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.
--
"Notes on Abstract Art" in Herbert Read's Ben Nicholson: Paintings, Reliefs, Drawings (London, 1948)Ben Nicholson
» Ben Nicholson - all quotes »
I don’t care for 'abstract expressionism'... and it is certainly not ‘non-objective’, and not ‘non-representational’ either. I’m very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you’re painting out of your consciousness, figures are bound to emerge. We’re all of us influenced by Freud, I guess. I’ve been a Jungian for a long time... Painting is a state of being... Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.
Jackson Pollock
Painting for me is like a fabric, all of a piece and uniform, with one set of threads as the representational, esthetic element, and the cross-threads as the technical, architectural, or abstract element. These threads are interdependent and complementary, and if one set is lacking the fabric does not exist.
Juan Gris
(On libraries) What's great about them is that anybody can go into them and find a book and borrow it free of charge and read it. They don't have to steal it from a bookshop... You know when you're young, you're growing up, they're almost sexually exciting places because books are powerhouses of knowledge, and therefore they're kind of slightly dark and dangerous. You see books that kind of make you go 'Oh!'
Stephen Fry
We are going to have perhaps a thousand years of non-representational painting.
Adolph Gottlieb
An example: if I compose a picture using as objects a scrap of bark, a scrap of butterfly wing and a purely imaginary form, you probably won’t recognise the bark, or the butterfly wing, and you’ll say: ‘What does this stand for? It is an abstract picture. No it’s a representational picture’.. ..There is no such thing as ‘abstract’, or ‘concrete’ either. There is a good picture and a bad picture. There is the picture that moves you and the picture that leaves you cold.. ..A picture has a value in itself, like a musical score, like a poem.
Fernand Leger
Nicholson, Ben
Nicholson, George
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z