Hans Hofmann

My aim in painting is to create pulsating, luminous, and open surfaces that emanate a mystic light, in accordance with my deepest insight into the experience of life and nature.

When the impulses which stir us to profound emotion are integrated with the medium of expression, every interview of the soul may become art. This is contingent upon mastery of the medium.

Color is a plastic means of creating intervals... color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now between formal tensions and color tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony.

The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.

Colors must fit together as pieces in a puzzle or cogs in a wheel.

Being inexhaustible, life and nature are a constant stimulus for a creative mind.

Creation is dominated by three absolutely different factors: First, nature, which works upon us by its laws; second, the artist, who creates a spiritual contact with nature and his materials; third, the medium of expression through which the artist translates his inner world.

In nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light.

The art of pictorial creation is so complicated - it is so astronomical in its possibilities of relation and combination that it would take an act of super-human concentration to explain the final realization.

Art is to me the glorification of the human spirit, and as such it is the cultural documentation of the time in which it is produced.

To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction.

What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation.