visual abstraction Quotes

I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either.

Black and white is abstract; color is not. Looking at a black and white photograph, you are already looking at a strange world.

How do you show what's not there? How do you show energy?

Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not....All colours arouse specific associative ideas, psychologically material or tangible, while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.

Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential.

For example, in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents - as an element - the greatest difficulty in manipulation.

Color... thinks by itself, independently of the object it clothes.

I'm never drawing the object itself; I'm only drawing a depiction of the object - a kind of crystallized symbol of it.

In a strict sense photography can never be abstract, for the camera is incapable of synthetic integration.

If the photographer is to create works that will stand for his spirit in the same way as artists in other genres, he must first - having no ready-made, abstract components such as works and sounds - supply other means to abstraction instead.

We all accept the visual shorthand used throughout comics: if something's farther away, it'll be drawn with a thinner, simpler line, eventually leaving out most visual information and becoming a gesture, a skeletal representation of a thing.

The difference between what we see and a sheet of white paper with a few thin lines on it is very great. Yet this abstraction is one which we seem to have adopted almost instinctively at an early stage in our development, not only in Neolithic graffiti but in early Egyptian drawings. And in spite of its abstract character, the outline is responsive to the least tremor of sensibility.

The kind of painting which I find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational, but it is musical and architectural... Whether this visual relationship is slightly more or slightly less abstract is, for me, beside the point.

There are lots of theories that the simpler a comic character is drawn the more relatable they become. People can imprint themselves onto the gaps in the picture. The skill of cartooning is often working out how much can be stripped away.

Your poems are rather hard to understand, whereas your paintings are so easy. Easy? Of course - you paint flowers and girls and sunsets; things that everybody understands. I never met him. Who? Everybody. Did you ever hear of nonrepresentational painting? I am. Pardon me? I am a painter, and painting is nonrepresentational. Not all painting. No: housepainting is representational. And what does a housepainter represent? Ten dollars an hour. In other words, you don't want to be serious - It takes two to be serious.

Part of the strength of Pollock and Rothko's art, in fact, is this doubt as to whether art may be there at all.

There is no interruption between my older paintings and my cutouts. Just that with an increasing sense of the absolute, and more abstraction, I have achieved a form that is simplified to its essence.