Top 1200 Abstract Painting Quotes & Sayings - Page 10

fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.

Art is only abstract when you look the other way.

I conceive of the film as a modern art form particularly interesting to the sense of sight. Painting has its own peculiar problems and specific sensations, and so has the film. But there are also problems in which the dividing line is obliterated, or where the two infringe upon each other. More especially, the cinema can fulfill certain promises made by the ancient arts, in the realization of which painting and film become close neighbors and work together.

Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.

Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!

I like the fact that music is more abstract.

A picture is not a window...an abstract refers to no reality but its own.

In old times men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith, in later times they use the objects of faith to show their powers of painting.

I wanted to be a painter, somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and Pop.

All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs.

Suddenly, I saw it in a new way, as a picture that offered me a new view, free of all the conventional criteria I had always associated with art. It had no style, no composition, no judgment. It freed me from personal experience. For the first time, there was nothing to it: it was pure picture. That's why I wanted to have it, to show it - not use it as a means to painting but use painting as a means to photography.

I like painting because it's something I never come to the end of. Sometimes I paint a picture, then I paint it all out. Sometimes I'm working on fifteen or twenty pictures at the same time. I do that because I want to - because I like to change my mind so often. The thing to do is always to keep starting to paint, never finishing painting.

It's true, I do sometimes suspend myself over the canvas, but mostly I work at a table when I'm making a painting. When I use 'The Rig,' my feet are firmly anchored. I lower myself horizontally just long enough to make a brush stroke - a matter of seconds - and then I'm upright again. My assistant then erases the painting quickly with a squeegee and I go for it again... until I get it right. It's like trying to hit a home run.

Oh abstractions are just abstract until they have an ache in them.

My own physicality, not an abstract idea, makes me a choreographer.

The power to love what is purely abstract is given to few.

Herein is the explanation of the analogies, which exist in all the arts. They are the re-appearance of one mind, working in many materials to many temporary ends. Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakspeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it. Painting was called "silent poetry," and poetry "speaking painting." The laws of each art are convertible into the laws of every other.

Climate change is a really abstract thing in most of the world.

Abstract propositions should never be discussed by a legislative body.

Sculpture is for the touch, painting is for the eye. I wanted to make a sculpture for the eye and a painting for the touch.

I wanted to make abstract films that are emotional, and I still do.

We value apology in the abstract, but turn our backs on it in practice.

If a painting of a tree was only the exact representation of the original, so that it looked just like the tree, there would be no reason for making it; we might as well look at the tree itself. But the painting, if it is of the right sort, gives something that neither a photograph nor a view of the tree conveys. It emphasizes something of character, quality, individuality. We are not lost in looking at thorns and defects; we catch a vision of the grandeur and beauty of a king of the forest.

Music is so abstract; it is a combination of words and melody.

Whitman was Emerson translated from the abstract into the concrete.

Of all the arts, music is really the most abstract.

Abstract Expressionism was invented by New York drunks.

I love going to the runway shows. It's not so much for me a shopping trip as it is the appreciation of the craft of these design geniuses who come up with beautiful color combinations and beautiful proportion suggestions and these kind of ideas, so I look at the runway shows in very different ways, just kind of a romantic artistic interpretation of how they would like to see fashion going forward, but for me it's much more abstract. The runway shows are much more abstract than you know what ends up on people is much more real to me.

I happen to be a twin. I grew up half of my life with someone who looks and sounds like me. And I believe it's possible to hold twin desires in your head, such as the desire to create painting and destroy painting at once. The desire to look at a black American culture as underserved, in need of representation, a desire to mine that said culture and to lay its parts bare and look at it almost clinically.

It is often my nature to be abstract, hidden in plain sight, or nowhere at all.

I think that the idea of a war on an abstract noun is unacceptable.

There is plenty of courage among us for the abstract, but not for the concrete.

The effort of painting from life has cost my models a great deal of physical discomfort, and cost me a great deal of money in model fees... I have wanted to make the camera obsolete... because, in my reading about early 20th century art, I found that the most frequently used argument made in favor of abstraction was that the camera made realist painting obsolete.

Remember—boredom is the enemy, not some abstract "failure.

I guess my experience with some stuff is kind of abstract.

Just as pure abstract art is not dogmatic, neither is it decorative.

This is the essential distinction--even opposition--between the painting and the film: the painting is composed subjectively, thefilm objectively. However highly we rate the function of the scenario writer--in actual practice it is rated very low--we must recognize that the film is not transposed directly and freely from the mind by means of a docile medium like paint, but must be cut piece-meal out of the lumbering material of the actual visible world.

[Comics is] one of the last havens for honesty when it comes to a reader's genuine response to art. Most of us, if we don't find any sympathy or pleasure, for example, in a modern painting, are likely to blame our own ignorance of the history and theory of painting. But nobody pretends to like a bad comic strip. Such harshness is necessary for any real truth to surface, I think, and for art to really contribute anything to life. Though I don't know. I could be wrong.

Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.

I don't know but a book in a man's brain is better off than a book bound in calf--at any rate it is safer from criticism. And taking a book off the brain, is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel--you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety--& even then, the painting may not be worth the trouble.

Whatever is most abstract may perhaps be the summit of reality.

In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.

I don't do abstract art because I don't find it as interesting as I do subjects and depictions.

A lot of my books have started with an abstract premise.

As I say, I as an abstract artist was active politically.

Even abstract shapes must have a likeness

I'm not satisfied sitting in just the world of abstract work.

Cinema is not a series of abstract ideas, but rather the phrasing of moments.

Americans have no capacity for abstract thought, and make bad coffee.

For those who don't know what they are doing, painting is easy. For those who do know what they are doing, painting is difficult.

I think a lot of my anxieties and fears are things that are very abstract.

I started getting really curious about art. I read about the Dadaists and the Futurists and the Constructivists - those kind of movements which were reflecting the angst of the people of their times. Their work was trying to lead a movement. I began thinking about what was happening, with painting on the streets and painting on the trains as being similar but also coming from a real, pure space. It wasn't being created by academies. It was a spontaneous combustion of ideas that just happened.

I wear my pants on my upper torso to be abstract and different.

Abstract knowledge is always useful, sooner or later.

Sometimes I have these abstract ideas and then lose track of myself.

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.

In Holman Hunt's painting, "The Light of the World, "Christ is shown in a garden at midnight, holding a lantern in His left hand. With His right hand He is knocking on a heavily paneled door. When the painting was unveiled, a critic remarked to the painter, "Mr. Hunt, the work is unfinished. There is no handle on the door." "That," Hunt answered, "is the door to the human heart. It can be opened only from the inside."

To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.

All paintings are abstract ideas, not representations of a true reality.

It is easier to take a position in the abstract than when it hits home.