Abstract Artist Quotes

#1. My father was a proctologist and my mother was an abstract artist, so that's how I view the world.

Sandra Bernhard

#2. The abstract artist has given material existence to many unseen worlds and tempi.

Mark Rothko

#3. I am an abstract artist in the sense that I abstract. I cannot be called non-figurative while I am still interested in the modern magic of space, primitive sex forms, the sensual and erotic, disconcerting contours, the things of life.

Sean William Scott

#4. I think, basically, I'm an abstract artist. I just think that that's not even an issue. I think everything's abstract.

Julian Schnabel

#5. I'm not an abstract artist; I leave that to others. To me, abstract art ended with Kazimir Malevich's 'Black Square.' To continue it is senseless.

Jonas Mekas

#6. As I say, I as an abstract artist was active politically.

Lee Krasner

#7. Poverty, I realized, wasn't only a lack of financial resources; it was isolation from the kind of people that could help you make more of yourself.

Keith Ferrazzi

#8. See, there's the pie chart. If you look, you can see clear as day that the happy times -- the times when you think "How fun! I'm glad I'm alive" -- don't make up even one tenth of life. I'm work this out properly with a calculator, so there's no mistake.

Tatsuhiko Takimoto

#9. The pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second - comics, picnic tables, men's trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles. All the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried not to notice at all.

Andy Warhol

#10. Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract.

Richard Diebenkorn

#11. I do not see any essential difference between abstract and primitive art. Both are simple and sincere. Naturally, we should not generalize in these matters: It is the individual artist that counts.

Vladimir Nabokov

#12. All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. BOTH SIDES of the artist's personality must play their part.

Henry Moore

#13. Fear is the deep motive of abstract art - fear of a repellent civilization which is dominated by the power of things ... who can be surprised if, more sensitive than the others, the artist is terrified by the power things have acquired over us?

Storm Jameson

#14. The full moon rises. The fog clings to the lowest branches of the spruce trees. The man steps out of the darkest corner of the forest and finds himself transformed into ...
A monkey?
I think not.

Garth Stein

#15. You have to have time to be sorry for yourself to be a good Abstract Expressionist.

Robert Rauschenberg

#16. Abstract expression is so solid, so successful and recognizable, but there's a mystery about the artists that goes into it, a fetishism about the artists themselves and who they were.

Keanu Reeves

#17. Then Samson said. With a donkeys jawbone I have made donkeys of them. With a donkey's jawbone I have killed a thousand of them.

Anonymous

#18. What a funny thing painting is. The abstract painters always insist on their connection with the visible reality, while the so called figurative artists insist that what they really care about, is the abstract qualities of life.

Marlene Dumas

#19. For death begins with life's first breath,
And life begins at touch of death.

William Arthur Dunkerley

#20. I love the edited version of it.

Terry Gross

#21. Make me a shadow on the wall!

Kate Griffin

#22. Self-conceit is a weighty quality, and will sometimes bring down the scale when there is nothing else in it. It magnifies a fault beyond proportion, and swells every omission into an outrage.

Jeremy Collier

#23. When you gossip, it's self-hexing. Because when you do it, it comes back to you. Everything starts with the word. The word is demonstrating a condition of the mind. If it's in your mind and comes out of your mouth, it will be created.

Iyanla Vanzant

#24. Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes ... Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an exploration into unknown areas.

Arshile Gorky

#25. 'Abstract' literally means to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract ... a realistic or nonobjective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.

Richard Diebenkorn

#26. Any combining, mixing, adding, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing, or popularizing of abstract art deprives art of its essence and depraves the artist's artistic consciousness. Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all.

Donald Judd

#27. I don't know how he calmed me down without even talking, but he did. Some people just have a calming presence about them and he's one of those people.

Colleen Hoover

#28. Conflict, not progress, is the word that defines man's path from darkness into light. No holiness is won by any other means than this, that wickedness should be slain day by day, and hour by hour.

Alexander MacLaren

#29. Among those born into chaos, some will imagine an order and become scientists; a few will recognize the chaos and become abstract artists; most others will turn to faith for understanding; and the rest will become lost souls.

Robert Breault

#30. I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist; or I'd draw a big ram's head, really messy. I'd never win painting contests. I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect Spiderman.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

#31. How much luckier than all the rest of mankind are the astrologers who, if they tell one truth among a hundred lies, obtain so much credit that even their lies are believed.

Francesco Guicciardini

#32. Art comes into being in that abstract interval between a thought and reality, and no one - not even the artist who created it - can remeasure the influences that caused it.

Edgar Alwin Payne

#33. 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.

Yukio Mishima

#34. The idea of space is given to the artist to change if he can. The subject matter in the abstract is space.

Willem De Kooning

#35. I am not a follower of Monet. I am not an admirer or follower of De Kooning. I am not an action painter. I am not an abstract expressionist. I am not younger or older. I will not take my hat off to any other artist living or dead in all the world. I know this.

Milton Resnick

#36. I grew up listening to English music.

Ryan Tedder

#37. With the manipulation of abstract
symbols, an artist can send you information without sound, change your feelings and,
sometimes, even beliefs. Artists convey the unspeakable. Artists inspire.

Jonathan Culver

#38. After being an Impressionist, Cubist, and an Abstract Expressionist, I was influenced by realistic artists, including Andrew Wyeth in the late '50s, and I haven't changed my style since.

Robert Bateman