“
Colour is a power which directly influences the soul.
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Wassily Kandinsky (Concerning the Spiritual in Art)
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The art of avoiding extremes is an art that is drawn on the canvas of maturity and painted with the abstract strokes of many experiences.
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T.D. Jakes (The Lady, Her Lover, and Her Lord)
“
The theory of thought is like painting: it needs that revolution which took art from representation to abstraction. This is the aim of a theory of thought without image.
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Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition)
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The canvas is the door to another dimension. The paintbrush is the key.
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Luhraw
“
If you wish to make good art, then you must believe you already do. Otherwise, you will never be good enough.
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Luhraw
“
Art should be linked to abstract things - color, line, tone. It is not an instrument to improve social conditions and chase ugliness. Painting is like music and it has to separate from everyday reality.
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Irving Stone (Lust for Life)
“
Before, I could only guess of who I was. Now, thanks to my art, I know who I am
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Luhraw
“
A picture is worth a thousand words, but the way I paint I'm going to need to contact an editor. Even if I were to abstractly paint the phrase "I love you," it would be the visual equivalent of Joyce's Ulysses.
-James Lee Schmidt and Jarod Kintz
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James Lee Schmidt (liQUID PROse QUOtes)
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I was reminded of a painter friend who had started her career by depicting scenes from life, mainly deserted rooms, abandoned houses and discarded photographs of women. Gradually, her work became more abstract, and in her last exhibition, her paintings were splashes of rebellious color, like the two in my living room, dark patches with little droplets of blue. I asked about her progress from modern realism to abstraction. Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.
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Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books)
“
A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art. And from this results that modern desire for rhythm in painting, for mathematical, abstract construction, for repeated notes of colour, for setting colour in motion.
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Wassily Kandinsky (Concerning the Spiritual in Art)
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I don’t want to see landscapes, i.e. scenic paintings of them, because I don’t want to see the original realities – as optical effects that is. I want to see the deeper reality underlying the scenic, the expression of what are sometimes called abstract imaginings. The ‘simply natural’ is interesting no longer.
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Thomas Hardy
“
That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography, as it deals not with events, but with the thoughts of one's life; not with life's physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind...The best that one can say of most modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality, and so the critic, with his fine sense of distinction and sure instinct of delicate refinement, will prefer to look into the silver mirror or through the woven veil, and will turn his eyes away from the chaos and clamor of actual existence, though the mirror be tarnished and the veil be torn. His sole aim is to chronicle his own impressions. It is for him that pictures are painted, books written, and marble hewn into form.
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Oscar Wilde (The Critic As Artist: With Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Nothing and Discussing Everything (Green Integer))
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Abstract Art is considered as one of the pious forms in expressing one-self without any detailed illustration of reality. It uses a perceptible language such as shapes, color, line, form and gestural marks to create a beauty which may persist with a degree of freedom from visual references in the world.
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7 Arts Online
“
Deconstruction seeks neither to reframe art with some perfect, apt and truthful new frame, nor simply to maintain the illusion of some pure and simple absence of a frame. Rather it shows that the frame is, in a sense, also inside the painting. For the frame is what "produces" the object of art, is what sets it off
as
an object of art—an aesthetic object. Thus the frame is essential to the work of art; in the work of art. Paint a $5,000 abstract painting on a railroad boxcar and nobody will pay a cent for it. Take a torch, remove the panel of the boxcar, install it in a gallery, and it will be worth $5,000. It will be art because it is now framed by the gallery. But at the same moment that the frame encloses the work in its own protected enclosure, making it a work of art, it becomes merely ornamental—external to the work of art. Thus is the frame central or marginal? Is the frame inside the work of art, essential to it, or outside the work of art, extrinsic to it?
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James N. Powell (Derrida for Beginners)
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And I'll go even further and say that mathematics, this art of abstract pattern-making — even more than storytelling, painting, or music - is our most quintessentially human art form. This is what our brains do, whether we like it or not. We are biochemical pattern-recognition machines and mathematics is nothing less than the distilled essence of who we are.
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Paul Lockhart (A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form)
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Don't paint from nature too much. Art is an abstraction. Derive this abstraction from nature while dreaming before it, and think more of the creation that will result.
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Paul Gauguin
“
The theory of thought is like
painting: it needs that revolution which took art from representation to
abstraction. This is the aim of a theory of thought without image.
”
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Gilles Deleuze
“
Pienso que en la obra de arte lo que no resulta necesario, sobra, incluso distrae, debilita y estorba.
Conversaciones con Zóbel (Rafael Pérez-Madero, 1978)
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Fernando Zóbel
“
An art prodigy of the 21st century has yet to be crowned. Or have they?
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Luhraw
“
Jubal shrugged. "Abstract design is all right-for wall paper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturbation. . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce- render emotional-his audience, each time. These ladies who won't deign to do that- and perhaps can't- of course lost the public. If they hadn't lobbied for endless subsidies, they would have starved or been forced to go to work long ago. Because the ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for 'art' that leaves him unmoved- if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes or such."
"You know, Jubal, I've always wondered why i didn't give a hoot for paintings or statues- but I thought it was something missing in me, like color blindness."
"Mmm, one does have to learn to look at art, just as you must know French to read a story printed in French. But in general terms it's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code like Pepys and his diary. Most of these jokers don't even want to use language you and I know or can learn. . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything- obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence. Ben, would you call me an artists?”
“Huh? Well, I’ve never thought about it. You write a pretty good stick.”
“Thank you. ‘Artist’ is a word I avoid for the same reasons I hate to be called ‘Doctor.’ But I am an artist, albeit a minor one. Admittedly most of my stuff is fit to read only once… and not even once for a busy person who already knows the little I have to say. But I am an honest artist, because what I write is consciously intended to reach the customer… reach him and affect him, if possible with pity and terror… or, if not, at least to divert the tedium of his hours with a chuckle or an odd idea. But I am never trying to hide it from him in a private language, nor am I seeking the praise of other writers for ‘technique’ or other balderdash. I want the praise of the cash customer, given in cash because I’ve reached him- or I don’t want anything. Support for the arts- merde! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore! Damn it, you punched one of my buttons. Let me fill your glass and you tell me what is on your mind.
”
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Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land)
“
Abstracts, mostly. Nonsense art, my friend Jake calls it. But it’s not really nonsense, it’s just—other people paint what they see. I paint what I feel. Maybe it’s confusing, swapping one sense for another, but there’s beauty in the transmutation.
”
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Victoria E. Schwab (The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue)
“
People are fond of spouting out the old cliché about how Van Gogh never sold a painting in his lifetime. Somehow his example serves to justify to us, decades later, that there is merit in utter failure.
Perhaps, but the man did commit suicide. The market for his work took off big-time shortly after his death. Had he decided to stick around another few decades he most likely would’ve entered old age quite prosperous. And sadly for failures everywhere, the cliché would have lost a lot of its power.
The fact is, the old clichés work for us in abstract terms, but they never work out in real life quite the same way. Life is messy; clichés are clean and tidy.
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Hugh MacLeod (Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity)
“
Kandinsky now knew that abstraction was the magic ingredient when it came to making a painting that could stand comparison with a symphony.
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Will Gompertz (What Are You Looking At?: The Surprising, Shocking, and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 Years of Modern Art)
“
When I was a child, I looked at rugs the same way, as a grown-up, I look at an abstract painting.
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Édouard Levé (Autoportrait)
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Suprematism was an audacious concept. At least Kandinsky’s abstract paintings gave the viewer a visual treat, even if they were indecipherable
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Will Gompertz (What Are You Looking At?: The Surprising, Shocking, and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 Years of Modern Art)
“
Nevertheless, we react to one a bit differently than we do to Rothko’s hovering panels or Barnett Newman’s stripes, though Whistler does approach their extremity of abstraction; part of our pleasure lies in recognizing bridges and buildings in the mist, and in sensing the damp riverine silence, the glimmering metropolitan presence. … The painting - a single blurred stripe of urban shore - is additionally daring in that the sky and sea are no shade of blue, but, instead, an improbable, pervasive cobalt green. Human vision is here taken to its limits, and modern painting, as a set of sensations realized in paint, is achieved.
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John Updike (Still Looking: Essays on American Art)
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The abstract artist, he said, would be repeatedly challenged by such skeptics asking, “‘What does it mean?’… ‘Is it a sky, a house, a horse?’” To which they should respond with confidence and honesty, “‘No, it is a painting.’”29
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Mary Gabriel (Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art (LITTLE, BROWN A))
“
I’ll be honest with you. The variables that construct my existence are confusing. Like handwritten math equations jammed together on a sloppy page of homework. They don’t make any sense. One math problem leads to another, and then another and so it goes.
One day you realize that your life is one whole page of problems and nothing ever gets solved.
One ongoing equation with no equal sign at the end. But it occurred to me, beneath the canopy of a starlight heaven, that I’d been looking at my life all wrong.
It wasn’t a math equation. Things weren’t supposed to add up. There was no solution.
In fact, there was no problem. Life’s variables and numbers and pages of chicken scratch weren’t mathematical marks. They were art. A drawing. An abstract painting. It was meant to be beautiful, not sensical. And embedded within the mess of it all were miracles. Small ones. I’d never paid attention to them because I was too busy, but it didn’t make them less real.
”
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Sean Dietrich (Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: A Memoir of Learning to Believe You’re Gonna Be Okay)
“
The Ilhalmiut do not fill canvases with their paintings, or inscribe figures on rocks, or carve figurines in clay or in stone, because in the lives of the People there is no room for the creation of objects of no practical value. What purpose is there in creating beautiful things if these must be abandoned when the family treks out over the Barrens? But the artistic sense is present and strongly developed. It is strongly alive in their stories and songs, and in the string-figures, but they also use it on the construction of things which assist in their living and in these cases it is no less an art. The pleasure of abstract creation is largely denied to them by the nature of the land, but still they know how to make beauty.
They know how to make beauty, and they also know how to enjoy it-- for it is no uncommon thing to see an Ilhalmio man squatting silently on a hill crest and watching, for hours at a time, the swift interplay of colors that sweep the sky at sunset and dawn. It is not unusual to see an Ilhalmio pause for long minutes to watch the sleek beauty of a weasel or to stare into the brilliant heart of some minuscule flower. And these things are done quite unconsciously, too. There is no word for 'beauty'--as such--in their language; it needs no words in their hearts.
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Farley Mowat (People of the Deer)
“
Should you devote your life to asshole aikido? While that would not be entirely unworthy, there are probably better things to do with the limited time one has in life, things such as learning to paint large canvases in the abstract; refining one’s taste in jazz; or, indeed, learning the martial art of aikido for the sake of the practice itself (rather than for the few occasions one will ever use it in a fight). Life affords only so much time, and there are better things to do—sweeter spots to hit—than perfection in the asshole management arts.
”
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Aaron James (Assholes: A Theory)
“
I do,” says Sam, a smile breaking over her face. “Abstracts, mostly. Nonsense art, my friend Jake calls it. But it’s not really nonsense, it’s just—other people paint what they see. I paint what I feel. Maybe it’s confusing, swapping one sense for another, but there’s beauty in the transmutation.
”
”
Victoria E. Schwab (The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue)
“
Note 54.
I have often pondered whether Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game painted, perhaps not fully consciously, a good picture of what this new world could look like: a small and poor cultural en intellectual elite living in a secluded 'Castalia,' but that performed the glass bead game - an abstract synthesis of the arts and science -to tie together and give meaning to existence as well as the world as a whole. Remember that Castalia has a diplomatic wing whose role is to negotiate with the outside world to keep its funding. Of course Knecht leaves in the end, but there is one way of reading his ultimate drowning as a sacrifice so that the overman - Tito - can live.
”
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Hugo Drochon (Nietzsche's Great Politics)
“
But, as Sir Herbert Read remarks in his Concise History of Modern Art, metaphysical anxiety is no longer only Germanic and northern; it now characterizes the whole of the modern world. Read quotes Klee, who wrote in his Diary at the beginning of 1915: “The more horrifying this world becomes (as it is in these days) the more art becomes abstract; while a world at peace produces realistic art.” To Franz Marc, abstraction offered a refuge from the evil and ugliness in this world. “Very early in life I felt that man was ugly. The animals seemed to be more lovely and pure, yet even among them I discovered so much that was revolting and hideous that my painting became more and more schematic and abstract.
”
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C.G. Jung (Man and His Symbols)
“
I remember [Meyer] Schapiro telling us that before Cézanne, there had always been a place in landscape painting where the viewer could walk into the picture. There was an entrance; you could go there, like walking into a park. But this was not true of Cézanne’s landscapes, which were cut off absolutely, abstracted from their context. You could not walk into them—you could enter them only through art, by leaping.
Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage
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Anatole Broyard
“
Hegel was paradoxically not idealist enough to imagine the reign of abstraction in art. That is to say, in the same way that, in the domain of economy, he wasn’t able to discern the self-mediating Notion which structures the economic reality of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption, he wasn’t able to discern the Notional content of a painting which mediates and regulates its form (shapes, colours) at a level which is more basic than the content represented (pictured) by a painting—“abstract painting” mediates/reflects sensuality at a non-representational level.
”
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Slavoj Žižek (Freedom: A Disease Without Cure)
“
Art lovers collect paintings that demonstrate some form of imperceptible complexity. Abstract images with vague messages and symbols that keep you guessing and wondering what it all means, if anything. What these art buffs don’t seem to realize is that true complexity—the real abstract image—lies in something as simple and as random as a family photo. If they bothered to look deeply and closely enough into these unremarkable images, they would see the lies, the sorrow and the dark secrets that hide behind the superficial smiles and forced joviality. A picture is worth a thousand words, but most of those words get lost in translation.
”
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Mindy Fordham (The Waking World)
“
Whenever there was an opening for a new show, she would invite him; there would be champagne and hors d’oeuvres, women in smart dresses and men in well-cut suits. Anne would circulate around the room, stopping to talk with the people clustered in front of the paintings—wild, abstract splashes of color or more somber, tonal works. Marco didn’t understand any of it. The most beautiful, the most arresting thing in the room, for him, would always be Anne. He would stay out of her way, stand over by the bar eating cheese, or off to the side, and watch her do her thing. She had been trained for it, getting her degree in art history and modern art, but more than that, she had an instinct for it, a passion. Marco had not grown up with art, but it was part of her life, and he loved her for it.
”
”
Shari Lapena (The Couple Next Door)
“
Sometimes my soul feels very peaceful, happy to be contained. Other times it has the urge to send envoys into the world, and I find myself sending unguarded passionate messages, voice notes and even recordings of me singing to my friends. It makes me think of the bit in the song where Joni breaks into the Canadian national anthem. I find the whole song moving, but this particular part, her 'o Canada', sounds like a moment where she forgets the audience and performs in the way you might in a private scene with a lover, family member or friend. No one wants to be a lonely soul, only filled up with yourself and the abstractions of the soul in art. Like a squid stuffed with its own tentacles. A lonely painter, living in a box of paints. But, it occurs to me, needing to identify what or who the 'you' is when I sing Joni's song is another example of my ego troubling with a convention I don't really believe in. My 'you' could be liquid, flowing from one thing to another. It could contain many people and things, be so vast as to be God-sized, an oceanic you. Or it could be small and exact like a square of pure pigment, with a startling itselfness, which once it goes beyond me can transform all it touches.
”
”
Amy Key (Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Loving and Living Alone)
“
None,” Einstein said. “Relativity is a purely scientific matter and has nothing to do with religion.”51 That was no doubt true. However, there was a more complex relationship between Einstein’s theories and the whole witch’s brew of ideas and emotions in the early twentieth century that bubbled up from the highly charged cauldron of modernism. In his novel Balthazar, Lawrence Durrell had his character declare, “The Relativity proposition was directly responsible for abstract painting, atonal music, and formless literature.” The relativity proposition, of course, was not directly responsible for any of this. Instead, its relationship with modernism was more mysteriously interactive. There are historical moments when an alignment of forces causes a shift in human outlook. It happened to art and philosophy and science at the beginning of the Renaissance, and again at the beginning of the Enlightenment. Now, in the early twentieth century, modernism was born by the breaking of the old strictures and verities. A spontaneous combustion occurred that included the works of Einstein, Picasso, Matisse, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Joyce, Eliot, Proust, Diaghilev, Freud, Wittgenstein, and dozens of other path-breakers who seemed to break the bonds of classical thinking.52 In his book Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc, the historian of science and philosophy Arthur I. Miller explored the common wellsprings that produced, for example, the 1905 special theory of relativity and Picasso’s 1907 modernist masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
”
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Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe)
“
It may be cheap, but it should also be sturdy. What must be avoided at all costs is dishonest, distorted and ornate work. What must be sought is the natural, direct, simple, sturdy and safe.
Confining beauty to visual appreciation and excluding the beauty of practical objects has proven to be a grave error on the part of modern man. A true appreciation of beauty cannot be fostered by ignoring practical handicrafts. After all, there is no greater opportunity for appreciating beauty than through its use in our daily lives, no greater opportunity for coming into direct contact with the beautiful. It was the tea masters who first recognized this fact. Their profound aesthetic insight came as a result of their experience with utilitarian objects.
If life and beauty are treated as belonging to different realms, our aesthetic sensibilities will gradually wither and decline.
It is said that someone living in proximity to a flowering garden grows insensitive to its fragrance. Likewise, when one becomes too familiar with a sight, one loses the ability to truly see it. Habit robs us of the power to perceive anew, much less the power to be moved. Thus it has taken us all these years, all these ages, to detect the beauty in common objects.
The world of utility and the world of beauty are not separate realms.
Users and the used have exchanged a vow: the more an object is used the more beautiful it will become and the more the user uses an object, the more the object will be used.
When machines are in control, the beauty they produce is cold and shallow. It is the human hand that creates subtlety and warmth.
Weakness cannot withstand the rigors of daily use.
The true meaning of the tea ceremony is being forgotten. The beauty of the way of tea should be the beauty of the ordinary, the beauty of honest poverty.
Equating the expensive with the beautiful cannot be a point of pride.
Under the snow's reflected light creeping into the houses, beneath the dim lamplight, various types of manual work are taken up. This is how time is forgotten; this is how work absorbs the hours and days. yet there is work to do, work to be done with the hands. Once this work begins, the clock no longer measures the passage of time.
The history of kogin is the history of utility being transformed into beauty.
Through their own efforts, these people made their daily lives more beautiful. This is the true calling, the mission, of handicrafts. We are drawn by that beauty and we have much to learn from it.
As rich as it is, America is perhaps unrivalled for its vulgar lack of propriety and decorum, which may account for its having the world's highest crime rate.
The art of empty space seen in the Nanga school of monochrome painting and the abstract, free-flowing art of calligraphy have already begun to exert considerable influence on the West.
Asian art represents a latent treasure trove of immense and wide-reaching value for the future and that is precisely because it presents a sharp contrast to Western art.
No other country has pursued the art of imperfection as eagerly as Japan.
Just as Western art and architecture owe much to the sponsorship of the House of Medici during the Reformation, tea and Noh owe much to the protection of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa ( 1436-1490 ).
The most brilliant era of Japanese culture, the Higashiyama period ( 1443-1490 ).
Literally, sabi commonly means "loneliness" but as a Buddhist term it originally referred to the cessation of attachment.
The beauty of tea is the beauty of sabi. It might also be called the beauty of poverty or in our day it might be simply be called the beauty of simplicity. The tea masters familiar with this beauty were called sukisha-ki meaning "lacking". The sukisha were masters of enjoying what was lacking.
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Soetsu Yanagi (The Beauty of Everyday Things)
“
In 1972, Bayber's work underwent another metamorphosis, yet refused to be defined by or adhere to any specific style. Elements of abstract expressionism, modernism, surrealism, and neo-expressionism combine with figurative art to create works which remain wholly original and highly complex, both delighting and terrifying at a subconscious level. There is nothing fragile here, nothing dreamlike. No protections are offered, not for the artist himself and not for those viewing his work. All is called forth in a raw state, human values finessed on the canvas, softened and sharpened, separated and made aggregate. While there are certain motifs in these works- often a suggestion of water, the figure of a bird- and various elements are repeated, aside from an introverted complexity, the context in which they appear is never the same from one piece to the next. What ties these works together is the suggestion of loss, of disappearance, and of longing ( see figs. 87-95)"
The figure of a bird. He had forgotten his own writing. Finch took the book back to his desk and pulled a magnifying glass from the top drawer to study the color plates. Thomas had completed six paintings in 1972, four of them after July. In each of those four, Finch managed to find what he had seen long ago, the figure of a bird. Was it Alice, flown away from him?
”
”
Tracy Guzeman (The Gravity of Birds)
“
Is that a DeKwan?” Jeannie blurted out, pointing to a massive abstract painting on the far wall—aggressive black slashes on daubed off-white. At once, she reviled herself for the question. She’d given in to the fateful impulse—the desire to make sure that Lally knew that she knew! The desire to somehow, in some way, put herself on equal footing with Lally Stein. I may not be able to buy contemporary art, but I do recognize it! But rich people and celebrities didn’t care if you knew!
”
”
Caitlin Macy (Mrs.)
“
Paint Me and You Will End up with Abstract Art
”
”
Alana Josey
“
Shum fan of abstract expressionism—Pollock. Gonna paint walls with yer blood. Splatter red and bone marrow.” There’s a first time for everything. Like meeting a troll who can make a better highbrow art joke than you can.
”
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R.R. Virdi (Grave Dealings (The Grave Report, #3))
“
And yet, to describe Twombly’s abstract paintings, or to look at reproductions, tiny postage stamps a poor proxy for his floor-to-ceiling canvases, is to miss why they capture the imagination. “A Twombly looks,” writes one critic, “the way thinking sometimes feels.”8 And that is Twombly’s gift, the bewildering slipstream between thinking and feeling—a gift I’ve spent years trying to understand.
”
”
Joshua Rivkin (Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly)
“
begin your drawing or painting by placing eleven small dots, at random, on a piece of paper and start connecting those dots with lines. Think of the dots as hubs or anchors for the lines to connect to in a variety of ways.
”
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Dean Nimmer (Creating Abstract Art: Ideas and Inspirations for Passionate Art-Making)
“
Abstraction, like poetry, does not dictate a clear narrative but rather, quietly offers a fragment, a piece of a mysteriously familiar narrative. In my paintings, there has continued to be a paring down of recognizable natural forms, which now have given way to a personal abstract vocabulary of shapes, colors and forms. The prominent use of abstraction has allowed me to distill and better communicate my emotions and ideas about life, nature and our respective place within it
”
”
Nicholas Wilton
“
I started painting again. Not the meticulous landscapes I used to do, but abstracts. Bold, violent slashes of color on the canvas, emotional and unrestrained. Landscapes are all about what I see, but these…these are all about what I feel. I won’t show them to anyone. They’re more like spiritual vomit than art.
”
”
J.T. Geissinger (Ruthless Creatures (Queens & Monsters, #1))
“
But in my profession I know one miraculous name. You will be very much surprised. This name is Piet Mondrian. That man painted extremely simple panels, where on a seemingly white ground, divided by what seems to merely be black lines of different sizes and some rectangles of color. If you sit in front of that picture or in front of any of his pictures, but you cannot see it quick, you see it certain times. You have to concentrate and suddenly in front of your eyes, the background recedes, the airy, wonderful structure is advancing towards your eyes and you see the green going far and red coming nearer and the yellow going out of sight. And in front of your eyes is the structure. You are assisting at something that becomes in front of your eyes, that's veritably a becoming, you are assisting at the birth of a form. It is miraculous to recreate the form, but to make you see form being born in front of you -- it is a great miracle.
[-- Martin A. Ryerson Lecture, 20 February 1951]
”
”
Pavel Tchelitchew
“
After leaving holes in me I started taking pictures and painting abstract, the magic of museum still trickles in my soul. I went in Budapest last summer what a place with extraordinary art and theater. Guess what? I watched Charlotte play it was looking into the sea tides and breathe the sands of time...
”
”
Tapiwanaishe Pamacheche (Hannah Cherub: Hannah cherub)
“
My mom and sisters cried—even Maria, and she never cried—but I couldn’t. I was defective. Instead, I withdrew into my art. I painted dark abstracts and broken people for hours on end.
”
”
Jill Ramsower (Never Truth (The Five Families, #2))
“
Philosophy is the abstract art of thoughts and perceptions that form colors of words and languages that paint the canvas of our minds.
”
”
Debasish Mridha
“
This ability is partly why artistically naive viewers prefer representational paintings over abstract ones: they can latch onto a piece of the meaning of the painting.
”
”
Anjan Chatterjee (The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art)
“
In portraiture I look for people that I recognise - 'Look, it's Uncle Tony' - or for the faces of film stars. The Madame Tussaud's school of art appreciation. In realist works I look for detail; 'Look at the eyelashes!' I say, in idiotic admiration at the fineness of the brush. 'Look at the reflection in his eye!' In abstract art I look for colour - 'I love the blue' as if the works of Rothko and Mondrian were little more than immense paint charts. I understand the superficial thrill of seeing the object in the flesh, so to speak; the sightseeing approach that lumps together the Grand Canyon, the Taj Mahal and the Sistine Chapel as items to tick off. I understand rarity and uniqueness, the 'how much?' school of criticism.
”
”
David Nicholls
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Kandinsky argued that, like music, art need not represent objects: the sublime aspects of the human spirit and soul can only be expressed through abstraction. Just as music moves the heart of the listener, so form and color in painting should move the heart of the beholder.
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Eric R. Kandel (Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures)
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Try using brushes of different sizes and paints of different colors, and let your marks merge together on the canvas. The first few times you try action painting should be purely experimental. The important thing to remember is that unpredictability is what you are after, so you can revel in the pure enjoyment of playing with the paint. Begin to experiment with different approaches: Try flinging paint off the brush to create explosive spatters, dripping paint from different heights or pouring paint of different thicknesses (diluted with various amounts of water) onto the canvas at the same time.
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Dean Nimmer (Creating Abstract Art: Ideas and Inspirations for Passionate Art-Making)
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The Latvian painter has a special love for diffused outdoor light which seems to penetrate the bodies and emanate from them," a light that reappears within, and from behind, Rothko's paintings, an illumination glimpsed through a hazy doorway or window, a light longed for but beyond reach.
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James E.B. Breslin (Mark Rothko: A Biography)
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The Latvian painter has a special love for diffused outdoor light which seems to penetrate the bodies and emanate from them," a light that reappears within, and from behind, Rothko's paintings, an illumination glimpsed through a hazy doorway or window, a light longed for but beyond reach.
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E.B. Breslin
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Line: An artist’s tool used to illustrate the outer edges of shapes and forms. Technically, no physical lines exist in nature. For example, there is not an actual line around an apple to distinguish it from the table it’s sitting on, nor is there a physical line between the sky and the land at the horizon; therefore, lines in art are an artist’s interpretation of the boundaries between forms in a scene, or the perceived edges of shapes in a composition. Repeated lines can also be used to create values and textures in two-dimensional and three-dimensional art. Shape: The outside two-dimensional contour, outline or border of a form, figure or structure. Form: The three-dimensional representation of a shape. In drawings, paintings and other two-dimensional art, the artist creates the illusion of a three-dimensional form in space using light, shadow and other rendering techniques. In sculpture, the form is the manifestation of the object itself. Texture: The distinctive surface qualities found on all things as well as the overall visual patterns and tactile feel of objects and their surroundings. Value: The relative lightness or darkness of shapes, forms and backgrounds of two-dimensional or three-dimensional compositions. Value plays a prominent role in both black-and-white and color artworks, potentially adding dramatic contrasts and depth to an otherwise bland composition. Color: The spectrum of hues, values and intensities of natural light and man-made pigments, paints and mineral compounds that can be used in all art forms.
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Dean Nimmer (Creating Abstract Art: Ideas and Inspirations for Passionate Art-Making)
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Action painting is nothing more than letting the paint do what it wants to do with a little help from you. The first thing to try might be the loosest form of action painting, where you begin by soaking a brush with paint and dripping and splashing paint onto your paper or canvas. Let the paint spatter and drip as you make bold, impromptu gestures, or change to more subtle patterns of movement to see what kinds of marks those gestures create.
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Dean Nimmer (Creating Abstract Art: Ideas and Inspirations for Passionate Art-Making)
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In art you always work between opposites. Between stopping and going, stasis and movement, abstraction and figuration.
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Philip Guston (I Paint What I Want to See)
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As for Reka’s own artistic career, it might seem absurd that the CIA funded modern art in a blow for the culture war against the USSR, but it is very true: government funds sent a sensational collection of abstract expressionist art called The New American Painting on a tour of Europe, comprised of works by Pollock, Rothko, and many more. One woman artist was represented in the collection—Elaine de Kooning, who specialized in abstract portraits, including a famous depiction of JFK in the sixties. Reka’s work is based on hers.
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Kate Quinn (The Briar Club)
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If Klee led Plath further into the rococo labyrinth she meant to escape, Giorgio de Chirico led her out. Plath’s most successful art poem from this period was “The Disquieting Muses,” inspired by an abstract, surrealist painting of that title by de Chirico—“three terrible, faceless dressmakers’ dummies in classical gowns,
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Heather Clark (Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath)
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A hallmark of classicism in art and science is a visual imagery abstracted from phenomena and objects we have experienced in the daily world. There is no such visual imagery in quantum mechanics or in highly abstract art. Artists and scientists had to seek it anew rather than extrapolate it from the everyday world. Just as it is pointless to stand in front of a Mondrian or Pollock, for instance, and ask what the painting is of, so it’s pointless to ask what the electron under quantum mechanics looks like. Neither question has an answer, and neither Einstein nor Picasso could accept such a radical break with classical thinking.
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Arthur I. Miller (Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc)
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This is abstract art, pure and simple. And art is always a struggle. There is no systematic way to create beautiful and meaningful paintings or sculptures, and there is also no method for producing beautiful and meaningful mathematical arguments.
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Paul Lockhart (Measurement)
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There are several books on Walter Potter---one is called Sweet Death: A Feast With Kittens; another, The Victorian Visionary: Inventor of Kitsch. There are some on carnivals, fairgrounds, prison murals, prison art, and a hefty book with a title in gold, Portraits of Icons: From Alexamenos Graffito to Peter Blake's Sgt. Pepper. There are also books I have seen before, books I used to, until very recently when I lost my suitcase, own. One is a book on the abstract expressionist Bernice Bing; colors from her piece Burney Falls cascade down the spine---deep red, tinged with orange, outlined in black against white, brown and peach like skin. There's a book on the performance artist Senga Nengudi too, and another on the painter Amrita Sher-Gil. I take this last one off the shelf, and it falls open to a middle page, which has a picture of her painting Three Girls on it. I stand there for a moment, looking at the three girls' faces: calm, patiently waiting. They are huddled close together, as though perhaps they are sisters, but I don't think they could be; they look too different.
I had a postcard of this painting taped to my wall while I was growing up. It was blank on the other side, but I kept it because I had found it tucked in the wooden frame of one of Dad's paintings. It went missing at some point, but while I had it, I looked at it often and felt that I knew---like really knew, as though I had a sense about these things---that the girls depicted were vampires, and that they were still out there in the world, looking exactly the same as when Sher-Gil painted them in 1935, and that I would one day meet them. The painting, I decided when I was a child, depicted the three girls quietly waiting for three brothers to come out of a house so that they could eat them.
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Claire Kohda (Woman, Eating)
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Another indication that apes do not just make disruptive marks comes from the fact that they have a sense of completion of a painting. This is in contrast to what some early observers claimed. They argued that ape paintings are actually a human product: apes happily paint away until the product starts to look like a piece of abstract art to the people around it, who then take it away from the ape and hang it in a gallery. That would mean that the art is all in the human eye, that an ape has no conception of making a finished product.
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Frans de Waal (The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist)
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I believe there is a genuine need for people to feel part of an ennobling mission, but stating a mission or purpose in words is not enough. Many mission statements end up sounding like ‘apple pie and motherhood.’ People need visions to make the purpose more concrete and tangible. We have to learn to ‘paint pictures’ of the type of organization we want to have. Core values are necessary to help people with day-to-day decision making. Purpose is abstract. Visions may be long term. People need ‘guiding stars’ to navigate and make decisions day to day. But core values are only helpful if they can be translated into concrete behaviors. For example, a core value like openness’ requires the skills of reflection and inquiry within an overall context of trusting and supporting one another.
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Peter M. Senge (The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization)
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Over in Europe, at around the same time, people were creating art in very similar ways. Southern France is littered with caves adorned with pictures of astonishing beauty and skill that date from around this time all the way into the near present. Lascaux, near Montignac, is probably the most famous, a Pleistocene art gallery from a much more recent 17,000 years ago, displaying more than 6,000 figures, interpretations of hunts, with horses and bison, felines, the extinct colossal elk Megaloceros giganteus, and abstract symbols whose meaning we can never understand. People painted in charcoal and haematite and dabbed them onto the walls as pigments in suspensions with animal fats and clay. They are breathtaking. To the west, the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave has the oldest wall art in Europe, again with beasts in relief, from hunts, and hunters – cave lions, hyenas, bears and panthers, oh my! The oldest of these were painted 37,000 years ago, according to the most up-to-date studies in 2016.
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Adam Rutherford (The Book of Humans: A Brief History of Culture, Sex, War and the Evolution of Us)
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But in my profession I know one miraculous name. You will be very much surprised. This name is Piet Mondrian. That man painted extremely simple panels, where on a seemingly white ground, divided by what seems to merely be black lines of different sizes and some rectangles of color. If you sit in front of that picture or in front of any of his pictures, but you cannot see it quick, you see it certain times. You have to conentrate and suddenly in front of your eyes, the background recedes, the airy, wonderful structure is advancing towards your eyes and you see the green going far and red coming nearer and the yellow going out of sight. And in front of your eyes is the structure. You are assisting at something that becomes in front of your eyes, that's veritably a becoming, you are assisting at the birth of a form. It is miraculous to recreate the form, but to make you see form being born in front of you -- it is a great miracle.
[-- Martin A. Ryerson Lecture, 20 February 1951]
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Pavel Tchelitchew
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By counting the most meagre form of life (existence) as the standard, indeed, as the general standard – general because it is applicable to the mass of men. He turns the worker into an insensible being lacking all needs, just as he changes his activity into a pure abstraction from all activity. To him, therefore, every luxury of the worker seems to be reprehensible, and everything that goes beyond the most abstract need – be it in the realm of passive enjoyment, or a manifestation of activity – seems to him a luxury. Political economy, this science of wealth, is therefore simultaneously the science of renunciation, of want, of saving and it actually reaches the point where it spares man the need of either fresh air or physical exercise. This science of marvellous industry is simultaneously the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave. Its moral ideal is the worker who takes part of his wages to the savings-bank, and it has even found ready-made a servile art which embodies this pet idea: it has been presented, bathed in sentimentality, on the stage. Thus political economy – despite its worldly and voluptuous appearance – is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is its principal thesis. The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything ||XVI| which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and, drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power – all this it can appropriate for you – it can buy all this: it is true endowment. Yet being all this, it wants to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant, and when I have the master I have the servant and do not need his servant. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice. The worker may only have enough for him to want to live, and may only want to live in order to have that.
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Karl Marx (Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844/The Communist Manifesto)
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Can you not see artistic development— how he renounced the realism of his earlier years, and advanced into abstract, nonrepresentational art?’
He had indeed moved from realism to nonrepresentation to the abstract, yet this was not the artist, but the pathology, advancing—advancing towards a profound visual agnosia, in which all powers of representation and imagery, all sense of the concrete, all sense of reality, were being destroyed. This wall of paintings was a tragic
pathological exhibit, which belonged to neurology, not art.
And yet, I wondered, was she not partly right? For there is often a struggle, and sometimes, even more interestingly, a collusion between the powers of pathology and creation.
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Oliver Sacks (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales)
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She walked past an abstract painting that oozed wealth, the grotesquely simply kind with the white line drawn on a black canvas, as though saying: we're so powerful we pay millions for the mundane.
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Kelly Siskind (The Beat Match (Showmen, #3))
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We must take literally what vision teaches us: namely, that through it we come in contact with the sun and the stars, that we are everywhere all at once,
and that even our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere—"I am in Petersburg in my bed, in Paris, my eyes see the sun"—or to intend real beings wherever they are, borrows from vision and employs
means we owe to it. Vision alone makes us learn that beings that are different, "exterior," foreign to one another, are yet absolutely together, are "simultaneity"; this is a mystery psychologists handle the way a child handles explosives. Robert Delaunay says succinctly, "The railroad track is the image of succession which comes closest to the parallel: the parity of the rails." The rails converge and do not converge; they converge in order to remain equidistant down below. The world is in accordance with my perspective in order to be independent of
me, is for me in order to be without me, and to be the world. The "visual quale" gives me, and alone gives me, the presence of what is not me, of what is simply and fully. It does so because, like texture, it is the concretion of a universal visibility, of a unique space which separates and reunites, which sustains every cohesion (and even that of past and future, since there would be no such cohesion if they were
not essentially relevant to the same space). Every visual something, as individual as it is, functions also as a dimension, because it gives itself as the result of a dehiscence of Being. What this ultimately means is
that the proper essence of the visible is to have a layer of invisibility in the strict sense, which it makes present as a certain absence...There is that which reaches the eye directly, the frontal properties of the visible; but there is also that which reaches it from below—the profound postural latency where the body raises itself to see—and that which reaches vision from above like the phenomena of flight, of swimming, of movement, where it participates no longer in the heaviness of origins but in free accomplishments. Through it, then, the painter touches the two extremities. In the immemorial depth of the visible, something moved, caught fire, and engulfed his body; everything he paints is in answer to this incitement, and his hand is "nothing but the instrument of a distant will." Vision encounters, as at a crossroads, all the aspects of
Being...
There is no break at all in this circuit; it is impossible to say that nature ends here and that man or expression starts here. It is, therefore, mute Being which itself comes to show forth its own meaning. Herein lies the reason why the dilemma between figurative and nonfigurative art is badly posed; it is true and uncontradictory that no grape was ever
what it is in the most figurative painting and that no painting, no matter how abstract, can get away from Being, that even Caravaggio's grape is the grape itself. This precession of what is upon what one
sees and makes seen, of what one sees and makes seen upon what is—this is vision itself.
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty (L'Œil et l'Esprit)
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In the early Soviet years, before ‘socialist realism’ became the prescribed genre in literature, painting, film and even music, the first big new thing in the arts under Communism was ‘Prolekult’, proletarian culture. The idea was that art would reflect the experience of people in the workplace, and many artists went to factories to produce work collectively in teams rather than individually. ‘The “I” of bourgeois culture would yield to the “we” of the new world,’ as Lunacharsky said. Large amounts of money were spent on projects like building an orchestra from the sound of clanking factory machinery, and replacing old paintings in museums with often abstract new pieces produced in working conditions by a team of labourers and artists together. This was the first ‘cultural revolution’ under Communism, which aimed to destroy everything old and start anew.
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Victor Sebestyen (Lenin the Dictator)
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A dandy," wrote Charles Baudelaire, "must be looking in his mirror at all times, waking and sleeping." Dali could easily have become the living proof of Baudelaire's dictum. But the literal mirror was not enough for him. Dali needed mirrors of many kinds: his pictures, his admirers, newspapers and magazines and television. And even that still left him unsatisfied.
So one Christmas he took a walk in the streets of New York carrying a bell. He would ring it whenever he felt people were not paying enough attention to him. "The thought of not being recognised was unbearable." True to himself to the bitter end, he delighted in following Catalonian television's bulletins on his state of health during his last days alive (in Quiron hospital in Barcelona); he wanted to hear people talking about him, and he also wanted to know whether his health would revive or whether he would be dying soon. At the age of six he wanted to be a female cook - he specified the gender. At seven he wanted to be Napoleon. "Ever since, my ambition has been continually on the increase, as has my megalomania: now all I want to be is Salvador Dali. But the closer I get to my goal, the further Salvador Dali drifts away from me."
He painted his first picture in 1910 at the age of six. At ten he discovered Impressionist art, and at fourteen the Pompiers (a 19th century group of academic genre painters, among them Meissonier, Detaille and Moreau). By 1927 he was Dali, and the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, a friend of his youth, wrote an 'Ode to Salvador Dali.' Years later Dali claimed that Lorca had been very attracted to him and had tride to sodomize him, but had not quite managed it. Dali's thirst for scandal was unquenchable. His parents had named him Salvador "because he was the chosen one who was come to save painting from the" deadly menace of abstract art, academic Surrealism, Dadaism, and any kind of anarchic "ism" whatsoever."
If he had lived during the Renaissance, his genius would have been recognized at an earlier stage and indeed considered normal. But in the twentieth century, which Dali damned as stupid, he was thought provocative, a thorn in the flesh. To this day there are many who misunderstand the provocativeness and label him insane. But Dali repeatedly declared: "... the sole difference between me and a madman is the fact that I am not mad!" Dali also said: "The difference between the Surrealists and me is that I am a Surrealist" - which is perfectly true. And he also claimed: "I have the universal curiosity of Renaissance men, and my mental jaws are constantly at work.
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Gilles Néret (Salvador Dalí: 1904-1989)
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Noa sleeps with the curtains open, allowing as much moonlight as possible to flood her bedroom, allowing her to see each and every picture on the walls, if only as a pale glimmer. It took Noa weeks to perfect the art display. Reproductions of Monet's gardens at Giverny blanket one wall: thousands of violets- smudges of purples and mauves- and azaleas, poppies, and peonies, tulips and roses, water lilies in pastel pinks floating on serene lakes reflecting weeping willows and shimmers of sunshine. Turner's sunsets adorn another: bright eyes of gold at the center of skies and seas of searing magenta or soft blue. The third wall is splashed with Jackson Pollocks: a hundred different colors streaked and splattered above Noa's bed. The fourth wall is decorated by Rothko: blocks of blue and red and yellow blending and bleeding together. The ceiling is papered with the abstract shapes of Kandinsky: triangles, circles, and lines tumbling over one another in energetic acrobatics.
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Menna Van Praag (The Witches of Cambridge)
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There is no painting without drawing and there is no shape without line ... in the end all images can be reduced to lines.
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El-Sahali
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The most striking phenomenon connected with the progress of technology is the development of cultural centres into large cities in the modern sense; these form the soil in which the new art is rooted. Impressionism is an urban art, and not only because it discovers the landscape quality of the city and brings painting back from the country into the town, but because it sees the world through the eyes of the townsman and reacts to external impressions with the overstrained nerves of modern technical man. It is an urban style, because it describes the changeability, the nervous rhythm, the sudden, sharp but always ephemeral impressions of city life. And precisely as such, it implies an enormous expansion of sensual perception, a new sharpening of sensibility, a new irritability, and, with the Gothic and romanticism, it signifies one of the most important turning points in the history of Western art. In the dialectical process represented by the history of painting, the alternation of the static and the dynamic, of design and colour, abstract order and organic life, impressionism forms the climax of the development in which recognition is given to the dynamic and organic elements of experience and which completely dissolves the static world-view of the Middle Ages. A continuous line can be traced from the Gothic to impressionism comparable to the line leading from late medieval economy to high capitalism, and modern man, who regards his whole existence as a struggle and a competition, who translates all being into motion and change, for whom experience of the world increasingly becomes experience of time, is the product of this bilateral, but fundamentally uniform development.
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Arnold Hauser (The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age)
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He knew what was going on in painting in this country in the Fifties and Sixties. Abstract Expressionism, Pop-Art, Minimal, Op-Art, Less-is-More, Flat, all the avant-garde idiocies. But Maitland paid no attention to it. He went his way. Traditional. Representational. If he painted a tit, it was a tit.
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Lawrence Sanders (The Second Deadly Sin (Deadly Sins #3))
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I started painting again. Not the meticulous landscapes I used to do, but abstracts. Bold, violent slashes of color on the canvas, emotional and unrestrained. Landscapes are all about what I see, but these…these are all about what I feel. I won’t show them to anyone. They’re more like spiritual vomit than art. I assume it’s a phase that will pass, but for now, I’m into it.
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J.T. Geissinger (Ruthless Creatures (Queens & Monsters, #1))
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According to Croce, therefore, the burden of artistic meaning lies not with representation but with expression. And expression is the vehicle of aesthetic value. Works of art express things, and even abstract art, like instrumental music or abstract painting, can be an effective milieu for expression. So how do we understand expression, and why is it a value? One suggestion is that works of art express emotion, and that this is of value to us because it acquaints us with the human condition, and arouses our sympathies for experiences that we do not otherwise undergo. But clearly works of art don’t express emotion in the way that you express your anger by shouting at your son, or your love by speaking to him affectionately. Most works of art are not created in a sudden heat of passion; nor do we have the knowledge that will enable us to say what passion (if any) motivated the artist. Even when artists refer to the emotion that is allegedly conveyed by their work, we may not believe that their description is the correct one. Beethoven prefaced the slow movement of Op. 132 with the description ‘Hymn of thanksgiving from the convalescent to the Godhead in the Lydian mode’. Suppose you respond by saying ‘To me it is just a serene expression of contentment, and convalescence has nothing to do with it’. Does that show that you have not understood the movement? Why is Beethoven any better placed than you, to put words to the feeling conveyed by his music? Maybe you, as critic, are better able to describe the emotional content of a piece of music than the composer. There are plenty of artists who are awoken by criticism to the meaning of their own works: such, for example, was T. S. Eliot’s response to Helen Gardner’s book about his poetry—namely, at last I know what it means.
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Roger Scruton