Hans Hofmann Quotes
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Painters must speak through paint, not through words.
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To experience visually, and to transform our visual experience into plastic terms, requires the faculty of empathy.
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The plastic artist may or may not be concerned with presenting a superficial appearance of reality, but he is always concerned with the presentation - if not the representation - of the plastic values of reality.
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The general misunderstanding of a work of art is often due to the fact that the key to its spiritual content and technical means is missed. Unless the observer is trained to a certain degree in the artistic idiom, he is apt to search for things which have little to do with the aesthetic content of a picture. He is likely to look for pure representational values when the emphasis is really upon music-like relationships.
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The impulse of nature, fused through the personality of the artist by laws arising from the particular nature of the medium, produces the rhythm and the personal expression of a work. Then the life of the composition becomes a spiritual unity.
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Color is a plastic means of creating intervals... color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now between formal tensions and color tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony.
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Being inexhaustible, life and nature are a constant stimulus for a creative mind.
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It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws
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There is in reality no such thing as modern art. Art is carried on up and down in immense cycles through centuries and civilizations.
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I can't understand how anyone is able to paint without optimism.
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As a teacher I approach my students purely with the human desire to free them from all scholarly inhibitions, and I tell them, "Painters must speak through paint not through words."
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Every art expression is rooted fundamentally in the personality and temperament of the artist.
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The art of pictorial creation is so complicated - it is so astronomical in its possibilities of relation and combination that it would take an act of super-human concentration to explain the final realization.
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Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.
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A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.
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When the impulses which stir us to profound emotion are integrated with the medium of expression, every interview of the soul may become art. This is contingent upon mastery of the medium.
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The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.
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Art is magic... But how is it magic? In its metaphysical development? Or does some final transformation culminate in a magic reality? In truth, the latter is impossible without the former. If creation is not magic, the outcome cannot be magic.
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The width of a line may present the idea of infinity. An epigram may contain a world. In the same way, a small picture format may be much more living, much more leavening, stirring, awakening, than square yards of wall space.
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We are connected with our own age if we recognize ourselves in relation to outside events; and we have grasped its spirit when we influence the future.
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People say 'Hofmann has different styles'. I have not. I have different moods; I am not two days the same man.
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What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation.
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My aim in painting is to create pulsating, luminous, and open surfaces that emanate a mystic light, in accordance with my deepest insight into the experience of life and nature.
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The child is really an artist, and the artist should be like a child, but he should not stay a child. He must become an artist. That means he cannot permit himself to become sentimental or something like that. He must know what he is doing
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Art leads to a more profound concept of life, because art itself is a profound expression of feeling. The artist is born, and art is the expression of his overflowing soul. Because his soul is rich, he cares comparatively little about the superficial necessities of the material world; he sublimates the pressure of material affairs in an artistic experience.
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The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature - translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive, and every work of art should be alive.
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Colors must fit together as pieces in a puzzle or cogs in a wheel.
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You must break all the rules of painting, but you must also convince me you've had a reason to do so.
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To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction.
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Art is something absolute, something positive, which gives power just as food gives power. While creative science is a mental food, art is the satisfaction of the soul.
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