Mark Tobey Quotes

So that ideas of sort of relaxed symmetry have been something for years that I have been concerned with because I think that symmetry is a neutral shape as opposed to a form of design.

Everything must work in concert. Composition is important, but so are many other things, from content to the way colours work with or against each other.

You keep on balancing and balancing and balancing until the picture wins, because then the subject's turned into the picture.

The truth is that painting is all about scale; you use scale to create experience. A lot of artists have lost that ability. They don't even know that's something they should be doing.

I enjoy trying to figure out the best way to compliment the picture and not overpower it.

The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.

My paintings do not have a center, but depend on the same amount of interest throughout.

The Bauhaus strives to bring together all creative effort into one whole, to reunify all the disciplines of practical art - sculpture, painting, handicrafts, and crafts - as inseparable components of a new architecture.

In every picture there should be shade as well as light.

The whole arrangement of my picture is expressive. The place occupied by the figures or objects, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything plays a part.

One is attracted to beauty. Beauty is the coordination of things, in such a way, that it is what attracts you. It's almost self-defining.

To achieve vital harmony in a picture it must be constructed out of parts in themselves incomplete, brought into harmony only at the last stroke.

I don't know what good composition is.... Sometimes for me composition has to do with a certain brightness or a certain coming to restness and other times it has to do with funny mistakes. There's a kind of rightness and wrongness and sometimes I like rightness and sometimes I like wrongness.

Design, whether it's on your body or in your home, is the same thing. It's mixing different colors, different textures, and unexpected patterns - elements that you wouldn't often put together in an interesting way.

The beauty of a face is not a separate quality but a relation or proportion of qualities to each other.

Beauty: the adjustment of all parts proportionately so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole.

A painting should be tough; it should have muscle, but I have to find some tenderness in it, too. There has to be that dynamic.

The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.

In things to be seen at once, much variety makes confusion, another vice of beauty. In things that are not seen at once, and have no respect one to another, great variety is commendable, provided this variety transgress not the rules of optics and geometry.

All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.

Approach nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone ...

It was hard to see the ‘art’ because everything partook of the art. Even the victrola had been painted so as to be in harmony. I must have missed a lot, because it was all one big decor, and the things in the foreground were lost against the things behind. But behind all was the wall running from one window to the other and at a certain spot Mondrian had tacked on it rectangles of the primary colors, and black, gray + white. In fact there were several whites, some shiny some matte.

When I was a student looking at Leonardo DaVinci and all those guys - Italian, Dutch, or whatever - it's incredible how each piece of the painting fits to the main theme that they want to express.

I love a good monochromatic moment with doors/walls. I think it looks great!

I feel that my ideas of beauty have been given very strong backing by Botticelli and a few others: Slender hands, long neck, long limbs - look at Nefertiti. She was very teensy-weensy with a long neck and wide-spaced eyes.