Paul Klee Quotes
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Art makes something a lot more visible or audible.
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A tendency toward the abstract is inherent in linear expression: graphic imagery being confined to outlines has a fairy-like quality and at the same time can achieve great precision.
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The artist of today is more than an improved camera, he is more complex, richer, and wider. He is a creature on the earth and a creature within the whole, that is, a creature on a star among stars.
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What my art probably lacks is a kind of passionate humanity... There is no sensuous relationship, not even the noblest, between myself and the many.
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Spatial art does not begin with a poetic mood or idea, but with construction of one or more figures, with the harmonizing of several colors and tones, or with the devaluation of spatial relationships and so on.
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You adapt yourself to the contents of the paintbox.
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The longer a line, the more of the time element it contains. Distance is time whereas a surface is apprehended more in terms of the moment.
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I want to be as though newborn. To be almost primitive.
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I paint in order not to cry.
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Sometimes I dream of a work of really great breadth, ranging through the whole region of object, meaning, and style. This, I fear, will remain a dream, but it is a good thing to bear the possibility occasionally in mind.
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In earlier times artists liked to show what was actually visible... nowadays we are concerned with reality, rather than the merely visible.
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We document, explain, justify, construct, organize: these are good things, but we do not succeed in coming to the whole. But we may as well calm down: construction is not absolute. Our virtue is this: by cultivating the exact we have laid the foundations for a science of art, including the unknown X.
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My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.
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It is interesting to observe how real the object remains, in spite of all abstractions.
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Nature can afford to be prodigal in everything, the artist must be frugal down to the last detail. Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.
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It is possible that a picture will move far away from Nature and yet find its way back to reality. The faculty of memory, experience at a distance produces pictorial associations.
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From the root, the sap rises up into the artist, flows through him, flows to his eye. Overwhelmed and activated by the force of the current, he conveys his vision into his work. And yet, standing at his appointed place as the trunk of the tree, he does nothing other than gather and pass on what rises from the depths. He neither serves nor commands he transmits. His position is humble. And the beauty at the crown is not his own; it has merely passed through him.
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Gradually compositions make an appearance again. Political - satirical - conceits expressed in one figure or a few.
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Polyphonic painting is superior to music in that there, the time element becomes a spatial element. The notion of simultaneity stands out even more richly.
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Children also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in there having it! The more helpless they are, the more instructive are the examples they furnish us; and they must be preserved free of corruption from an early age.
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Color has got me. I no longer need to chase after it. It has got me for ever. I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour.
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Beauty is as relative as light and dark. Thus, there exists no beautiful woman, none at all, because you are never certain that a still far more beautiful woman will not appear and completely shame the supposed beauty of the first.
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It is precisely the way which is productive - this is the essential thing; becoming is more important than being.
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Each energy calls for its complementary energy to achieve self-contained stability based on the play of energies.