Abstract Painting Quotes

• Even with painting, even abstract paintings, you need the incoming of, light on the canvas.

  Jean-Luc Godard

  Light, Needs, Canvas

  Source: cinemagodardcinema.wordpress.com

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you.

  Jackson Pollock

  Compliment, Expressionism, Abstract Art

  Quoted in FrancisVO'Connor Jackson Pollock (1967).

  69 Copy quote

  Show source

• The freer the soul, the more abstract painting becomes.

  Marc Chagall

  Freedom, Soul, Painting

  9 Copy quote

• We speak of concrete and not abstract painting because nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a color, a surface.

  Theo van Doesburg

  Art, Real, Color

  61 Copy quote

• When realistic images or patterns are seen in an abstract painting, they are often parallels brought about by processes in painting which echo processes in nature.

  Walter Darby Bannard

  Echoes, Patterns, Realistic

  3 Copy quote

• I'm interested in color belonging to something, where it takes on a completely new kind of vibrancy, rather than being what you would call straight abstract paintings. And anyway it is so much more exciting trying to find out about the three dimensions of color and sticking it down on a two dimensional surface.

  Euan Uglow

  Color, Two, Trying

  56 Copy quote

• I never had the... common anxiety as to whether abstract painting had a given 'meaning.

  Robert Motherwell

  Anxiety, Common, Given

  3 Copy quote

• In every respect, fantasy is like doing abstract paintings.

  Lance Henriksen

  Painting, Fantasy, Abstract

  "Lance Henriksen Interview SCREAM OF THE BANSHEE". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. March 26, 2011.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Sometimes I think I shouldn't explain much about my work because people will just feel what they feel when they see it. They'll love it or hate it or enjoy it on their own, like how I've looked at abstract paintings of other artists and cried or felt happy because I've felt, "Wow, I've lived that, I've understood that."

  Jose Parla

  Hate, Artist, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  Wassily Kandinsky

  Art, Color, Essentials

  106 Copy quote

• If the abstract paintings show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lifes show my yearning.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Reality, Landscape

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: text : writings, interviews and letters, 1961-2007”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• life's kind of like a painting. A really bizarre, abstract painting. You could look at it and think that all it is, is a blur. And you could continue living your life thinking that all it is, is just a blur. But if you really look at it, really see it, focus on it, and use your imagination, life can become so much more. The painting could be of the sea, the sky, people,buildings, a butterfly on a flower, or anything except the blur you were once convinced it was.

  Cecelia Ahern

  Flower, Butterfly, Thinking

  33 Copy quote

• Up until 35 I had a slightly skewed world view. I honestly believed everybody in the world wanted to make abstract paintings, and people only became lawyers and doctors and brokers and things because they couldn't make abstract paintings

  Frank Stella

  Artist, Doctors, Views

  51 Copy quote

• Think of an abstract painting as very, very low relief - a thing, not a picture.

  Jerry Saltz

  Thinking, Relief, Lows

  "Ask an Art Critic: Jerry Saltz Answers Your Questions About George Condo, Online Art Fairs, and What Abstraction Really Is" by Jerry Saltz, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 24, 2011.

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• Painting is a duality and abstract painting is an entirely aesthetic thing. It always remains on one level. It is only really interesting in the beauty of its patterns or its shapes.

  Francis Bacon

  Interesting, Levels, Shapes

  3 Copy quote

• I guess I have no motivation to make an abstract painting, even if they sometimes read as abstract. I think, with abstraction, it's easy to fall into a sort of pastiche.

  Joe Bradley

  Motivation, Fall, Thinking

  Interview with Laura Hoptman, www.interviewmagazine.com. May 16, 2013.

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• Artists with a capital 'A' are at ease working in all areas of art, whether it is a contemporary abstract painting or work requiring methods and techniques of the Renaissance Masters.

  Igor Babailov

  Art, Technique, Ease

  6 Copy quote

• If I would had been born years earlier, I would have been in all the Westerns. It's just the way that the industry goes. But now, we are in an age of a lot of different kinds of fears, and you have the science fiction and horror genres doing our morality plays the same way that they would have done in Westerns. I absolutely accept it. In every respect, fantasy is like doing abstract paintings.

  Lance Henriksen

  Years, Horror Genre, Play

  Source: collider.com

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• Abstract painting is dead. That's why it has become so interesting again.

  Chris Martin

  Interesting, Painting, Abstract

  6 Copy quote

• I loved surrealism and abstract painting, and anything related to those. I always thought painting was the highest form of art. What led me to drawing was seeing so much self-important, pretentious, conceptual-type art in university. I wanted to reject that by making quick, fun art.

  Neil Farber

  Art, Fun, Drawing

  Source: www.believermag.com

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• I didn't see an abstract painting until I was 18, when I went to Vincent Price's house and saw Richard Niebencorn, Wolff, Jackson Pollack. He had an amazing collection. I didn't know people painted abstractly, I thought I was just doing something wholeheartedly.

  Dennis Hopper

  People, House, Saws

  Source: interviewswithicons.wordpress.com

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I used to do abstract paintings at school, like everyone else, the tutor said these would make great curtains. I would always neglect the formal stuff that was going on by using colour, because colour kind of came naturally to me.

  Damien Hirst

  School, Stuff, Kind

  "Damien Hirst interview for The Blue Paintings at the Wallace Collection". Interview with John Hoyland, www.telegraph.co.uk. October 13, 2009.

  3 Copy quote

  Show source

• Abstract paintings must be as real as those created by the 16th century Italians.

  Frank Stella

  Real, Century, Painting

  3 Copy quote

• 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.

  Edward Hopper

  Art, Color, Design

  5 Copy quote

• Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was.

  Jackson Pollock

  Mean, Artist, Compliment

  Interview, New Yorker, 5 Aug. 1950

  108 Copy quote

  Show source