The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.
Interpretation
Color shapes our perception of the world around us.
In this quote, Hans Hofmann emphasizes the profound impact that color has on our experiences and perceptions. He suggests that our visual experiences are not just passive observations but are deeply influenced by the vibrancy and qualities of color, highlighting its mystical and essential role in understanding the world.
In practice
In an art class while discussing the importance of color theory.
Color is a plastic means of creating intervals... color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now between formal tensions and color tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony.
In nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light.
The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.
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.
Colors must fit together as pieces in a puzzle or cogs in a wheel.
A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.
I maintain that anyone who still refuses to see, for instance, a horse galloping on a tomato, must be an idiot. A tomato is also a child's balloon - Surrealism, again, having suppressed the word "like."
The artist must have something to say, for mastery over form is not his goal but rather the adapting of form to its inner meaning.
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
The best graphics are about the useful and important, about life and death, about the universe. Beautiful graphics do not traffic with the trivial.
The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service.
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
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