Abstraction Quotes

Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art's version of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It's the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly, decisively, for good.

I guess I have no motivation to make an abstract painting, even if they sometimes read as abstract. I think, with abstraction, it's easy to fall into a sort of pastiche.

All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.

Abstraction is the way to the heart - it is not the heart itself.

The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.

Whether dark presages of the night proceed from any latent power of the soul during her abstraction, or from any operation of subordinate spirits, has been a dispute.

I expect of abstraction as much as what imagery does for me... to carry meaning.

Abstraction and representation are supposed to be going down two very different paths, one sociological and the other aesthetic.

I felt like my parents were always involved with abstraction, and I wanted to do something very specific.

Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.

I paint - I tend more to abstraction - but not as much as I would like to because of time. I would love to do sculpture - I've toyed with the idea of fitting in a sculpture course.

If you want an application to be portable, you don't necessarily create an abstraction layer like a microkernel so much as you program intelligently.

If power is abstraction, which many black men, black women, and people of color have very little voice in, well, then I want to sit at the table.

True leaders have so much power they are willing to give it away. Power is not a fixed, quantifiable sum; instead it is an unlimited abstraction which grows as it is shared.

In principle, any abstraction of the object is allowed which has a sufficiently strong creative power behind it.

Light is snow sifted / To an abstraction.

I don't have any personal upset at the death penalty as an abstraction, What I do realize is how many mistakes can be made with the way things are being done now.

There is an amount of abstraction in my movies, and sometimes they don't really understand it until the film is finished.

At some level, you have to be able to say, "This is my task." It's in small, local ways that you keep yourself alive and refresh ideas that are always going into dead abstraction.

I do believe abstraction is and was meant to embody deep emotion. I believe that's its job, in the history of art.

I'm trying not to delve into my world of abstraction and self-indulgence. But I haven't. When I sit down and I try not to [be abstract], it comes out really forced and awkward.

By means of the sign, man frees himself from the here and now for abstraction.

Sabism is deabstraction, metacolorism, thematism, exotic, convalescent substrate, soft act, collectivism, pluralization, sensationalism, pluralart, thematic colourism, reabstraction.

Both [social science & science fiction] attempt to understand empirical facts and lived experience as something that is shaped by abstract - and not directly perceptible - structural forces.

Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract.

Challenge quandary thinking, either/or thinking come by moving from the abstract to the concrete. What can we do with the choice actually in front of us?

She really was pretty, for a grown-up, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative.

The canvas is the door to another dimension. The paintbrush is the key.