Abstract Art Quotes

Abstract art: a construction site for high fashion, for advertising, for furniture. ~ Adrienne Monnier

Beauty is a type of art everyone is trying to perfect, but no one realizes it's abstract art. ~ Keaton Stromberg

In every landscape should reside jewels of abstract art waiting to be discovered. ~ Melissa Brown

The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai. ~ J.G. Ballard

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

Abstract art was the quivalent of poetic expression; I didn't need to use words,but colors and lines. I didn't need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression. ~ Etel Adnan

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art. ~ Salvador Dali

I honestly believe students of painting in the next century will laugh at the abstract art movement. They will marvel at such a drawn-out regression in the plastic arts. ~ Richard Schmid

Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come in to existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need. The need is for felt experience - intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic. ~ Robert Motherwell

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. ~ Pablo Picasso

We are not talking about a new cognition in relation to abstract art, rather a new area of cognition ... ~ Asger Jorn

I think we're much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it. ~ Roy Lichtenstein

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

I blink rapidly, breaking our reverie and force myself to focus on something,anything, other than his beauty. Or his body. A body I want pressed against mine, limbs and tongues twisted and tangled, our flesh contortioned into X-rated abstract art ... ~ S.L. Jennings

You have to have time to be sorry for yourself to be a good Abstract Expressionist. ~ Robert Rauschenberg

In the abstract art of cooking,
ingredients trump appliances,
passion supersedes expertise,
creativity triumphs over technique,
spontaneity inspires invention,
and wine makes even the worst culinary disaster taste delicious. ~ Bob Blumer

Yes, I hate blown glass art and I happen to live in the blown glass art capital of the world, Seattle, Washington. Being a part of the Seattle artistic community, I often get invited to galleries that are displaying the latest glass sculptures by some amazing new/old/mid-career glass blower. I never go. Abstract art leaves me feeling stupid and bored. Perhaps it's because I grew up inside a tribal culture, on a reservation where every song and dance had specific ownership, specific meaning, and specific historical context. Moreover, every work of art had use - art as tool: art to heal; art to honor, art to grieve. I think of the Spanish word carnal, defined as, 'Of the appetites and passions of the body.' And I think of Gertrude Stein's line, 'Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.' When asked what that line meant, Stein said, 'The poet could use the name of the thing and the thing was really there.' So when I say drum, the drum is really being pounded in this poem; when I say fancydancer, the fancydancer is really spinning inside this poem; when I say Indian singer, that singer is really wailing inside this poem. But when it comes to abstract art - when it comes to studying an organically shaped giant piece of multi-colored glass - I end up thinking, 'That looks like my kidney. Anybody's kidney, really. And frankly, there can be no kidney-shaped art more beautiful - more useful and closer to our Creator - than the kidney itself. And beyond that, this glass isn't funny. There's ~ Sherman Alexie

Fear is the deep motive of abstract art - fear of a repellent civilization which is dominated by the power of things ... who can be surprised if, more sensitive than the others, the artist is terrified by the power things have acquired over us? ~ Storm Jameson

Some people who look at abstract art say 'I could do that.' A good response is, 'Go ahead but then you'll be accused of copying. ~ Christopher Willard

Modern abstract art starts in Russia in about 1915 with Malevich, and then the Russian Revolution happens, and eventually all that experimental art gets squashed and social realism comes back into play. All of a sudden, Malevich is no longer painting black squares; he's painting peasants in colorful schmattas. ~ Robert Longo

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

The less there is to look at, the more important it is that we look at it closely and carefully. This is critical to abstract art. Small differences make all the difference. ~ Kirk Varnedoe

What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles ... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation. ~ Hans Hofmann

Because you get it, you know? You get that the colors and the lines and the curves aren't trying to be like everything else in the world. You understand that the abstract art is standing out against the norm because it's the only way abstract art knows how to stand. And you get so fucking happy because it's so beautiful. And unique. And edgy. And ... abstract. ~ Brittainy C. Cherry

I'm just really impressed by oil paintings - I don't see how people do it! That's the style I like: classic oil paintings. Abstract art just isn't my thing. ~ Brittany Howard

Abstract understanding doesn't mean arbitrary sloshing and messing. Abstract art is controlled visual magic based on laws and methodology. Abstraction generally involves implication, suggestion and mystery rather that obvious description. Like a good poem, a good abstraction attacks your feelings before your understanding. Abstraction within realism adds zest and excitement to otherwise dull subject matter. Abstract understanding takes time and patience. ~ Robert Genn

In a successful painting everything is integral - all the parts belong to the whole. If you remove an aspect or element you are removing its wholeness. ~ Richard Diebenkorn

The only thing I collect is art. I collect it because I like looking at it. A lot of it is really personal stuff that my friends have made, paintings that my husband's mother made, and things that I bought. I buy abstract art on eBay, and I buy some outsider art on eBay, or what is called folk art, I buy a lot of. I have a lot of professional art work as well as more stuff my friends' kids make. To have a wall of art to look at, I feel really surrounded by love, because so much of the work is related to my friendships. ~ Kathleen Hanna

Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature. ~ Josef Albers

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them. ~ Ben Shahn

Art should look like art, trees and flowers and people, not weird shapes and splotches of color all smeared together. ~ Jennifer Estep

Forgotten Stars. Time in the Flame.
Missing Shard. The Only Rain.
Door of the Memory. Waves in the Silk.
Silent Birch. Thoughts of Lunatics.
Secret of the Flowers. Soaring of the Souls.
Heart in the Night. And a Kiss Unfolds.
Forgotten Voyager. Voyage in the Words.
Nothing of the World. Someone of the Hemisphere.
Trembling Stones. Sucking Tears.
The Next Gift. The World in the Kisses.
Missing Angels. The Woman of the Girl.
Guardian of the Rings. Thorn in the Pearl.
Whispering Sword. Touching exclaim.
Soul in the Truth. Heat in the Flame.
Thy name, my name, Thy name!
Came. Became. To Remain. ~ Jasleen Kaur Gumber

Lenin thought abstract art was a conspiracy by the bourgeois to demoralize the proletariat. Yeah, socialist realism! ~ Carl Andre

Abstract art is a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. ~ Al Capp

The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive - non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective. the only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not. ~ Ad Reinhardt

Art has a voice - let it speak. ~ Rochelle Carr

It is sometimes forgotten how much wit there is in certain works of abstract art. There is a certain point in undergoing anguish when one encounters the comic. ~ Robert Motherwell

Every good painter paints what he is. ~ Jackson Pollock

Do not be afraid of the word 'theory'. Yes, it can sound dauntingly abstract at times, and in the hands of some writers can appear to have precious little to do with the actual, visual world around us. Good theory however, is an awesome thing. [ ... ] But unless we actually use it, it borders on the metaphysical and might as well not be used at all. ~ Richard Howells

Music, the most abstract and uncanny art, is an eternal river of sound moving through time. We can free ourselves from whatever may be holding us back, and join that flowing river. ~ William Westney

I shall never forget what I saw at the Museum of Modern Art: in a spotless schoolroom, fifty little girls painting away at tables covered with brushes, pots, tubes, bowls, staring into space and sticking out their tongues like the clever animals that ring a bell, tongues lolling and eyes vague. Teachers supervise these young creators of abstract art and slap their wrists if what they paint represents something and dangerously inclines toward realism. The mothers - still at the Picasso stage - are not admitted. ~ Jean Cocteau

Form itself, even if completely abstract ... has its own inner sound. ~ Wassily Kandinsky

Writing is an abstract art of drawing pictures of the conscious and subconscious mind with words. ~ Debasish Mridha

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract. ~ Ellen Key

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

The works of 'abstract' art are subtle creations of order out of simple contrasting elements. ~ Jan Tschichold

All good art is abstract. ~ John Newman

When I was fourteen, I had a massive poster on my wall of a giant pop-art mouth advertising a Swiss exhibition of abstract art. My friends and family mocked my pretention, but I loved that poster and the hope it offered of an exciting world of thought beyond the boundaries of stifling Solihull. But one day the poster fell off the wall and the dog pissed all over it, ruining it for ever, while my mother laughed. That poster is what the Alternative Comedy dream meant to me - the possibility of a better world. And now it is covered in dog's piss. ~ Stewart Lee

Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism. ~ Harold Rosenberg

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

What is desperately needed ... is the skepticism and the sense of history that a liberal arts education provides. ~ Felix Rohatyn

One must give value to their existence by behaving as if ones very existence were a work of art. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I have no idea how long Quisser was gone from the table. My attention became fully absorbed by the other faces in the club and the deep anxiety they betrayed to me, an anxiety that was not of the natural, existential sort but one that was caused by peculiar concerns of an uncanny nature. What a season is upon us, these faces seemed to say. And no doubt their voices would have spoken directly of certain peculiar concerns had they not been intimidated into weird equivocations and double entendres by the fear of falling victim to the same kind of unnatural affliction that had made so much trouble in the mind of the art critic Stuart Quisser. Who would be next? What could a person say these days, or even think, without feeling the dread of repercussion from powerfully connected groups and individuals? I could almost hear their voices asking, "Why here, why now?" But of course they could have just as easily been asking, "Why not here, why not now?" It would not occur to this crowd that there were no special rules involved; it would not occur to them, even though they were a crowd of imaginative artists, that the whole thing was simply a matter of random, purposeless terror that converged upon a particular place at a particular time for no particular reason. On the other hand, it would also not have occurred to them that they might have wished it all upon themselves, that they might have had a hand in bringing certain powerful forces and connections into our district simply by wish ~ Thomas Ligotti

After the day's active life, we spend at least a few hours quietly to develop our aesthetic, theoretical, and spiritual understanding of the way of life. By either reading, writing, performing, or thinking and meditating, we should continuously refine our personality and deepen our understanding of art, literature, science, philosophy, religion, and various other arts. ~ Michio Kushi

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't. ~ Theodore Roethke

She was a shrewd woman, and knew that the art of life is to know when to stop talking. What words have accomplished, too many words can undo. "Good-bye. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

Wonderful art can spring from misery,I'm the last person to deny that.I'd go even further:the best works of art of all time are probably stemmed from the deep human sorrow or hellish frustration,the death of a loved one or a divorce and yes:jealousy.Heartache and impotence as the man-spring for making the unverifiable verifiable and for giving it face.How romantic,beautiful and especially useful pain and misery can be. ~ Esther Verhoef

Any first rate novel or story must have in it the strength of a dozen fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it. A good workman can't be a cheap workman; he can't be stingy about wasting material, and he cannot compromise. Excerpt taken from On the Art of Fiction by Willa Cather circa 1920. ~ Willa Cather

Leonardo Da Vinci combined art and science and aesthetics and engineering, that kind of unity is needed once again. ~ Ben Shneiderman

What attracted me was less art itself than the artist's life and all that it meant for me: the idea of creativity and freedom of expression and action. I had been attracted to painting and drawing for a long time, but it was not an irresistible passion; what I wanted, at all costs, was to escape the monotony of life. ~ Pierre Bonnard

The acquisition of culture requires repose, sitting quietly in a room with a book, or alone with one's thoughts even any crowded concert or art museum. ~ Joseph Epstein

I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between. ~ Robert Hughes

I'm constantly working, even when I'm at home. ~ Art Alexakis

Every shift is a work of art. ~ Herta Muller

Crossing out is an art that is, perhaps, even more difficult than writing. It requires the sharpest eye to decide what is superfluous and must be removed. And it requires ruthlessness toward yourself
the greatest ruthlessness and self-sacrifice. You must know how to sacrifice parts in the name of the whole. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

He who cannot limit himself will never know how to write. ~ Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people. ~ Norman Mailer

The good fighter is able to secure himself against defeat, but cannot make certain of defeating the enemy. ~ Sun Tzu

We learn to understand ourselves in and through it because the artwork is not a timeless present for a pure aesthetic consciousness (i.e., it is not an encounter with an object for which one can only express feelings of pleasure or displeasure), but rather, a real encounter with a world that presents itself historically. The self-understanding that occurs in relation to the experience of art, Gadamer tells us, is only possible when our experiencing is not discontinuous with "the unity and integrity of the other."17 ~ James Risser

Fresh from the rarefied environments of Harvard, the author says he purposefully took journalism jobs in small southern towns so that he could learn the art of conversation with ordinary people. Is this gift for listening and for conversation, it seems, that allowed him to produce textured historical narratives of grand impact. ~ David Halberstam

Those who express even a little of themselves never become old-fashioned. ~ Robert Henri

Unpraised, I find it hard to start writing in the morning; but the dejection lasts only 30 minutes, and once I start I forget all about it. One should aim, seriously, at disregarding ups and downs; a compliment here, a silence there;[ ... ] the central fact remains stable, which is the fact of my own pleasure in the art. ~ Virginia Woolf

Karate is a defensive art from beginning to end. ~ Gichin Funakoshi

I dream of you in colors that don't exist. ~ Leah Raeder

Art and the artist meet in stages, slowly revealing themselves until both are satisfied with what the other has become. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

In spite of my great admiration for individual splendid talents I do not accept the star system. Collective creative effort is the root of our kind of art. That requires ensemble acting and whoever mars that ensemble is committing a crime not only against his comrades but also against the very art of which he is the servant. ~ Constantin Stanislavski

In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is. ~ Douglas Sirk

It is clear enough that not every something can be elevated to the rank of a thing - otherwise everything and everyone would be speaking once more, and the chatter would spread from humans to things. Rilke privileges two categories of 'entities' [Seienden), to express it in the papery diction of philosophy, that are eligible for the lofty task of acting as message-things - artifices and living creatures - with the latter gaining their particular quality from the former, as if animals were being's highest works of art before humans. Inherent to both is a message energy that does not activate itself, but requires the poet as a decoder and messenger. ~ Peter Sloterdijk

Calligraphy is an art form that uses ink and a brush to express the very souls of words on paper. ~ Kaoru Akagawa

In visual art it's better once to see, than one hundred times to hear. ~ Igor Babailov

Urban artist have to face the stigma not only from white Australia but black Australia too; that's horrific when people say that their art isn't "Aboriginal" if it doesn't have dots or lines or moieties in it. ~ Warwick Thornton

Comedy is the one absolutely self-aware art form. Actually, hip-hop's another one, I suppose. Because in your songs you're talking about how good a hip-hop artist you are. It's like a painter painting a panting of himself painting a painting. ~ Bo Burnham

Civilisation is the art of living in contact with other persons with the minimum of discomfort. ~ Nanamoli Thera

This resembles the slow discipline of art: it's the work that Rembrandt did, that Picasso and Yeats and Rilke and Bach did. Bucket work implies much more discipline than most men realize. ~ Robert Bly

The name has always occupied a space between the concrete and the abstract, the individual and the social, but when it begins to be shaped and charged with meaning in places removed from the physical world, in that way entertaining the world of fiction, albeit unseen by the majority, at the same time as this fictional world is expanding and taking up an ever greater part of our lives - the TV screens are now not only in our own rooms, but also on the walls of our trains and under the luggage bins of our planes, in the waiting rooms of our doctors' offices and the halls of our banks, even in the supermarkets, quite apart from our carrying them around in the form of laptop computers and cell phones, in such a way that we inhabit two realities, one abstract and image-based, in which all kinds of people and places present themselves before us with nothing in common but being somewhere other than where we are, and one concrete, physical, which is the one we move around in and are more palpably a part of - when we arrive at a point where everything is either fiction or seen as fiction, the job of the novelist can no longer be to write more fiction. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

There's nothing wrong with Oscar Levant - nothing a miracle won't cure. ~ Alexander Woollcott

Cooking food is a science but making people hungry is an art ~ Myra Yadav