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.

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

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.

Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.

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

The work of the art student is no light matter. Few have the courage and stamina to think it through. You have to make up your mind to be alone in many ways. We like sympathy and we like to be in company. It is easier than going it alone. But alone one gets acquainted with himself, grows up and on, not stopping with the crowd. It costs to do this. If you succeed somewhat you may have to pay for it as well as enjoy it all your life.

The sketch hunter moves through life as he finds it, not passing negligently the things he loves, but stopping to know them, and to note them down in the shorthand of his sketchbook.

Do whatever you do intensely.

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

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.

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 artist cares whether what he does is 'art' or not. Who, after all, knows what 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.

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.

Pretend you are dancing or singing a picture. A worker or painter should enjoy his work, else the observer will not enjoy it.

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.

Let every student enter the school with this advice. No matter how good the school is, his education is in his own hands. All education must be self education.

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.

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.

Art is an outsider, a gypsy over the face of the earth.

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.

No work of Art is really ever finished. They only stop at good places.

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.

Art appreciation, like love, cannot be done by proxy: It is a very personal affair and is necessary to each individual.

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

A mountain seen in the haze of distance must nevertheless look a solid heavy mountain.

It is harder to see than it is to express. The whole value of art rests in the artist's ability to see well into what is before him.

It is the common defect of modern art study. Too many students do not know why they draw.

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

A weak background is a deadly thing.

There are pictures that manifest education and there are pictures that manifest love.

Keep a bad drawing until by study you have found out why it is bad.

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

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

Cherish your own emotions and never undervalue them.

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.

Realize that a drawing is not a copy. It is a construction in very different materials. A drawing is an invention.

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

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

Paint what you feel. Paint what you see. Paint what is real to you.

I paint for the sole purpose of magnifying the privilege of being alive.

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.

There is no art without contemplation.

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

To have ideas one must have imagination. To express ideas one must have science.

A drawing should be a verdict on the model. Don't confuse a drawing with a map.

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?

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.

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.

Lines are results, do not draw them for themselves.

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.