Hans Hofmann
Art and science create a balance to material life and enlarge the world of living experience. Art leads to a more profound concept of life, because art itself is a profound expression of feeling.Collection: Art
It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental lawsCollection: Expression
Just as counterpoint and harmony follow their own laws, and differ in rhythm and movement, both formal tensions and color tensions have a development of their own in accordance with the inherent laws from which they are separately derived. Both, however, aim toward the realization of the same image. And both deal with the depth problem.Collection: Color
There is in reality no such thing as modern art. Art is carried on up and down in immense cycles through centuries and civilizations.Collection: Art
It takes intelligence and training, self-discipline and fine-sensibility, to gain renewed life through leisure occupation. America now suffers spiritual poverty, and art must become more fully American life before her leisure can become culture.Collection: Spiritual
The product of movement and counter-movement is tension. When tension working strength is expressed, it endows the work of art with the living effect of coordinated, though opposing, forces.Collection: Art
The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature - translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive, and every work of art should be alive.Collection: Art
The difference between the arts arises because of the difference in the nature of the mediums of expression and the emphasis induced by the nature of each medium. Each means of expression has its own order of being, its own units.Collection: Art
And so artistic creation is the metamorphosis of the external physical aspects of a thing into a self-sustaining spiritual reality .Collection: Spiritual
We are connected with our own age if we recognize ourselves in relation to outside events; and we have grasped its spirit when we influence the future.Collection: Age
To me, art is the glorification of the human spirit.Collection: Art
The impressionistic method leads into a complete splitting and dissolution of all areas involved in the composition, and color is used to create an overall effect of light. The color is, through such a shading down from the highest light in the deepest shadows, sacrified an degraded to a (black-and-white) function. This leads to the destructions of the color as color.Collection: Black And White
You must break all the rules of painting, but you must also convince me you've had a reason to do so.Collection: Crafts