Marsden Hartley Quotes & Sayings

The reading of tourist prospectuses is one of the joys of the world
it is like operetta in prose
all so flowery and heavenlike. — Marsden Hartley

I harp always on the 'idea' of life as I dwell perpetually on the existence of the moment. — Marsden Hartley

The sense of form in New Mexico is for me one of the profoundest, most original, and most beautiful I have personally experienced. It must be 'learned.' . . . It is not a country of light on things. It is a country of things in light. — Marsden Hartley

All things that are living are expression and therefore part of the inherent symbology of life. Art, therefore, that is encumbered with excessive symbolism is extraneous, and from my point of view, useless art. Anyone who understands life needs no handbook of poetry or philosophy to tell him what it is. — Marsden Hartley

My work has the abstraction underneath it all now & what I deliberately set out to do down here, for this is the perfect realistic abstraction in landscape. — Marsden Hartley

It is the incongruous thing in my entire life, this isolation ... My work requires it - but I myself have no need or use for it - Perhaps once on a time I found isolation imperative - I think all chrysalides do - all embryos go for the underside of the leaf in the time of body-change preparing for the final reassertion -resurrection - the establishment of the entity. But now I've come up tot the outside of my casements. — Marsden Hartley

(I was) happily contended to be climbing the heights and the clouds by the brush method ... rendering the God-spirit in the mountains. — Marsden Hartley

The place (Dogtown, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, fh) is forsaken and majestically lovely as if nature had at last formed one spot where she can live for herself alone.. (it) looked like a cross between Easter Island and Stonehenge - essentially druidic in it appearance, it gives the feeling that an ancient race might turn up at any moment and renew an ageless rite there. — Marsden Hartley

A reaction, to be pleasant, must be simple. — Marsden Hartley

I see the possibility of being 'made new' again and the gift of rebirth is all that lets anyone really live ... The great secret ... is never to get stuck, imprisoned in common social patterns. They always paralyse the real quality of life - the 'going onward' is all that matters, and the dead moments in one's life through trying to be a unit in any society or social concept are terrifying really. — Marsden Hartley

They are the gateway for our modern esthetic development, the prophets of the new time. They are most of all, the primitives of the way they have begun; they have voiced most of all the imperative need of essential personalism, of direct expression of direct experience. — Marsden Hartley

My work is getting stronger & stronger and more intense all the time ... I have such a rush of new energy & notions coming into my head, over my horizon like chariots of fire that all I want is freedom to step aside and execute them. — Marsden Hartley

I have achieved the 'sacred' pilgrimage to Ktaadn MT - exceeding all my expectations so far that I am sort of helpless with words. I feel as if I have seen God for the first time, and find him so nonchalantly solemn. — Marsden Hartley

The virtue of Yankee upbringing spiritually speaking is of more downright value to me than any past heritages. — Marsden Hartley

The essential of a real picture is that the things which occur in it occur to him in his peculiarly personal fashion ... the idea of modernity is but a new attachment of things universal - a fresh relationship to the courses of the sun and to the living swing of the earth - a new fire of affection for the living essence present everywhere. — Marsden Hartley

By getting as close to the true idea of religion, of spirituality as it is possible for us to get ... we would be in possession of the only tangible relationship tot the deity in things. — Marsden Hartley

My work embodies little visions of the great intangible ... Some will say he's gone mad - others will look and say he's looked in at the lattices of Heaven and come back with the madness of splendor on him. — Marsden Hartley

I could never be French, I could never become German - I shall always remain American - the essence which is in me is American mysticism just as Davies declared it when he saw those first landscapes. — Marsden Hartley