Abstract Painting Quotes

• Even with painting, even abstract paintings, you need the incoming of, light on the canvas.

  Jean-Luc Godard

  Light, Needs, Canvas

  Source: cinemagodardcinema.wordpress.com

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• Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you.

  Jackson Pollock

  Compliment, Expressionism, Abstract Art

  Quoted in FrancisVO'Connor Jackson Pollock (1967).

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• The freer the soul, the more abstract painting becomes.

  Marc Chagall

  Freedom, Soul, Painting

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• We speak of concrete and not abstract painting because nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a color, a surface.

  Theo van Doesburg

  Art, Real, Color

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• When realistic images or patterns are seen in an abstract painting, they are often parallels brought about by processes in painting which echo processes in nature.

  Walter Darby Bannard

  Echoes, Patterns, Realistic

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• I'm interested in color belonging to something, where it takes on a completely new kind of vibrancy, rather than being what you would call straight abstract paintings. And anyway it is so much more exciting trying to find out about the three dimensions of color and sticking it down on a two dimensional surface.

  Euan Uglow

  Color, Two, Trying

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• I never had the... common anxiety as to whether abstract painting had a given 'meaning.

  Robert Motherwell

  Anxiety, Common, Given

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• In every respect, fantasy is like doing abstract paintings.

  Lance Henriksen

  Painting, Fantasy, Abstract

  "Lance Henriksen Interview SCREAM OF THE BANSHEE". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. March 26, 2011.

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• Sometimes I think I shouldn't explain much about my work because people will just feel what they feel when they see it. They'll love it or hate it or enjoy it on their own, like how I've looked at abstract paintings of other artists and cried or felt happy because I've felt, "Wow, I've lived that, I've understood that."

  Jose Parla

  Hate, Artist, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• If the abstract paintings show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lifes show my yearning.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Reality, Landscape

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: text : writings, interviews and letters, 1961-2007”

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• Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential.

  Wassily Kandinsky

  Art, Color, Essentials

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• Up until 35 I had a slightly skewed world view. I honestly believed everybody in the world wanted to make abstract paintings, and people only became lawyers and doctors and brokers and things because they couldn't make abstract paintings

  Frank Stella

  Artist, Doctors, Views

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• 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.

  Cecelia Ahern

  Flower, Butterfly, Thinking

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• Think of an abstract painting as very, very low relief - a thing, not a picture.

  Jerry Saltz

  Thinking, Relief, Lows

  "Ask an Art Critic: Jerry Saltz Answers Your Questions About George Condo, Online Art Fairs, and What Abstraction Really Is" by Jerry Saltz, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 24, 2011.

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• When I see people making 'abstract' painting, I think it's just a dialogue and a dialogue isn't enough. That is to say, there is you painting and this canvas. I think there has to be a third thing; it has to be a trialogue.

  Philip Guston

  Thinking, People, Canvas

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• I always say that writing non-fiction versus writing fiction is a bit like architecture versus abstract painting.

  Andrew Lam

  Writing, Fiction, Architecture

  "‘Birds of Paradise Lost’: A Conversation With Author Andrew Lam". Interview with Anna Challet, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 5, 2013.

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• When art seems to be empty of meaning, as no doubt some of the abstract painting of our own day actually does seem, what the painting says, indeed what the artist is shrieking at the top of his voice, is that life has become empty of all rational content and coherence, and that, in times like these, is far from a meaningless statement.

  Lewis Mumford

  Art, Times Like These, Voice

  Lewis Mumford (2000). “Art and Technics”, p.21, Columbia University Press

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• Certainly one of the surprising truths of having a book published is realizing that your book is as open to interpretation as an abstract painting. People bring their own beliefs and attitudes to your work, which is thrilling and surprising at the same time.

  Marisha Pessl

  Attitude, Book, People

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• I began in 1976, with small abstract paintings that allowed me to do what I had never let myself do: put something down at random. And then, of course, I realized that it never can be random. It was all a way of opening a door for me. If I don't know what's coming - that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Doors, Play

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

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• I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall.

  Frank Stella

  Wall, Artist, Gestures

  "With Frank Stella, what you see is what you see. But when the modern master speaks, what you hear may raise your eyebrows."by Kenneth Baker, www.sfgate.com. June 17, 2004.

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• I remember being handed a score composed by Mozart at the age of eleven. What could I say? I felt like de Kooning, who was asked to comment on a certain abstract painting, and answered in the negative. He was then told it was the work of a celebrated monkey. 'That's different. For a monkey, it's terrific'.

  Igor Stravinsky

  Age, Negative, Different

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• Experience has proved that there is no difference between a so-called realist painting - of a landscape, for example - and an abstract painting. They both have more or less the same effect on the observer.

  Gerhard Richter

  Differences, Example, Landscape

  FaceBook post by Gerhard Richter from Oct 28, 2015

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• An abstract painting need in 50 years by no means look "abstract" any longer.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Art, Mean, Years

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• Raymond Hendler exhibited a group of abstract paintings that displayed rare high spirits. Using a great deal of fresh white, Hendler devised extremely simple symbols which he dispersed felicitously on his shining grounds. These bright, often linear hieroglyphs serve both as pictorial animators-they often flow in winding patterns or like fluent handwriting-and as references to the plentitude of the artist's existence. Gardens and sky and human joy are read in these exceedingly compressed forms.

  Dore Ashton

  Artist, Simple, Garden

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• Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising.

  David Ogilvy

  Advertising, Reader, Advertisements

  David Ogilvy (1963). “Confessions of an advertising man”, Holiday House

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