QuoteProject
Painting should never look as if it were done with difficulty, however difficult it may actually have been.
Robert Henri
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Art should appear effortless, regardless of the challenges faced in its creation.

This quote by Robert Henri emphasizes the importance of presenting art in a way that conveys ease and grace, even if the process of creating it was challenging. The artist's struggle and hard work should remain behind the scenes, allowing the viewer to connect with the final piece without being aware of the difficulties involved in its creation.

Themes

ArtEffortlessnessCreativityExpression

In practice

Example use cases

An art exhibit opening where the artist speaks about the beauty of their work appearing effortless.

More from Robert Henri

Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.
Robert HenriRead
Know what the old masters did. Know how they composed their pictures, but do not fall into the conventions they established. These conventions were right for them, and they are wonderful. They made their language. You make yours. All the past can help you.
Robert HenriRead
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.
Robert HenriRead
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.
Robert HenriRead
After all, the goal is not making art. It is living a life. Those who live their lives will leave the stuff that is really art.
Robert HenriRead
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.
Robert HenriRead

Similar quotes

I write and sing about whatever I am able to understand and feel. I feel that it is healthier to look out at the world through a window than through a mirror. Otherwise, all you see is yourself and whatever is behind you.
Bill WithersRead
Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.
Oscar WildeRead
Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.
Marcel ProustRead
As a photographer who is constantly in violent, bloody situations where the instinct is to turn away, I am always trying to figure out how to make people not turn away.
Lynsey AddarioRead
Do not write if there is no tremendous urge to do so. At the heart, there must be an inspiration or muse or one of those old-fashioned things. Else, why bore yourself, destroy other people's interest and kill trees?
Vikram SethRead
Could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet.
Oliver GoldsmithRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.