Form Quotes - Page 2

• The conscious principle in this design has been to achieve forms that could create experiences, and that could at the same time welcome everyone's experiences with the serenity of an effortless development.

  Gae Aulenti

  Design, Serenity, Principles

  Gae Aulenti, Margherita Petranzan (1997). “Gae Aulenti”, Rizzoli Intl Pubns

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• If you want to write something completely unique, you will probably fail or at best write something without redeeming value. The mind works in certain patterns: the mind organizes facts in story form; it is your commonality with that body of human thought that makes a good book, not its estrangement from the common values that humans share.

  Janet Morris

  Book, Writing, Unique

  Interview with Michael A. Ventrella, michaelaventrella.com. May 15, 2012.

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• Always stand by form against force.

  John Ruskin

  Force

  John Ruskin (1872). “The Queen of the Air: Being a Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm”, p.66

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• The mind is matter in solution and matter is mind in form.

  Phineas Quimby

  Mind, Matter, Solutions

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• Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.

  Michel Foucault

  Time, Art, Madness

  Michel Foucault (2001). “Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason”, p.273, Psychology Press

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• Nothing is more beautiful than a line that brings out a form.

  Mary Beth McKenzie

  Beautiful, Lines

  Mary Beth Mckenzie (1987). “Painterly Approach”, Watson-Guptill

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• Since form is emptiness and emptiness is form, then instead of a hand grasping at nothing, it is better to grasp at someone's nose because this is closer to reality.

  Dalai Lama

  Reality, Hands, Noses

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• Every real form is a world. And any plastic surface is more alive than a face from which stares a pair of eyes and a smile.

  Kazimir Malevich

  Real, Eye, Alive

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• The form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a predetermined form. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate, it shapes as it develops itself from within.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Hands, Shapes, Mechanic

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1989). “Coleridge's Criticism of Shakespeare”

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• I see only forms that are lit up and forms that are not. There is only light and shadow.

  Francisco Goya

  Light, Shadow, Lit

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• Drawing is your understanding of form.

  Edgar Degas

  Drawing, Understanding

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• Short things are short all over and long things are long all over.

  Jim Harrison

  Long, Literature

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, themorningnews.org. June 7, 2004.

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• Form and substance are one and the same. Form is the life expression and substance the living painting.

  Asger Jorn

  Expression, Substance, Painting

  Asger Jorn, Per Hovdenakk, Stine Høholt, Arken museum for moderne kunst (Ishøj, Denmark), Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst (Amstelveen, Netherlands) (2002). “Asger Jorn”

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• Forms in art arise from the impact of idea upon material... so that thinking and belief and attitudes may endure as actual things.

  Ben Shahn

  Art, Attitude, Thinking

  Ben Shahn (1967). “Ben Shahn: Paintings and Graphics : [exhibition] Santa Barbara Museum of Art, July 30, 1967-September 10, 1967; La Jolla Museum of Art, October 5, 1967-November 12, 1967 ; Art Association of Indianapolis, Herron Museum of Art, December 3, 1967-January 3, 1968”

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• If form is mechanically applied, it may indeed result in work that is conventional, if not pedantic or stupid. But form used well can become the very vehicle of freedom, of discovering the creative surprises that liberate mind-at-play.

  Stephen Nachmanovitch

  Stupid, Play, Creative

  Stephen Nachmanovitch (1991). “Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art”, p.84, Penguin

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• When the whole and the parts are seen at once, as mutually producing and explaining each other, as unity in multeity, there results shapeliness.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Unity, Results, Explaining

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1836). “Letters”, p.197

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• The way to form transcends its own destination, goes beyond the end of the way itself.

  Paul Klee

  Way, Ends, Destination

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• From the point of view of art, there are no concrete or abstract forms, but only forms which are more or less convincing lies.

  Pablo Picasso

  Art, Lying, Views

  Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Sarah Campbell Blaffer Gallery (1975). “Picasso, Braque, Léger: masterpieces from Swiss collections”

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• The simplest forms in the universe are the sphere and the circle. I represent them by disks and then I vary them... spheres of different sizes, densities, colours and volumes, floating in space, traversing clouds, sprays of water, currents of air, viscosities and odours - of the greatest variety and disparity.

  Alexander Calder

  Clouds, Air, Circles

  "The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists, Harper & Row, New York and Evanston, Illinois". Interview with Katherine Kuh, 1962.

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• Fashion should be a form of escapism, and not a form of imprisonment.

  Alexander McQueen

  Fashion, Should, Style Icons

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• It was always disappointing to see that what I could really master in terms of form boiled down to so little.

  Alberto Giacometti

  Littles, Disappointing, Masters

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• The work produced is a thing among things, able to be experienced and described as a sum of qualities. But from time to time it can face the receptive beholder in its whole embodied form.

  Martin Buber

  Quality, Able, Faces

  Martin Buber (2004). “I and Thou”, p.16, A&C Black

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• It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

  Mark Strand

  Believe, Shapes, Worthwhile

  Mark Strand (2000). “The Weather of Words: Poetic Invention”, Alfred a Knopf Incorporated

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• Our knowledge of shape and form remains, in general, a mixture of visual and of tactile experiences... A child learns about roundness from handling a ball far more than from looking at it.

  Henry Moore

  Children, Balls, Shapes

  Henry Moore, Alan G. Wilkinson (2002). “Henry Moore-- Writings and Conversations”, p.210, Univ of California Press

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• The secret of many of my deformations - which many people do not understand - is that there is an interaction, an intereffect between the lines in a painting: one line attracts the other and at the point of maximum attraction the lines curve in toward the attracting point and form is altered.

  Pablo Picasso

  Curves, People, Secret

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