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The product of movement and counter-movement is tension. When tension working strength is expressed, it endows the work of art with the living effect of coordinated, though opposing, forces.

Hans Hofmann

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Hans Hofmann
Age: 85 †
Born: 1880
Born: January 1
Died: 1966
Died: January 1
Architect
Artist
Drawer
Painter
Weißenburg/Bayern
Hans Georg Albert Hofmann
Johann Georg Albert Hofmann
Johann Hofmann
Hans Hoffman
Hans. Hofmann
Hans Hofmann (1880-1966)
Hofmann
Work
Effects
Counter
Strength
Opposing
Movement
Expressed
Though
Tension
Working
Product
Force
Forces
Living
Effect
Endows
Art
Products
Coordinated

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A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world. Just as a flower, by virtue of its existence as a complete organism is both ornamental and self-sufficient as to color, form, and texture, so art, because of its singular existence is more than mere ornament.
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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.
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A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.
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Just as counterpoint and harmony follow their own laws, and differ in rhythm and movement, both formal tensions and color tensions have a development of their own in accordance with the inherent laws from which they are separately derived. Both, however, aim toward the realization of the same image. And both deal with the depth problem.
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Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.
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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.
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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.
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Being inexhaustible, life and nature are a constant stimulus for a creative mind.
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Colors must fit together as pieces in a puzzle or cogs in a wheel.
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I can't understand how anyone is able to paint without optimism. Despite the general pessimistic attitude in the world today, I am nothing but an optimist.
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A work of art is finished, from the point of view of the artist, when feeling and perception have resulted in a spiritual synthesis.
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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.
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Space expands or contracts in the tensions and functions through which it exists. Space is not a static, inert thing. Space is alive space is dynamic space is imbued with movement expressed by forces and counterforces space vibrates and resounds with color, light and form in the rhythm of life.
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The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.
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There is in reality no such thing as modern art. Art is carried on up and down in immense cycles through centuries and civilizations.
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Painters must speak through paint, not through words.
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The impulse of nature, fused through the personality of the artist by laws arising from the particular nature of the medium, produces the rhythm and the personal expression of a work. Then the life of the composition becomes a spiritual unity.
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Genius is gifted with a vitality which is expended in the enrichment of life through the discovery of new worlds of feeling.
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Nature's purpose in relation to the visual arts is to provide stimulus not imitation. From its ceaseless urge to create springs all Life - all movement and rhythm - time and light, color and mood - in short, all reality in Form and Thought.
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Our entire being is nourished by color.
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