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. Hans Hofmann More Quotes by Hans Hofmann More Quotes From Hans Hofmann 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 Hans Hofmann mean children art You must break all the rules of painting, but you must also convince me you've had a reason to do so. Hans Hofmann painting crafts reason 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. Hans Hofmann wall space ideas Colors must fit together as pieces in a puzzle or cogs in a wheel. Hans Hofmann wheels color together The product of movement and counter-movement is tension. When tension working strength is expressed, it endows the work of art with the living effect of coordinated, though opposing, forces. Hans Hofmann force movement art Creation is dominated by three absolutely different factors: First, nature, which works upon us by its laws; second, the artist, who creates a spiritual contact with nature and his materials; third, the medium of expression through which the artist translates his inner world. Hans Hofmann artist expression spiritual An idea can only be materialized with the help of a medium of expression, the inherent qualities of which must be surely sensed and understood in order to become the carrier of an idea Hans Hofmann expression order ideas 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. Hans Hofmann events spirit age A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world. Just as a flower, by virtue of its existence as a complete organism is both ornamental and self-sufficient as to color, form, and texture, so art, because of its singular existence is more than mere ornament. Hans Hofmann flower self art It isn't necessary to make things large to make them monumental; a head by Giacometti one inch high would be able to vitalize this whole space. Hans Hofmann able space would-be 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. Hans Hofmann creating color mean To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction. Hans Hofmann reactions development worship 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. Hans Hofmann finals realization art To me, art is the glorification of the human spirit. Hans Hofmann glorification spirit art Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects. Hans Hofmann sophisticated superficial art 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." Hans Hofmann students desire teacher Depth, in a pictorial, plastic sense, is not created by the arrangement of objects one after another toward a vanishing point, in the sense of the Renaissance perspective, but on the contrary (and in absolute denial of this doctrine) by the creation of forces in the sense of push and pull . Nor is depth created by tonal gradation (another doctrine of the academician which, at its culmination, degraded the use of color to a mere function of expressing dark and light). Hans Hofmann color light dark A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea. Hans Hofmann function ideas A work based only on a line concept is scarcely more than a illustration; it fails to achieve pictorial structure. Pictorial structure is based on a plane concept. The line originates in the meeting of two planes ... we can lose ourselves in a multitude of lines, if through them we lose our senses for the planes. Hans Hofmann illustration lines two Genius is gifted with a vitality which is expended in the enrichment of life through the discovery of new worlds of feeling. Hans Hofmann vitality feelings discovery
