited yourself again; draw up a constitution and bylaws and you've made a groove, a rut, that hampers your growth. You think you can fix your course and move straight along it. But sometimes the important thing is to strike out sidewise."
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"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."
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"I paint for the sole purpose of magnifying the privilege of being alive."
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"Paint what you feel. Paint what you see. Paint what is real to you."
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"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."
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"Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing."
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"The man who has honesty, integrity, the love of inquiry, the desire to see beyond, is ready to appreciate good art. He needs no one to give him an 'Art Education'; he is already qualified. He needs but to see pictures with his active mind, look into them for the things that belong to him, and he will find soon enough in himself an art connoisseur and an art lover of the first order."
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"Lines are results, do not draw them for themselves."
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"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."
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"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."
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"The world will see many fashions of art and most of the world will follow the fashions and make none. These cults - these 'movements' - are absolutely necessary, or at any rate their causes are, for somewhere in their centres are the ones who bear the Idea, the ones who have questioned, 'But what do I think?' and 'How shall I say it best?"
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"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."
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"Knowledge of anatomy is a tool like good brushes."
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"Color is only beautiful when it means something."
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"We make our discoveries while in the state [of high functioning] because then we are clear-sighted."
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"Paint like a fiend when the idea possesses you."
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"An artist must have imagination. An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic."
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"The big painter is one who has something to say. He thus does not paint men, landscape or furniture, but an idea."
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"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."
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