Wassily Kandinsky Quotes

Of all the arts, music is really the most abstract.

If you want to paint the inner life, you paint it from the exterior. From the exterior, you breathe the inner life into your painting.

The hardest of all the arts to speak of is music, because music has no meaning to speak of.

I've always envied people who compose music or paint, because they don't have to be bothered with the sort of crude mess that language normally is, in everyday life and in the way we use it.

Opera tells stories through the pure emotion of music. An exhibition has to tell a story purely visually. I've tried to incorporate both of those things - pure emotion and being more visual - into my writing.

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

Composing is my life blood.

The musician writes for the orchestra what his inner voice sings to him; the painter rarely relies without disadvantage solely upon the images which his inner eye presents to him; nature gives him his forms, study governs his combinations of them.

Music's always been a huge part of my life, and my first record came out in 1981.

I want to make portraits and images. I don't know how. Out of despair, I just use paint anyway. Suddenly the things you make coagulate and take on just the shape you intend. Totally accurate marks, which are outside representational marks.

I wish I could play music. I think I get as closeas possible with the editing of the films. Over the years musichas been an even more important influence than-or as important as-film.There's no doubt about it. Painting, movement, dance, sculpture-it'sall in cinema.

Before music there was silence and the duet format allows you to build from the silence in a very special way.

Music exists when rhythmic, melodic or harmonic order is deliberately created, and consciously listened to, and it is only language-using, self-conscious creatures ... who are capable of organizing sounds in this way, either when uttering them or when perceiving them. We can hear music in the song of the nightingale, but it is music that no nightingale has heard.

The only principle in art is to copy what you see. Dealers in aesthetics to the contrary, every other method is fatal.

People think one-point and two-point perspective is how the world actually looks, but of course, it isn't. It's a convention.

For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.

The grandeur of man lies in song, not in thought.

To convey in the print the feeling you experienced when you exposed your film – to walk out of the darkroom and say: ‘This is it, the equivalent of what I saw and felt!’. That’s what it’s all about.

It seemed to me that it was possible to translate light, forms, and character using nothing but color, without recourse to values.

One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the intellect for a pristine imaginative conception. The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form and design. The term 'life' as used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it applies all of its existence, and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it. Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again be great.

There is music wherever there is rhythm, as there is life wherever there beats a pulse.

Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.

I'm really good at melodic and sonic things, but I don't really think I have anything to say. But I really enjoy the puzzle-making of taking words and adding a melody to them.

I was a little worried that the familiarity would be a little weird, but I think for me everything is musical in my life. For me, timing is a rhythm.