Since one cannot create "real depth" by carving a hole in the picture, and since one should not attempt to create the illusion of depth by tonal gradation, depth as a plastic reality must be two dimensions in a formal sense as well in the sense of color. "Depth" is not created on a flat surface as an illusion, but as a plastic reality. The nature of the picture plane makes it possible to achieve depth without destroying the two-dimensional essence of the picture plane. ... A plane is a fragment in the architecture of space. When a number of planes are opposed one to another, a spatial effect results. A plane functions in the same manner as the walls of a building. ... Planes organized within a picture create the pictorial space of its composition. ... The old masters were plane-consciousness. This makes their pictures restful as well as vital...
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"Search for the Real in the Visual Arts", p. 44Hans Hofmann
My aim is always to get hold of the magic of reality and to transfer this reality in painting – to make the invisible visible through reality… …What helps me most in this task is the penetration of space. Height, width and depth are the three phenomena which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus to protect myself from the infinity of space. My figures come and go, suggested by fortune or misfortune. I try to fix them divested of their apparent accidental quality.
Max Beckmann
Depth, in a pictorial, plastic sense, is not created by the arrangement of objects one after another toward a vanishing point, in the sense of the Renaissance perspective, but on the contrary (and in absolute denial of this doctrine) by the creation of forces in the sense of push and pull. Nor is depth created by tonal gradation (another doctrine of the academician which, at its culmination, degraded the use of color to a mere function of expressing dark and light).
Hans Hofmann
A line cannot control pictorial space absolutely. A line may flow freely in and out space, but cannot independently create the phenomenon of push and pull necessary to plastic creation. Push and pull are expanding and contracting forces which are activated by carriers in visual motion. Planes are the most important carriers, lines and points less so ... the picture plane reacts automatically in the opposite direction to the stimulus received; thus action continues as long as it receives stimulus in the creative process. Push answers with pull and pull with push. ... At the end of his life and the height of his capacity Cézanne understood color as a force of push and pull. In his pictures he created an enormous sense of volume, breathing, pulsating, expanding, contracting through his use of colors.
Hans Hofmann
And they ask me, "Well, is it alright if we let the drug-sniffing dog walk along the outside of the plane?" I said, "That's fine," and the dog walks back and forth a few times, and the cop says, "Well, the dog gave us the signal there are drugs on the plane," and I was like, "...No, he didn't! That dog didn't do anything, I was starting straight at him! He didn't wink, blink, woof, or paw. What's his signal, a blank stare? [Mimes a blank stare] That's all he did!" And the cop says, "Well, the dog gave us the signal there are drugs on the plane," And I said, "Well I said there are no drugs on the plane. Who are you going to believe, me or...Ah, f**k it, whatever." It takes them an hour and a half to search this plane, and I'm standing there going, "Oh, come on!" And of course there are no drugs on the plane, and I think that's it, and then the cop goes, "Now that dog needs to sniff that bag you have with you," and I was like, [Scooby Doo voice] "Ruh Roh!" They found 7/8 of a gram of marijuana in my bag. I consider myself OUT of marijuana when I have 7/8 of a gram. That's no weed.
Ron White
The work of art should be entirely conceived and formed by the mind before its execution. It should receive nothing from Nature’s formal properties or from sensuality or sentimentality.. ..The picture should be constructed entirely from purely plastic elements, that is to say, planes and colours. A pictorial element has no other significance than ‘itself’, and therefore the picture has no other significance than 'itself'.
Theo van Doesburg
Hofmann, Hans
Hofstadter, Douglas
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