Member-only story
What Matisse Can Teach Us About Art and Life
Colour, creativity and courage
I recently read a short quote that stopped me in my tracks:
“A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful.”
Like all good aphorisms, it contains a hint of both poetry and paradox.
It was reputedly uttered by the French artist Henri Matisse, and it quickly had me speculating on its meaning. I think what Matisse had in mind is that sometimes a smaller dose is more powerful than a bigger one, and that too much of one thing can dilute an experience.
One thing it certainly was not was a call for painterly restraint: Matisse never shied away from colour, and his images dazzle with untrammelled colours — like a pomegranate that has just been cut open.
I think it was more of an invitation that Matisse was offering, to appreciate the smaller details. The idea that a thimble of red might be more intense than a bucketful is a deliberate shift of attention to the subtle accents that are easily overlooked. If we can relish the piquant morsel, or savour the fugitive moment, then our encounter with the world might be all the richer.
We tend to forget these important insights when so much of our modern lives are focused on bigger, better and more.
Reality and truth
Another statement from Matisse arrives at a similar point, but from a completely different direction:
“Exactitude is not truth.”
The words capture the strange dilemma that all paintings grapple with: how do you represent the infinite detail of the world through the imprecise medium of dabs and daubs of paint?
For Matisse, the answer was not through scrupulousness but a search for a more intuitive form of truth — which emerged for him through his psychological response to the subject:
“I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.”
