Jackson Pollock 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.

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

Non-figurative art is created by establishing a dynamic rhythm of determinate mutual relations which excludes the formation of any particular form.

I try to do a lot of asymmetrical, triangular compositions - I find those work really well for comic book covers in that portrait mode, and I don't always see that in other artists.

It's all in how you arrange the thing... the careful balance of the design is the motion.

I have worked to free shape from its ground, and then to work the shape so that it has a definite relationship to the space around it; so that it has a clarity and a measure within itself of its parts (angles, curves, edges and mass); and so that, with color and tonality, the shape finds its own space and always demands its freedom and separateness.

Don't confuse symmetry with balance.

I cry out for order and find it only in art.

When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in.

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.

Remember that a painting - before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.

My paintings are certainly nonobjective. They're just horizontal lines.

Art is when things appear rounded.

Pictures, abstract symbols, materials, and colors are among the ingredients with which a designer or engineer works. To design is to discover relationships and to make arrangements and rearrangements among these ingredients.

Just as Pollock used the drip to meld process and product, Richter 'found' and used the smudge and the blur to ravish the eye, creating works of psychic and physical power.

Dimension regulated the general scale of the work, so that the parts may all tell and be effective.

What has stayed true all the way through my work is my composition, I hope, and my sense of color.

I believe in leavening. You can't have words sticking out too much, like promontories. They disturb the density. You have to flatten them, or raise the surrounding terrain.

Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that.

Height, width, and depth are the three phenomena which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus to protect myself from the infinity of space.

I influenced the BG style by not being able to draw perspective. The BG artists developed cool graphic painting styles to make my bad backgrounds look like they were that way on purpose.

A painting that is well composed is half finished.

Artistic tricks divert from the effect that an artist endeavors to produce, and even excellent elements such as bullets, arrows, brackets, ornate initials, are at best superficial ornamentation unless logically employed.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Let us note that art - even on an abstract level - has never been confined to 'idea'; art has always been the 'realized' expression of equilibrium.