“Superficially there is negligence, but deep down in people there is love and craving for the beautiful.

There is a past, present and future in the fall of a dress. Don’t arrange it.Keep up the work. Try to reduce everything you see to the utmost simplicity.

It is harder to see a landscape than to paint it.

..there are lots of clever people who can paint anything, but, lacking the seeing power, paint nothing worthwhile.

..freedom can only be obtained through order—through a just sense of the relative value of things.

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

Pictures explain themselves. They are their own describers.

Real students go out of beaten paths, whether beaten by themselves or by others, and have adventure with the unknown.

..it is only the student who dares to take a chance, who has a real good time in life.

Get as much acquainted with yourself as you can. Question yourself. After a while you may get some answers.

It will be very fine when you can begin to serve yourself.

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.

It is useless to study technique in advance of having a motive.

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 understanding of the relative importance of things, order, balance. Any material will do. After all, the object is not to make art, but to be in the wonderful state which makes art inevitable.

I think the real artists are too busy with just being and growing and acting (on canvas or however) like themselves to worry about the end. The end will be what it will be. The object is intense living, fulfillment; the great happiness in creation. People sometimes phrase about the joy of work. It is only in creative work that joy may be found.

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.

The only sensible way to regard the art life is that it is a privilege you are willing to pay for.

Don’t ever stock your head so full of “learning” that there will be no room left for personal thinking. Develop your power of seeing through the effort and pleasure of seeing. Develop the power to express through the effort and pleasure of expression.”

from The Art Spirit by Robert Henri

Art Spirit