Abstract Painting Quotes

Colour is a power which directly influences the soul.

life's kind of like a painting. A really bizarre, abstract painting. You could look at it and think that all it is, is a blur. And you could continue living your life thinking that all it is, is just a blur. But if you really look at it, really see it, focus on it, and use your imagination, life can become so much more. The painting could be of the sea, the sky, people,buildings, a butterfly on a flower, or anything except the blur you were once convinced it was.

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.

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.

The canvas is the door to another dimension. The paintbrush is the key.

When we are in front of an abstract painting, we have the license to interpret in any way we want. Or music—music is a medium that we might not understand, but that we feel and enjoy. But in the case of cinema many expect to receive a clear and unified message, but what I’m suggesting is that a film could be experienced as a poem, a painting, or a piece of music.

If you wish to make good art, then you must believe you already do. Otherwise, you will never be good enough.

There are so many other wonderful things that eyes could see if they really focused. Life's kind of like a painting. A rally bizarre abstract painting. You could look at it and think that all it is is a blur. And you can continue living your life thinking that all it is is a blur. But if you really look at it, really see it, focus on it, and use your imagination, life can become so much more. That painting could be of the sea, the sky, people, buildings, a butterfly on a flower or anything except the blur you were once convinced it was.

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.

Before, I could only guess of who I was. Now, thanks to my art, I know who I am

When the woman you live with is an artist, every day is a surprise. Clare has turned the second bedroom into a wonder cabinet, full of small sculptures and drawings pinned up on every inch of wall space. There are coils of wire and rolls of paper tucked into shelves and drawers. The sculptures remind me of kites, or model airplanes. I say this to Clare one evening, standing in the doorway of her studio in my suit and tie, home from work, about to begin making dinner, and she throws one at me; it flies surprisingly well, and soon we are standing at opposite ends of the hall, tossing tiny sculptures at each other, testing their aerodynamics. The next day I come home to find that Clare has created a flock of paper and wire birds, which are hanging from the ceiling in the living room. A week later our bedroom windows are full of abstract blue translucent shapes that the sun throws across the room onto the walls, making a sky for the bird shapes Clare has painted there. It's beautiful. The next evening I'm standing in the doorway of Clare's studio, watching her finish drawing a thicket of black lines around a little red bird. Suddenly I see Clare, in her small room, closed in by all her stuff, and I realize that she's trying to say something, and I know what I have to do.

As I’m debating running for the exit, Nash leans down to whisper at my ear. “Is something wrong?” “I feel like the only splash of color in an abstract painting.” “You are the splash of color. But there’s nothing wrong with that.

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

The inner life has its soft and gentle beauty; an abstract formlessness as well as a subtle charm. I often consider myself as a figure in a foggy painting: faltering lines, insecure distances, and a merging of greys and blacks. An emotion or a mood—a mere wisp of color—is shaded off and made to spread until it becomes one with all that surrounds it.

That image - of a little child being suffocated, or almost suffocated, by others who thought the whole thing was a game - melded with the furtive nocturnal slugs, and my solitary pacing and singing, and the separate, claustrophobic stairway, and the charmless abstract painting, and the gold-framed mirror, and the slithery green satin bedspread, and became inseperable from them. It wasn't a cheerful composite. As a memory, it is more like a fog bank than a sunlit meadow. Yet I think of that period as having been a happy time in my life. Happy is the wrong word. Important.

Talk—half-talk, phrases that had no need to be finished, abstractions, Chinese bells played on with cotton-tipped sticks, mock orange blossoms painted on porcelain. The muffled, close, half-talk of soft-fleshed women. The men she had embraced, and the women, all washing against the resonance of my memory. Sound within sound, scene within scene, woman within woman—like acid revealing an invisible script. One woman within another eternally, in a far-reaching procession, shattering my mind into fragments, into quarter tones which no orchestral baton can ever make whole again.

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.

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?

I also want the figurative like a painter who only paints abstract colors but wants to show that he does so because he chooses to, not because he can't draw.

There are moments when clear images finally begin to emerge within the abstract painting of your life.

Nothing is clear now. Something must be the matter with my way of viewing things. I have no middle view. Either I fix on a detail and see it as thought it were magnified -- a leaf with all its veins perceived, the fine hairs on a man's hands -- or else the world recedes and becomes blurred, artificial, indefinite, an abstract painting of a world. The darkening sky is hugely blue, gashed with rose, blood, flame from the volcano or wound or flower of the lowering sun. The wavering green, the sea of grass, piercingly bright. Black tree trunks, contorted, arching over the river.

The first night Stephen and I slept together, he whispered numbers into my ear: long, high numbers -- distances between planets, seconds in a life. He spoke as if they were poetry, and they became poetry. Later, when he fell asleep, I leaned over him and watched, trying to picture a mathematician's dreams. I concluded that Stephen must dream in abstract, cool designs like Mondrian paintings.

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.

The Death of Allegory I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance displaying their capital letters like license plates. Truth cantering on a powerful horse, Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils. Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a coat, Courtesy bowing with one hand always extended, Villainy sharpening an instrument behind a wall, Reason with her crown and Constancy alert behind a helm. They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes. Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator. Valor lies in bed listening to the rain. Even Death has nothing to do but mend his cloak and hood, and all their props are locked away in a warehouse, hourglasses, globes, blindfolds and shackles. Even if you called them back, there are no places left for them to go, no Garden of Mirth or Bower of Bliss. The Valley of Forgiveness is lined with condominiums and chain saws are howling in the Forest of Despair. Here on the table near the window is a vase of peonies and next to it black binoculars and a money clip, exactly the kind of thing we now prefer, objects that sit quietly on a line in lower case, themselves and nothing more, a wheelbarrow, an empty mailbox, a razor blade resting in a glass ashtray. As for the others, the great ideas on horseback and the long-haired virtues in embroidered gowns, it looks as though they have traveled down that road you see on the final page of storybooks, the one that winds up a green hillside and disappears into an unseen valley where everyone must be fast asleep.

The difference between being subtle and abstract is the difference between knowing and saying it in a gentler way and not knowing and saying it in a way that will let you off the hook. To be abstract with the word is all right if you use it like paint and seek the pure word, but it is difficult, in the language, to have near purity without near meaning.

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.

First I’ll tell you about the picture of the universe painted by modern physics: the geometry of the universe is not physical.” “Can you be a little less abstract?” “What if I put it this way: in the universe, apart from empty space, there is nothing.

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.

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.

Life's kind of like a painting. A really bizzare, abstract painting. You could look at it and think that all it is, is just a blur. And you could continue living your life thinking that all it is, is a blur. But if you really look at it, really see it, focus on it, and use your imagination, life can become so much more.

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.

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.

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.

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)

An art prodigy of the 21st century has yet to be crowned. Or have they?

When I was a child, I looked at rugs the same way, as a grown-up, I look at an abstract painting.

Suprematism was an audacious concept. At least Kandinsky’s abstract paintings gave the viewer a visual treat, even if they were indecipherable

I BOUGHT THIS house for the door. The house itself was a ruin, but I had to have that door. Over the years, I’ve painted it many times, all different ways: abstract, representational, blue, black, brown. I’ve painted it in the hot green of summer, in the dead of winter, clouds rushing past it, a lone yellow leaf drifting down. I painted the door open only once. Just before he died. In every picture after, it was closed.

Can one have love? If we could, love would need to be a thing, a substance that one can have, own, possess. The truth is, there is no such thing as "love." "Love" is abstraction, perhaps a goddess or an alien being, although nobody has ever seen this goddess. In reality, there exists only the act of loving. To love is a productive activity. It implies caring for, knowing, responding, affirming, enjoying: the person, the tree, the painting, the idea. It means bringing to life, increasing his/her/its aliveness. It is a process, self-renewing and self-increasing.

You paint from your subject, not what you see…I rarely paint anything I don’t know very well. It was surprising to me to see how many people separate the objective from the abstract. Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.

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.

As an artist, i live in fantasy and flirt with reality. I'm an emotional magician of sorts. I paint my feelings onto the abstract canvas of a waking dream. I suspend my concepts in the ether's of otherworldly realms. This is the way my existence has always been. I am untethered, a traveler between worlds. I sinuously slip in and out of the real and surreal, until, they are one and the same. I do not like being shackled or chained, to the physical plane.

What we say doesn’t always paint an accurate picture of what we mean. Sometimes the result is sort of abstract, open to misinterpretations. We use the colors and words on our present palette when others would paint a clearer picture.

Because a new love affair always gives hope, the irrational mortal loneliness is always crowned, that thing I saw (that horror of a snake emptiness) when I took the deep iodine deathbreath on the Big Sur beach is now justified and hosannah'd and raised up like a sacred urn to Heaven in the mere fact of the taking off of clothes and clashing wits and bodies in the inexpressibly nervously sad delight of love- don't let no old fogies tell you otherwise, and on top of that nobody in the world even ever dares to write the true story of lovem it's awful, we're stuck with a 50% incomplete literature and drama- lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss in the pillow dark, loin to loin in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from all our mental fearful abstractions it makes you wonder why men have termed God antisexual somehow- the secret underground truth of mad desire hiding under fenders under buried junkyards throughout the world, never mentioned in newspapers, written about haltingly and like corn by authors and painted tongue in cheek by artists, agh, just listen to Tristan und Isolde by Wagner and think of him in a Bavarian field with his beloved naked beauty under fall leaves.

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.

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.

A trophy isn’t about the hardware, the gold-painted statue mounted on marble, it’s about the recognition of excellence. A trophy is a physical representation of the abstract concepts of hard work and dedication. And that’s precisely why I don’t have any trophies.


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.

She looked now at the drawing-room step. She saw, through William’s eyes, the shape of a woman, peaceful and silent, with downcast eyes. She sat musing, pondering (she was in grey that day, Lily thought). Her eyes were bent. She would never lift them. . . . [N]o, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? Express that emptiness there? (She was looking at the drawing-room steps; they looked extraordinarily empty.) It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind. The physical sensations that went with the bare look of the steps had become suddenly extremely unpleasant. To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have – to want and want – how that wrung the heart, and wrung again and again! Oh, Mrs. Ramsay! she called out silently, to that essence which sat by the boat, that abstract one made of her, that woman in grey, as if to abuse her for having gone, and then having gone, come back again. It had seemed so safe, thinking of her. Ghost, air, nothingness, a thing you could play with easily and safely at any time of day or night, she had been that, and then suddenly she put her hand out and wrung the heart thus. Suddenly, the empty drawing-room steps, the frill of the chair inside, the puppy tumbling on the terrace, the whole wave and whisper of the garden became like curves and arabesques flourishing round a centre of complete emptiness. . . . A curious notion came to her that he did after all hear the things she could not say. . . . She looked at her picture. That would have been his answer, presumably – how “you” and “I” and “she” pass and vanish; nothing stays; all changes; but not words, not paint. Yet it would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be rolled up and flung under a sofa; yet even so, even of a picture like that, it was true. One might say, even of this scrawl, not of that actual picture, perhaps, but of what it attempted, that it “remained for ever,” she was going to say, or, for the words spoken sounded even to herself, too boastful, to hint, wordlessly; when, looking at the picture, she was surprised to find that she could not see it. Her eyes were full of a hot liquid (she did not think of tears at first) which, without disturbing the firmness of her lips, made the air thick, rolled down her cheeks. She had perfect control of herself – Oh, yes! – in every other way. Was she crying then for Mrs. Ramsay, without being aware of any unhappiness? She addressed old Mr. Carmichael again. What was it then? What did it mean? Could things thrust their hands up and grip one; could the blade cut; the fist grasp? Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life? – startling, unexpected, unknown? For one moment she felt that if they both got up, here, now on the lawn, and demanded an explanation, why was it so short, why was it so inexplicable, said it with violence, as two fully equipped human beings from whom nothing should be hid might speak, then, beauty would roll itself up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return. “Mrs. Ramsay!” she said aloud, “Mrs. Ramsay!” The tears ran down her face.

...we live on the edge of the abstract all the time. Look at something solid in the known world: an automobile. Separate the fender, the hood, the roof, lie them on the garage floor, walk around them. Let go of the urge to reassemble the care or to pronounce fender, hood, roof. Look at them as curve, line, form. Relax the mind. Don't immediately try to make meaning or be practical. Truthfully, how practical is life anyway? All our work, and death is the final result? So let's enjoy the unfolding shape, the elemental, organic delight and agony of it all.

In the middle of our century, the purely abstract picture without any regular order of forms and colors has become the most frequent expression in painting. The deeper the dissolution of "reality," the more the picture loses its symbolic content. The reason for this lies in the nature of the symbol and its function. The symbol is an object of the known world hinting at something unknown; it is the known expressing the life and sense of the inexpressible. But in merely abstract paintings, the world of the known has completely vanished. Nothing is left to form a bridge to the unknown.

-She paints some, Stanley said in a vindicatory tone. -Paints! Did you see the abstract she did for the Army Air Force? the face persisted. -For a psychological test, they used it to pick out the queers, if you were queer the painting didn't look like anything, if you weren't it looked like a snatch.

Fiercely intelligent, yet bearing a sensibility far more porous than most, Van Gogh was unable, or unwilling, to abstract his intellect from his body's reality, unwilling to abandon the myriad things, to tame his senses and so stifle the steady eros between his flesh and the flesh of the earth. "Again and again he slides out of himself, through his eyes, to feel the hunkard silence of the olive groves, and to taste the spreading ecstasy of the leaves as they're slowly lit by the climbing sun. And again and again he is invaded, in turn, by the visible -- penetrated by the midday langor of the rolling wheat fields, or by the sullen mood of a neighbor's face. Although he writes often to his brother and a few friends (letters of luminous candor and kindness), it is only in the act of drawing and painting that he is able to give expression to this ongoing intercourse, by offering back to the visible a trace of what the visible steadily pours into his chest. "His paintings, then, are windows through which we look onto an earth no less alive and intelligent than ourselves

...for example, if Freud is wrong, as i and many others believe, where does that leave any number of novels and virtually the entire corpus of surrealism, Dada, and certain major forms of expressionism and abstraction, not to mention Richard Strauss' 'Freudian' operas such as Salome and Elektra, and the iconic novels of numerous writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf? It doesn't render these works less beautiful or pleasurable, necessarily, but it surely dilutes their meaning. They don't owe their entire existence to psychoanalysis. But if they are robbed of a large part of their meaning, can they retain their intellectual importance and validity? Or do they become period pieces? I stress the point because the novels, paintings and operas referred to above have helped to popularise and legitimise a certain view of human nature, one that is, all evidence to the contrary lacking, wrong.

Savich stood over the metal parcel cage he’d been told was called an OTR, looked at the boxes scattered around it on the floor, streaked and smudged with blood like abstract paintings. Only the packages beneath the body had kept the blood from dripping out of the OTR. He looked down to see the body of an older man with a circle of gray hair around his head. He was torqued into a tight fetal position—difficult because he was heavy—his arms pulled between his legs. No deputy’s uniform. He wore a long-sleeved flannel shirt, old jeans, and ancient brown boots. Impossible to tell what sort of man he’d been—if he’d enjoyed jokes, if he’d loved his family, if he’d been honorable—that was all wiped away, gone in an instant, when the Athame was stuck into his heart. There had to be people out there already worrying about Kane Lewis, wondering where he was. They’d find out soon enough. Savich imagined he’d been a pleasant-looking man, but not in death. No, not in death.

Whore. How many men had embraced her? How many gritty chins against her cheek? Always something to be endured. All of them punishing her for their need. Monotony had made them seem laughable, a long queue of the weak, the hopeful, the ashamed, the angered, the dangerous. How easily one grunting body replaced the next, until they became abstract things, moments of a ludicrous ceremony, spilling bowel-hot libations upon her, smearing her with their meaningless paint. One no different from the next.

Kandinsky now knew that abstraction was the magic ingredient when it came to making a painting that could stand comparison with a symphony.

There is no painting without drawing and there is no shape without line ... in the end all images can be reduced to lines.

laboratory. Ours is not a ‘lab faith,’ but a ‘journey faith,’ a historical faith. God has revealed himself as history, not as a compendium of abstract truths. I am afraid of laboratories, because in the laboratory you take the problems and then you bring them home to tame them, to paint them artificially, out of their context. You cannot bring home the frontier, but you have to live on the border and be audacious.

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.

We writers aren't sculpting in DNA, or even clay or mud, but words, sentences, paragraphs, syntax, voice; materials issued by tongue or fingertips but which upon release dissolve into the atmosphere, into cloud, confection, specter. Language, as a vehicle, is a lemon, a hot rod painted with thrilling flames but crazily erratic to drive, riddled with bugs like innate self-consciousness, embedded metaphors and symbols, helpless intertextuality, and so forth. Despite being regularly driven on prosaic errands (interoffice memos, supermarket receipts, etc.), it tends to veer on its misaligned chassis into the ditch of abstraction, of dream.

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

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.

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.

In the name of the multitude he was expressing the fact that Western man is in danger of losing his shadow altogether, of identifying himself with his fictive personality and the world with the abstract picture painted by scientific rationalism. His spiritual and moral opponent, who is just as real as he, no longer dwells in his own breast but beyond the geographical line of division, which no longer represents an outward political barrier but splits off the conscious from the unconscious man more and more menacingly.

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.

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.

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.

The Nazis were tedious in their self-righteousness and triumphalism. They were like a winning soccer team at the after-match party, getting drunker and more boring and refusing to go home. He was sick of them. Some people might say that the USSR was similar, with its secret police, its rigid orthodoxy, and its puritan attitudes to such pleasures as abstract painting and fashion. They were wrong. Communism was a work in progress, with mistakes being made on the road to a fair society. The NKVD with its torture chambers was an aberration, a cancer in the body of Communism. One day it would be surgically removed. But probably not in wartime.

For me, the real issues of our time are the issues of every time—the hurt and wonder of loving; making in all its forms—children, loaves of bread, paintings, buildings; and the conservation of life of all people in all places, the jeopardizing of which no abstract doubletalk of ‘peace’ or ‘implacable foes’ can excuse. ("Context", 1962)

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.

There’s an immense dramatic possibility in describing that universe. The books, for me, were an enormous relief in that sense of how they were written to allow primary emotion, elemental emotion, to matter enormously but to give the thing an extraordinary flow so you don’t notice at what point that you’re actually overwhelmed by this. There’s no showiness, at all. It’s the opposite of showiness. I think, if it was a painting, it could be very grey abstract, almost, with some lines and very, very beautiful. But you wouldn’t have a notion of where the beauty was. (Talking about the short stories of Alistair MacLeod, who he discovered while working on The Modern Library.)

Bethany stands in the middle of the enormous, apparently endless beach surrounded by square miles of damp sand, the surf still some hundred yards off, the light pearly and uniform, the horizon a blurry, darker grey line shading into the clouds. Turning, she sees the black-green jagged stripe of the pines behind the dunes and, beyond that, more unchanging grey sky. A kind of dizziness afflicts her – she senses her insignificance, a small two-legged homunculus in the midst of all this space, a mere speck, a tiny crawling gnat in this elemental simplicity of sand, water and sky. She squats on her haunches, worried she might fall over, and to distract herself takes out her camera and frames a shot of the beach, the sea and the packed clouds – it looks like an abstract painting. Click. It looks like an abstract painting by – what was his name? Colour-field paintings they are called, the three layers of colour-fields in this case being broad, horizontal bands of dark taupe, slate grey, nebulous tarnished silver. It is rather beautiful. She stands up, feeling equilibrium return – maybe she was hungry, and felt faint for a second or two or maybe, she wonders, maybe she has experienced an actual existential moment – an epiphany – and has seen clearly the reality of her place in the world and has felt the nothingness, the vast indifference of the universe…

In a sense, Joyce was Beckett's Don Quixote, and Beckett was his Sancho Panza. Joyce aspired to the One; Beckett encapsulated the fragmented many. But as each author accomplished his task, it was in the service of the other. Ultimately, Beckett's landscapes would resound with articulate silence, and his empty spaces would collect within themselves the richness of multiple shadows--a physicist would say the negative particles--of all that exists in absence, as in the white patches of an Abstract Expressionist painting. Becket would evoke, on his canvasses of vast innuendo and through the interstices of conscious and unconscious thought, the richness that Joyce had made explicit in words and intricate structure.

Her work was indeed elliptical, she left out everything that was essential, including logic and meaning. Her words neither described nor observed things. They were just words scattered across the page. This was braininess of the highest order, the verbal equivalent of the white canvas passed off as a painting; so abstract that to have expected some sense from it would have insulted the artist.

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

She was the model Manet painted more often than any other, more often than his own wife. But when I look at the paintings I don’t always recognize her as beautiful right away. Her beauty is something I have to search for, requiring some interpretive work, some intellectual or abstract work, and maybe that’s what Manet found so fascinating about it – but then again maybe not. For six years Morisot came to his studio, chaperoned by her mother, and he painted her, always clothed. Several of her own paintings hang in the museum too. Two girls sharing a park bench in the Bois de Boulogne, one in a white dress, wearing a broad straw hat, bending her head forward over her lap, maybe she’s reading, the other girl in a dark dress, her long fair hair tied back with a black ribbon, showing to the viewer her white neck and ear. Behind them, all the lush vague greenery of the public park. But Morisot never painted Manet. Six years after she met him, and apparently at his suggestion, she married his brother. He painted her just once more, wedding ring glittering dark on her delicate hand, and then never again. Don’t you think that’s a love story?

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.

God: The creation of a sick fantasy. Inhabitant of senile and impotent brains. Companion and comforter of rancid spirits born to slavery. A pill for constipated minds. Marxism for the faint of heart. Humanity: An abstract word with a negative connotation, long on power, short on truth. An obscene mask painted on the mean face of a shrewd vulgarian for the purpose of dominating the multitude of sentimentalist idiots and imbeciles. Country: Penal servitude for the semi-intelligent, a cowshed of imbecility. A Circe who transforms her adoring fans into dogs and pigs. A prostitute for the master, a pimp of the foreigner. Child-eater, parent-slanderer and scoffer at heroes.

What do you think of that one?” she asked. I looked back at the painting and tried to think of something to say. My mother had never asked me about her work before, but maybe I was old enough now to have an opinion. This one was different from her other work, more abstract and urgent, the brushstrokes wild and sensual. I tried to make out faces, eyes, recognizable parts of human forms, but everything was fractured, split open, like fruit or rot. “It scares me,” I said. My mother sat up and reached for her cigarettes. The scrape of the match was the loudest sound in the room. “That’s what your father said.” And then she stood up and walked into her bedroom, closing the door behind her.

to the whore who took my poems some say we should keep personal remorse from the poem, stay abstract, and there is some reason in this, but jezus: 12 poems gone and I don’t keep carbons and you have my paintings too, my best ones; it’s stifling: are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them? why didn’t you take my money? they usually do from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner. next time take my left arm or a fifty but not my poems: I’m not Shakespeare but sometimes simply there won’t be any more, abstract or otherwise; there’ll always be money and whores and drunkards down to the last bomb, but as God said, crossing his legs, I see where I have made plenty of poets but not so very much poetry.

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.

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.

Ever since I had ceased to see actors solely as the depositories, in their diction and acting ability, of an artistic truth, they had begun to interest me in their own right; with the feeling that I was watching the characters from some old comic novel, I was amused to see the naïve heroine of a play, her attention drawn to the new face of some young duke who had just taken his seat in the theatre, listen abstractedly to the declaration of love the juvenile lead was addressing to her, while he, through the rolling passion of this declaration, was in turn directing an enamoured eye at an old lady seated in a stage box, whose magnificent pearls had caught his interest; and in this way, largely owing to what Saint-Loup had told me about the private lives of actors, I saw another drama, silent but telling, being played out beneath the words of the play that was being performed, yet the play itself, however uninspired, was still something that interested me too; for within it I could feel germinating and blossoming for an hour in the glare of the footlights, created out of the agglutination on the face of an actor of another face of grease-paint and pasteboard, and on his individual soul the words of a part, the ephemeral and spirited personalities, captivating too, who form the cast of a play, whom one loves, admires, pities, whom one would like to meet again after the play is over, but who by that time have already disintegrated into the actors who are no longer what they were in their roles, into a script which no longer shows the actors’ faces, into a coloured powder that can be wiped off by a handkerchief, who have reverted, in a word, to elements that contain nothing of them, because their dissolution is complete as soon as the play has ended, and this, like the dissolution of a loved one, causes one to doubt the reality of the self and to meditate on the mystery of death.

It struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate—dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions; for I often noticed that living as we did, she and I, in a world of total evil, we would become strangely embarrassed whenever I tried to discuss something she and an older friend, she and a parent, she and a real healthy sweetheart, I and Annabel, Lolita and a sublime, purified, analyzed, deified Harold Haze, might have discussed—an abstract idea, a painting, stippled Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of a genuine kind. Good will! She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas I, using for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of voice that set my own last teeth on edge, provoked my audience to such outbursts of rudeness as made any further conversation impossible, oh my poor bruised child.

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.

What you call ‘Western civilization.’ Do you think it’s just an abstract concept? No, it’s a living force. A collective consciousness that has burned bright for thousands of years. The gods are part of it. You might even say they are the source of it, or at least, they are tied so tightly to it that they couldn’t possibly fade, not unless all of Western civilization were obliterated. The fire started in Greece. Then, as you well know—or as I hope you know, since you passed my course—the heart of the fire moved to Rome, and so did the gods. Oh, different names, perhaps—Jupiter for Zeus, Venus for Aphrodite, and so on—but the same forces, the same gods.” “And then they died.” “Died? No. Did the West die? The gods simply moved, to Germany, to France, to Spain, for a while. Wherever the flame was brightest, the gods were there. They spent several centuries in England. All you need to do is look at the architecture. People do not forget the gods. Every place they’ve ruled, for the last three thousand years, you can see them in paintings, in statues, on the most important buildings. And yes, Percy, of course they are now in your United States. Look at your symbol, the eagle of Zeus. Look at the statue of Prometheus in Rockefeller Center, the Greek facades of your government buildings in Washington. I defy you to find any American city where the Olympians are not prominently displayed in multiple places. Like it or not—and believe me, plenty of people weren’t very fond of Rome, either—America is now the heart of the flame. It is the great power of the West. And so Olympus is here.

And I still have other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton Pinski, some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked: 'You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own'; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate — dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions; for I often noticed that living as we did, she and I, in a world of total evil, we would become strangely embarrassed whenever I tried to discuss something she and an older friend, she and a parent, she and a real healthy sweetheart, I and Annabel, Lolita and a sublime, purified, analyzed, deified Harold Haze, might have discussed — and abstract idea, a painting, stippled Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of a genuine kind. Good will! She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas I, using for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of voice that set my own last teeth on edge, provoked my audience to such outburst of rudeness as made any further conversation impossible, oh my poor, bruised child.

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.

We see three men standing around a vat of vinegar. Each has dipped his finger into the vinegar and has tasted it. The expression on each man's face shows his individual reaction. Since the painting is allegorical, we are to understand that these are no ordinary vinegar tasters, but are instead representatives of the "Three Teachings" of China, and that the vinegar they are sampling represents the Essence of Life. The three masters are K'ung Fu-tse (Confucius), Buddha, and Lao-tse, author of the oldest existing book of Taoism. The first has a sour look on his face, the second wears a bitter expression, but the third man is smiling. To Kung Fu-tse (kung FOOdsuh), life seemed rather sour. He believed that the present was out step with the past, and that the government of man on earth was out of harmony with the Way of Heaven, the government of, the universe. Therefore, he emphasized reverence for the Ancestors, as well as for the ancient rituals and ceremonies in which the emperor, as the Son of Heaven, acted as intermediary between limitless heaven and limited earth. Under Confucianism, the use of precisely measured court music, prescribed steps, actions, and phrases all added up to an extremely complex system of rituals, each used for a particular purpose at a particular time. A saying was recorded about K'ung Fu-tse: "If the mat was not straight, the Master would not sit." This ought to give an indication of the extent to which things were carried out under Confucianism. To Buddha, the second figure in the painting, life on earth was bitter, filled with attachments and desires that led to suffering. The world was seen as a setter of traps, a generator of illusions, a revolving wheel of pain for all creatures. In order to find peace, the Buddhist considered it necessary to transcend "the world of dust" and reach Nirvana, literally a state of "no wind." Although the essentially optimistic attitude of the Chinese altered Buddhism considerably after it was brought in from its native India, the devout Buddhist often saw the way to Nirvana interrupted all the same by the bitter wind of everyday existence. To Lao-tse (LAOdsuh), the harmony that naturally existed between heaven and earth from the very beginning could be found by anyone at any time, but not by following the rules of the Confucianists. As he stated in his Tao To Ching (DAO DEH JEENG), the "Tao Virtue Book," earth was in essence a reflection of heaven, run by the same laws - not by the laws of men. These laws affected not only the spinning of distant planets, but the activities of the birds in the forest and the fish in the sea. According to Lao-tse, the more man interfered with the natural balance produced and governed by the universal laws, the further away the harmony retreated into the distance. The more forcing, the more trouble. Whether heavy or fight, wet or dry, fast or slow, everything had its own nature already within it, which could not be violated without causing difficulties. When abstract and arbitrary rules were imposed from the outside, struggle was inevitable. Only then did life become sour. To Lao-tse, the world was not a setter of traps but a teacher of valuable lessons. Its lessons needed to be learned, just as its laws needed to be followed; then all would go well. Rather than turn away from "the world of dust," Lao-tse advised others to "join the dust of the world." What he saw operating behind everything in heaven and earth he called Tao (DAO), "the Way." A basic principle of Lao-tse's teaching was that this Way of the Universe could not be adequately described in words, and that it would be insulting both to its unlimited power and to the intelligent human mind to attempt to do so. Still, its nature could be understood, and those who cared the most about it, and the life from which it was inseparable, understood it best.

Tony Cox, still a painter and not yet married to Yoko Ono, pioneered in the use of mescaline for draft-evasion. 400 milligrams taken before his own preinduction physical prompted an angry outburstas an orderly took a stab at his arm to draw blood. Tony roared, "What the fuck do you think you are doing?" and was led into the presence of a psychiatrist with whom he engaged in a protracted discussion of the merits of the New York school of abstract expressionist painting, all the while naked. Tony got his 4F classification, presumably on grounds of schizophrenia, and went on to counsel others liable to military service, using the same approach.

Tony Cox, still a painter and not yet married to Yoko Ono, pioneered in the use of mescaline for draft-evasion. 400 milligrams taken before his own preinduction physical prompted an angry outburstas an orderly took a stab at his arm to draw blood. Tony roared, "What the fuck do you think you are doing?" and was led into the presence of a psychiatrist with whom he engaged in a protracted discussion of the merits of the New York school of abstract expressionist painting, all the while naked. Tony got his 4F classification, presumably on grounds of schizophrenia, and went on to counsel others liable to military service, using the same approach.

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?

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!

I don’t think it’s an accident that 7NC Luxury Cruises appeal mostly to older people. I don’t mean decrepitly old, but I mean like age-50+ people, for whom their own mortality is something more than an abstraction. Most of the exposed bodies to be seen all over the daytime Nadir were in various stages of disintegration. And the ocean itself (which I found to be salty as hell, like sore-throat-soothing-gargle-grade salty, its spray so corrosive that one temple-hinge of my glasses is probably going to have to be replaced) turns out to be basically one enormous engine of decay. Seawater corrodes vessels with amazing speed—rusts them, exfoliates paint, strips varnish, dulls shine, coats ships’ hulls with barnacles and kelp-clumps and a vague ubiquitous nautical snot that seems like death incarnate.

Paint Me and You Will End up with Abstract Art

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.

If only she had lived back then... experienced a real ball... not this play-acting. "Wouldn't that be amazing to truly be at this ball in 1834?" she whispered. The silver under her thumb flared with heat. The room spun. The air, colors and sounds muted as if she was inside an abstract color painting.

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.

I shook my head, dazzled by the gleaming lime-green glass tile of the countertop, the matching walls and multicolored abstract painting across from the toilet. The light and color were so radiant, I could almost taste citrus. “Is there a lock on the bedroom door?” I asked.