Abstract Painting Quotes

#1. There are moments when clear images finally begin to emerge within the abstract painting of your life.

Renee Carlino

#2. Abstract painting seeks to be a pure pictorial language, and thus attempts to escape the essential impurity of all languages: the recourse to signs or forms that have meanings shared by everyone.

Octavio Paz

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

Chris Martin

#4. A lot of my work is about what's abstract and what's pictorial. Is it bubblegum, or is it an abstract painting using bubblegum? The energy comes from walking that line and watching things dip this way and that.

Dan Colen

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. An abstract painting need in 50 years by no means look "abstract" any longer.

Marcel Duchamp

#9. When I see people making 'abstract' painting, I think it's just a dialogue and a dialogue isn't enough. That is to say, there is you painting and this canvas. I think there has to be a third thing; it has to be a trialogue.

Philip Guston

#10. Certainly one of the surprising truths of having a book published is realizing that your book is as open to interpretation as an abstract painting. People bring their own beliefs and attitudes to your work, which is thrilling and surprising at the same time.

Marisha Pessl

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall.

Frank Stella

#14. The freer the soul, the more abstract painting becomes.

Marc Chagall

#15. 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

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

Jerry Saltz

#17. In abstract painting, I worried about the limited range of possibilities that, as time went on, became increasingly important to me. I wanted to express or deal with differences that an all-over paint and canvas 'presence' neutralized.

Richard Diebenkorn

#18. Experience has proved that there is no difference between a so-called realist painting - of a landscape, for example - and an abstract painting. They both have more or less the same effect on the observer.

Gerhard Richter

#19. 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

#20. To move the picture into our surroundings and give it real existence has been my ideal since I came to abstract painting.

Piet Mondrian

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

Robert Motherwell

#22. All painting, no matter what you are painting, is abstract in that it's got to be organized.

David Hockney

#23. I am against the line and all its consequences: contours, forms, composition. All paintings of whatever sort, figurative or abstract, seem to me like prison windows in which the lines, precisely are the bars.

Yves Klein

#24. Art should be linked to abstract things - color, line, tone. It is not an instrument to improve social conditions and chase ugliness. Painting is like music and it has to separate from everyday reality.

Irving Stone

#25. All individual thought is dissolved in universal thought, as all form is dissolved in the universal plastic means of Abstract-Real painting.

Piet Mondrian

#26. You like it, that's all, whether it's a landscape or abstract. You like it. It hits you. You don't have to read it. The work of art-sculpture or painting-forces your eye.

Clement Greenberg

#27. I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.

Max Beckmann

#28. 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.

Ben Nicholson

#29. 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

#30. I firmly believe that a representational painting is only as strong as its abstract components.

Robert Reynolds

#31. Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.

Harold Rosenberg

#32. With abstract work, I never was quite sure what it was that felt right about the painting, but I did know that I responded to it and I liked whatever it was offering me.

Kurt Wagner

#33. The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

J.G. Ballard

#34. Representational painters: loosen the grip of inflexibility! Abstract painters: tighten your hold on crafting your images! In both types of painting students need to unlearn what one has acquired.

Joshua L. Goldberg

#35. Abstract art is only painting. And what's so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint.

Pablo Picasso

#36. I want people to know what it is they're looking at. But at the same time, the closer they get to the painting, it's like going back into childhood. And it's like an abstract piece.. it becomes the landscape of the brush marks rather than just sort of an intellectual landscape.

Jenny Saville

#37. I like using concrete imagery, but I don't feel that's what it's about. It's a combination of concrete and abstract to take the listener somewhere they know better than you. That's true for music, seeing a painting, watching a movie ... it's all some kind of an escape.

M. Ward

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

Frank Stella

#39. Painting is ... a richer language than words ... Painting operates through signs which are not abstract and incorporeal like words. The signs of painting are much closer to the objects themselves.

Jean Dubuffet

#40. All paintings are abstract ideas, not representations of a true reality.

Mike Svob

#41. Great paintings have gradations, large and small ... They serve to lift the subject off the two-dimensionality of the canvas. Gradations are an essential abstract convention.

Robert Genn

#42. Humans abstract and record information in five major ways: with writing, mathematical notation, painting/photography/videography, maps, and clocks - that is, we can abstract and record verbal, numerical, visual, spatial, and temporal information.

William J. Bernstein

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

Gerhard Richter

#44. What interests me is all the stuff that goes into abstract and abstract-figurative art. Not the styles, but the stuff that, in various combinations, make the styles: mixing and matching painting methods and ideas.

Ed Askew

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

Marcel Duchamp

#46. I was struggling to figure out how to combine the abstract and the representational. Painting, I suddenly understood how that aesthetic could fit together. That was a really fun game to figure out how that worked.

Margaux Williamson

#47. And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting.

Robert Rauschenberg

#48. There is more fine abstract design in Navajo rugs than in all these modern paintings.

Theodore Roosevelt

#49. I have been continuously aware that in painting, I am always dealing with ... a relational structure. Which in turn makes permission 'to be abstract' no problem at all.

Robert Motherwell

#50. I honestly believe students of painting in the next century will laugh at the abstract art movement. They will marvel at such a drawn-out regression in the plastic arts.

Richard Schmid

#51. I was a student at Harvard, and that's where I learned about so-called avant-garde music. Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism and painting were well known at this time.

Henry Flynt

#52. 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

#53. Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.

Georgia O'Keeffe

#54. 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.

Sergei Eisenstein