Hans Hofmann Quotes

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.

To experience visually, and to transform our visual experience into plastic terms, requires the faculty of empathy.

In nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light.

It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws.

I can't understand how anyone is able to paint without optimism.

Genius is gifted with a vitality which is expended in the enrichment of life through the discovery of new worlds of feeling.

People say 'Hofmann has different styles'. I have not. I have different moods; I am not two days the same man.

To sense the invisible and to be able to create it, that is art.

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.

There is in reality no such thing as modern art. Art is carried on up and down in immense cycles through centuries and civilizations.

And so artistic creation is the metamorphosis of the external physical aspects of a thing into a self-sustaining spiritual reality .

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.

Colors must fit together as pieces in a puzzle or cogs in a wheel.

Art is to me the glorification of the human spirit, and as such it is the cultural documentation of the time in which it is produced.

You must break all the rules of painting, but you must also convince me you've had a reason to do so.

It is not the form that dictates the color, but the color that brings out the form.

A work of art is finished, from the point of view of the artist, when feeling and perception have resulted in a spiritual synthesis.

Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.

Our entire being is nourished by color.

Every art expression is rooted fundamentally in the personality and temperament of the artist.

Painters must speak through paint, not through words.

Through a painting we can see the whole world.

A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.

To me, art is the glorification of the human spirit.

Being inexhaustible, life and nature are a constant stimulus for a creative mind.

To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction.

A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of an idea.