Skip to content

Sometimes I wonder, laying in a great black stripe on a canvas, what animal bones (or horns) are making the furrows of my picture ... black grows deeper and deeper, darker and darker before me. It menaces me like a black gullet. I can bear it no longer. It is monstrous. It is unfathomable. As the thought comes to me to exorcise and transform this black with a white drawing, it has already become a surface.

— Hans Hofmann Misattributed

Another quote →

More quotes by Hans Hofmann

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)

All Hans Hofmann quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Hans Hofmann (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.