Robert Henri Quotes - Page 2

Get the few main lines and see what lines they call out.

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.

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.

Art tends toward balance, order, judgment of relative values, the laws of growth, the economy of living – very good things for anyone to be interested in.

The most vital things in the look of a landscape endure only for a moment. Work should be done from memory; memory of that vital moment.

Concentrate on a single feature – as, build all toward one eye – make all lines lead toward that eye. (Robert Henri)

There is always a commanding and simple line around each head. Learn to have a love for the big simple line.

The undercurrent and motive of all art is an individual man's idea. From each we expect what he has to give. We desire it. It is absolutely necessary for him to give it out.

Sometimes we do grip the concert in a human head, and so hold it that in a way we get a record of it into paint, but the vision and expressing of one day will not do for the next.

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?

The end will be what it will be. The object is intense living, fulfillment; the great happiness in creation.

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

Those who express even a little of themselves never become old-fashioned.

We will be happy if we can get around to the idea that art is not an outside and extra thing; that it is a natural outcome of a state of being; that the state of being is the important thing; that a man can be a carpenter and be a great man.

A work of art is the trace of a magnificent struggle.