45 quotes
Every art expression is rooted fundamentally in the personality and temperament of the artist.
To sense the invisible and to be able to create it — that is art.
In nature, light creates the color; in the picture, color creates light. Every color shade emanates a very characteristic light — no substitute is possible.
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.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
Since light is best expressed through differences in color quality, color should not be handled as a tonal gradation, to produce the effect of light.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
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.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
Being inexhaustible, life and nature are a constant stimulus for a creative mind.
The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.
Zen and the Art of Stand-up Comedy (1998)
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.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
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.
The Artist's Voice : Talks With Seventeen Modern Artists (1962)
And so artistic creation is the metamorphosis of the external physical aspects of a thing into a self-sustaining spiritual reality.
Colors must fit together as pieces in a puzzle or cogs in a wheel.
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.
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.'
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.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
There is in reality no such thing as modern art. Art is carried on up and down in immense cycles through centuries and civilizations.
statement in Hans Hofmann: Recent Paintings (1952)
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.
It takes intelligence and training, self-discipline and fine-sensibility, to gain renewed life through leisure occupation. America now suffers spiritual poverty, and art must become more fully American life before her leisure can become culture.
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
Nature's purpose in relation to the visual arts is to provide stimulus — not imitation.. .From its ceaseless urge to create springs all Life — all movement and rhythm — time and light, color and mood — in short, all reality in Form and Thought.
Hans Hofmann (2000)