Abstraction

Allowing abstraction all its worth, art should not be just abstract without purpose. In giving up the subject with all its resonance, all its meaning, its possibilities for symbolism and connotation, we give up enormous expressive potential. Abstraction needs to heft something true, something of real value, something powerful, needs great beauty or gravitas to compensate adequately for all that it takes away. It takes someone of Diebenkorn's stature to give the non-subject a meaning that can compete with imagery.

the Sketch

The precise quality that renders the sketch the highest expression of the idea is not the suppression of details, but their subordination to the great sweeping lines that come before everything else in making the impression. The greatest difficulty therefore, when it comes to tackling the picture, is this subordination of details which, nevertheless, make up the composition and are the very warp and weft of the picture itself. 23 April 1854 [trans. Lucy Norton]

Ce qui fait precisement de ce croquis l'expression par excellence de l'idee , c'est, non pas la suppression des details, mais leur complete subordination aux grand traits qui doivent saisir avant tout. La plus grande difficulte consiste donc a retrouner dans le tableau a cet effacement des details, lesquels pourtant sont la composition , la trame meme du tableau.....

Paris 23 avril, 1854

Art is

un-understood.

according to Delacroix

"The art of the painter is all the nearer to man's heart because it seems to be more material. In painting, as in external nature, proper justice is done to what is finite and to what is infinite, in other words, to what the soul finds inwardly moving in objects that are known through the senses alone." October 8, 1822
[trans. Lucy Norton]

See, Think

I believe art is keenly visual, is fundamentally about seeing. One can write about art, but first you understand directly by looking. It's all there to see. Art that needs a lot of explanation isn't visual. See art, see life. Think with your eyes.

Look long

You know it when you see it, though you will need to look carefully.

ineffable

Art is the thing that if you need words to explain it, you haven't got it yet.