A Quote by Hans Arp

In 1915 Sophie Tauber and I carried out our first works in the simplest forms, using painting, embroidery and pasted paper (without using oil colors to avoid any reference with usual painting). These were probably the first manifestations of their kind, pictures that were their own reality, without meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected everything in the nature of a copy or a description, in order to give free flow to what was elemental and spontaneous.
Little by little, I've reached the stage of using only a small number of forms and colors. It's not the first time that painting has been done with a very narrow range of colors. The frescoes of the tenth century are painted like this. For me, they are magnificent things.
Already in 1915, Sophie Tauber divides the surface of her aquarelle into squares and rectangles which she then juxtaposes horizontally and perpendicularly as Mondrian, Itten and Paul Klee did in the same period, fh). She constructs them as if they were masonry work. The colors are luminous, ranging from the raw yellow to deep red or blue.
In painting, the most brilliant colors, spread at random and without design, will give far less pleasure than the simplest outline of a figure.
How did we make the transition from using wood to using coal, from using coal to using oil, from using oil to using natural gas? How in God's name did we make that transition without a Federal Energy Agency?
We struggle against easel painting not because it is an aesthetic form of painting, but because it is not modern, for it does not succeed in bringing out the technical side, it is a redundant, exclusive art, and cannot be of any use to the masses. Hence we are struggling not against painting but against photography carried out as if it were an etching, a drawing, a picture in sepia or watercolor.
Painting, like music, has nothing to do with the reproduction of nature, nor interpretation of intellectual meanings. Whoever is able to feel the beauty of colors and forms has understood nonobjective painting.
I'm not giving away oil for free. Just using oil, first to benefit our people, to relieve poverty.
I think I've always been afraid of painting, really. Right from the beginning. All my paintings are about painting without a painter. Like a kind of mechanical form of painting.
On occasion I have drawn as a release from painting. The economy in using paper, pencil, charcoal and crayon can help towards a greater gamble and higher rewards. I also find that drawing can generate ideas more rapidly than painting.
We call our intuition our sixth sense, but in reality it would be called our first sense, because it's rooted in quantum nature of reality. It was around long before our solar system and our planetary system were even formulated or even organized. It is at the basis of how our normal sensing works. So instead of being our sixth sense or even â€" using the parapsychological term â€" "extrasensory perception," it's not. It's at the basis of our perception, and that's the quantum world.
The first degree of proficiency is, in painting, what grammar is in literature, a general preparation for whatever the student may afterward choose for more particular application. The power of drawing, modeling, and using colors, is very properly called the language of the art.
I believe I am looking for rightness. My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation. In nature everything is always right: the structure is right, the proportions are good, the colours fit the forms. If you imitate that in painting, it becomes false.
Before the first World War women were arrested for smoking cigarettes in public, for using profanity, for appearing on beaches without stockings, for driving automobiles without a man beside them, for wearing outlandish attire for example, shorts
You know, the way art history is taught, often there's nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.
Just the way you might look at a painting and see the painting, and the painting is outside you, so this immaterial intellect would see the forms and behold them, as if they were standing before it. And Plotinus said that that can't be right because it falls prey to sceptical objections.
Personally I would like to have pupils, a studio, pass on my love to them, work with them, without teaching them anything.. ..A convent, a monastery, a phalanstery of painting where one could train together.. ..but no programme, no instruction in painting.. ..drawing is still alright, it doesn't count, but painting - the way to learn is to look at the masters, above all at nature, and to watch other people painting.
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