Expressionism Quotes - Page 2

• The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.

  Jackson Pollock

  Art, Space, Feelings

  Elizabeth Frank, Jackson Pollock (1983). “Jackson Pollock”, Abbeville Pr

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• I am not an exponent of expressionism. I don't know exactly what that means, but I don't like the sound of it. I dislike cults and isms. I want to paint in terms of my own thinking and feeling.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Mean, Thinking, Expression

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• My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.

  Susan Sontag

  Writing, Self, Transcendence

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• When I am in a painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc, because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

  Jackson Pollock

  Giving, Trying, Etc

  Jackson Pollock, Gagosian Gallery (1990). “Jackson Pollock: black enamel paintings, April-May 1990”

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• I don't go into the studio with the idea of 'saying' something. What I do is face the blank canvas and put a few arbitrary marks on it that start me on some sort of dialogue.

  Richard Diebenkorn

  Ideas, Faces, Arbitrary

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• I went to the Mary Lee Burbank School in Belmont. And it was a place where you, like, learned to go to the store? And I was saying, Oh God, I want to learn something else. I wanted to learn to read and write better and do mathematics better. They were very much into Abstract Expressionism and that artsy stuff. And where most kids did what I call meaningless blobs, I could render perfectly.

  Paul Laffoley

  Kids, Writing, School

  Source: www.paranoiamagazine.com

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• I would be constantly brought up on the carpet by these teachers who were brought up with Abstract Expressionism, saying, "You're too uptight, you're not expressing yourself, why don't you feel freer?" I said, "Well, I don't like that stuff. It means nothing to me."

  Paul Laffoley

  Teacher, Mean, Would Be

  Source: www.paranoiamagazine.com

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• You have to act and this is something that happened in abstract expressionism too, it was a discovery particularly in De Kooning's paintings, great paintings. There's a lot of speed in his work and the speed produces things that only speed can produce.

  Michael Snow

  Discovery, Painting, Speed

  Source: offscreen.com

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• For example, in England, we teach about Expressionism, but it is not the same in England as it is in Germany, because Expressionism is more important in the history of German art. So although it is the same history, the emphasis is different.

  Michael Craig-Martin

  Art, Important, Different

  Source: www.artzip.org

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• We live in an age when the traditional great subjects - the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism - are daily devalued by commercial art.

  Andy Warhol

  Art, Age, Landscape

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• Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty.

  Robert Motherwell

  Art, Firsts, Abstract

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• Sometimes the things I learn making paintings or drawings - composition, colour, expressionism, texture - can directly influence the making of a film. Sometimes it's great that they are different, and simply taking a break from one medium to spend time with another, recharges the batteries and I feel refreshed.

  Dave McKean

  Drawing, Batteries, Different

  Source: theculturalgutter.com

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• If you're an impressionistic painter and you want to paint expressionism, you've got to change. You've got to figure out a way to do it and do it. If you've been playing jazz all your life and you want to start to play rock n' roll, blues, then do it.

  Tobin Bell

  Rocks, Play, Want

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• Backbends are not poses meant for expressionism. Backbends are meant to understand the back parts of our bodies. The front body can be seen with the eyes, but the back body can only be felt. That's why I say these are the most advanced postures, where the mind begins to look at the back.

  B.K.S. Iyengar

  Eye, Mind, Looks

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

  Aaron Huey

  Abstract, Pops, Painter

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• But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It's based on improvisation. The rhythms, the personal involvement, all of this is part of the jazz experience.

  Romare Bearden

  Thinking, Movement, Jazz

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• I decided that expressionism was a cheap way of getting a reaction - show anybody ripped apart, and you get sympathy. I was deliberately trying to show the human body as whole and relatively healthy.

  Philip Pearlstein

  Expression, Healthy, Trying

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• Food became, for dinner parties in the sixties, what abstract expressionism had been in the fifties.

  Nora Ephron

  Party, Dinner, Abstract

  Nora Ephron (2011). “Wallflower at the Orgy”, p.7, Bantam

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• Gorecki, you know, there's a kind of personal thing there for me. I had, you know, kind of become obsessed with that sort of Soviet Bloc period. And actually, a lot of composers in the Soviet Bloc - Gorecki's not the only one - are writing for the harpsichord as a sort of reaction against enforced Soviet realism, expressionism, sort of enforced modernism.

  Mahan Esfahani

  Writing, Kind, Obsessed

  "How To Annoy Your Dad: Play The Harpsichord". "All Things Considered" with Robert Siegel, www.npr.org. December 29, 2015.

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• Since adolescence I've had a passion for Romantic Fantastique literature, which continued with Expressionism and culminated with the genius of Kafka. It's that German thread of the metaphysic - they were looking for the beyond in dreams.

  Dumitru Tepeneag

  Dream, Passion, Genius

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The Germans were much more graphical. The expressionism is much more than cinema. It was a movement with artists, painters, music and architecture, so it's really graphic and visual. And the French were something else.

  Michel Hazanavicius

  Artist, Cinema, Movement

  "Director Michel Hazanavicius THE ARTIST Interview". Interview with Sheila Roberts, collider.com. November 26, 2011.

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• Pop is everything art hasn't been for the last two decades...It springs newborn out of a boredom with the finality and over-saturation of Abstract-Expressionism, which, by its own esthetic logic, is the END of art, the glorious pinnacle of the long pyramidal creative process. Stifled by this rarefied atmosphere, some young painters turn back to some less exalted things like Coca-Cola, ice-cream sodas, big hamburgers, super-markets and 'EAT' signs. They are eye-hungry; they pop.

  Robert Indiana

  Art, Spring, Eye

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• The non-geometric biomorphic forms of Arp and Miro and Moore are definitely in the ascendant. The formal tradition of Gauguin, Fauvism and Expressionism will probably dominate for some time to come the tradition of Cezanne and Cubism.

  Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

  Cezanne, Tradition, Form

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