Robert Henri Quotes

The whole point of art school is that you're going to be able to have nudes all day long and a teacher who is there to move you. It's great. I did a tiny bit in the one school in Paris, and it was wonderful because you'd have a nude taking a crazy position, and you'd have 10 seconds to do a drawing. Then you'd do a one-minute drawing.

In school, I never really grasped drawing the nude form.

I've done figure drawing classes or whatever.

Ruskin's concern for art education applied to the development of the power of the hand and eye for everyone.

Drawing teaches you to look at things properly and to understand form and structure.

With art, your motor sense should be developed at full capacity.

It is by developing the individual that he is prepared for that wonderful manifestation of the human intelligence, which drawing constitutes. The ability to see reality in form, in color, in proportion, to be master of the movements of one's own hand - that is what is necessary.

I went to school for fine art. I'm a decent housepainter, but I'm a really good fine art painter.

Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.

I had wrung impressionism dry and I finally came to the conclusion that I know neither how to paint nor how to draw.

Observe Everything. Communicate Well. Draw, Draw, Draw.

The best thing is to draw men and women from the nude and thus fix in the memory by constant exercise the muscles of the torso, back, legs, arms and knees, with bones underneath.

If you are not skillful enough to sketch a man jumping out of a window in the time it takes him to fall from the fourth storey to the ground, you will never be able to produce great works.

The young man should first learn perspective, then the proportions of objects. Next, copy work after the hand of a good master, to gain the habit of drawing parts of the body well; and then to work from nature, to confirm the lessons learned.

Many have genius, but, wanting art, are forever dumb. The two must go together to form the great poet, painter, or sculptor.

Such is the strength of art, rough things to shape.

The great use of copying, if it be at all useful, should seem to be in learning color; yet even coloring will never be perfectly attained by servilely copying the model before you.

I feel that if I had not had an art program in my school, I would have failed in a big way. My teachers knew I was intelligent, but they didn't quite know how I was ever going to apply that intelligence. The one or two teachers who knew me well knew that it would be through drawing or acting or whatever means of expression I was allowed.

The Academies of Art are nothing but great painting factories - those with talent are fed in at one end, and they come out as mechanical painting machines.

I went to art school, and every Tuesday and Friday we drew the nude. If you look at Western painting, male and female nudes are in the center of every painting. It's difficult and exciting to draw the nude. Why get so upset about this? It's our duty to break taboos.

I sketch the faces upside down because it's like drawing from the left side of the brain or the right side of the brain. I never took an art lesson in my life.

High art consists neither in altering, nor in improving nature; but in seeking throughout nature for 'whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are pure;' in loving these, in displaying to the utmost of the painter's power such loveliness as is in them, and directing the thoughts of others to them by winning art, or gentle emphasis.

Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets.

The brush is a more powerful and rapid tool than the point or the stump... the main thing that the brush secures is the instant grasp of the grand construction of a figure.

If you want to get somewhere in this life, learn to draw beautiful women.