I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colors is black.
Henri MatisseRead
The essential thing is to work in a state of mind that approaches prayer.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of a mindful and spiritual approach to work, akin to prayer.
Henri Matisse suggests that when we engage in our work, we should do so with a mindset that mirrors the reverence and focus associated with prayer. This notion encourages us to approach our creative or professional endeavors with intention, mindfulness, and a deeper connection to our purpose, making the work itself a form of spiritual expression.
In practice
In a speech at an art gallery opening, one could emphasize the importance of approaching creative work like Matisse suggests.
I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colors is black.
Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting should begin by cutting out his own tongue
Purer colors... have in themselves, independently of the objects they serve to express, a significant action on the feelings of those who look at them.
It is not enough to place colors, however beautiful, one beside the other; colors must also react on one another. Otherwise, you have cacophony.
Color, even more than drawing, is a means of liberation.
Don't try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out.
It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century.
Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?
Architecture is really about well-being. I think that people want to feel good in a space ... On the one hand it's about shelter, but it's also about pleasure.
There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.
I've been writing my entire life, and I'll always write.
I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
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