All art is an abstraction to some degree.
Interpretation
Art simplifies and interprets reality through abstraction.
Henry Moore's quote suggests that all forms of art inherently simplify and reinterpret reality, allowing for personal expression and individual perspectives. By acknowledging that abstraction exists in varying degrees within all art, Moore speaks to the artist's role in transforming the ordinary into something unique, making art an intimate exploration of both the subject and the artist's emotions or thoughts.
In practice
This quote can be used in an art class to discuss the role of abstraction in various art forms.
Recently I have been working in the country, where, carving in the open air, I find sculpture more natural than in a London studio, but it needs bigger dimensions. A large piece of stone or wood placed almost anywhere at random in a field, orchard, or garden, immediately looks right and inspiring.
I find in all the artists that I admire most a disturbing element, a distortion, giving evidence of a struggle . . . . In great art, this conflict is hidden, it is unresolved. All that is bursting with energy is disturbing - not perfect.
Between beauty of expression and power of expression there is a difference of function. The first aims at pleasing the senses, the second has a spiritual vitality which for me is more moving and goes deeper than the senses.
A work can have in it a pent-up energy, an intense life of its own, independent of the subject it may represent.
I have always liked drawing, when you draw you see things more intensely.
The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.
We Orientals find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and darkness which that thing provides.
Literary studies were no more than a series of autopsies performed by heartless technicians. Worse than autopsies: biopsies. Vivisection. Even movies, which I love more than anything, more than life itself, they even do it with movies these days.
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.
The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.
I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them.
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