Expressionist Quotes & Sayings

I'm not an Expressionist. I love to look at de Kooning, but I've got this kind of secret life, and that is something that pleases me. I have to try and make something out of it. — Ellsworth Kelly

How can you say one style is better than another? You ought to be able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling you've given up something.. I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that's what's is going to happen, that's going to be the whole new scene. — Andy Warhol

Before World War II, Modernist architects sometimes had to resort to custom fabrication or outright fakery to achieve the machine imagery advocated by the Bauhaus after its initial, Expressionist, phase. Stucco masqueraded as reinforced concrete; rivets were used for decoration. — Martin Filler

I don't know if I'm an impressionist or an expressionist. You can call me an American first ... I've been labeled doing neimanism, so that's what it is, I guess. — LeRoy Neiman

I had grown up under the heroic spell of the Abstract Expressionist painters, — Pete Hamill

How many of the people I know - sons and daughters - have intricate abstract expressionist paintings of their mothers, created out of their own emotions, attitudes, hands. And how many have only Polaroid pictures of their fathers. — Ellen Goodman

I had always loved expressionist painting, like every European. In fact I admired it all the more because these were precisely the paintings despised by my father's generation. — Georg Baselitz

All human action is expressive; a gesture is an intentionally expressive action. All art is expressive - of its author and of the situation in which he works - but some art is intended to move us through visual gestures that transmit, and perhaps give release to, emotions and emotionally charged messages. Such art is expressionist. — Norbert Lynton

Yes, I did, I mean I painted er, in a kind of abstract expressionist way, because of course that was exciting. — David Hockney

It's the Abstract Expressionist approach to publishing. Throw ink at paper. Hope for pattern to emerge. — Jay McInerney

Without the witty, potent dialogue and the puzzling shape of the story, the movie would have been merely an American version of the kind of brooding, shadow-filled, Ufa-style expressionist stuff that Joe had grown up watching in Prague. Without the brooding shadows and cold adventurings of the camera, without the theatrical lighting and queasy angles, it would have been merely a clever movie about a rich bastard. It was much, much more, than any movie really needed to be. In this one crucial regard--its inextricable braiding of image and narrative--Citizen Kane was like a comic book. — Michael Chabon

You have to have time to be sorry for yourself to be a good Abstract Expressionist. — Robert Rauschenberg

Where the realist would say, "One day Gregor Samsa woke up to the realization that he was like a cockroach," the expressionist heightens or intensifies reality by turning the metaphor to fact. — John Gardner

In a sense, Joyce was Beckett's Don Quixote, and Beckett was his Sancho Panza. Joyce aspired to the One; Beckett encapsulated the fragmented many. But as each author accomplished his task, it was in the service of the other. Ultimately, Beckett's landscapes would resound with articulate silence, and his empty spaces would collect within themselves the richness of multiple shadows
a physicist would say the negative particles
of all that exists in absence, as in the white patches of an Abstract Expressionist painting. Becket would evoke, on his canvasses of vast innuendo and through the interstices of conscious and unconscious thought, the richness that Joyce had made explicit in words and intricate structure. — Lois Gordon

Those of us born into vitalist and expressionist cultures must hope that governments will draw back from shutting down the modernist project of exploring, experimenting, and imagining - of voyaging into the unknown - that has been essential for rewarding lives. — Edmund Phelps

Donnelley was lifting his shirt away from the torn flesh in his side. He was cranked around, trying to assess the damage in the muck-spotted mirror. To Vero, he looked like an expressionist painting in which all the objects were the same color of too-vivid red: the shirt, the hands holding the shirt, the belt bassing through pant loops. At the center of it all was the thing that corrupted its surroundings with its own gruesome color - a wound. — Robert Liparulo

I would describe my work as expressionist. The expressionist point of view is stressing your own feelings about something. — Jacob Lawrence

Isaiah said, "My word shall not return unto me void, but shall accomplish that where it is sent. — Florence Scovel Shinn

I am an expressionist and by that I mean that I'm not a photographer or a writer or a painter or a tap dancer, but rather someone who expresses himself according to his needs. — Duane Michals

I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist; or I'd draw a big ram's head, really messy. I'd never win painting contests. I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect Spiderman. — Jean-Michel Basquiat

Tony Cox, still a painter and not yet married to Yoko Ono, pioneered in the use of mescaline for draft-evasion. 400 milligrams taken before his own preinduction physical prompted an angry outburstas an orderly took a stab at his arm to draw blood. Tony roared, "What the fuck do you think you are doing?" and was led into the presence of a psychiatrist with whom he engaged in a protracted discussion of the merits of the New York school of abstract expressionist painting, all the while naked. Tony got his 4F classification, presumably on grounds of schizophrenia, and went on to counsel others liable to military service, using the same approach. — Peter G. Stafford

Breakthrough is guaranteed, if there is enough light. — Sunday Adelaja

Technocracy wants to do everything by machinery. Machinery is doing just fine. If it can't kill you, it will put you out of work. — Will Rogers

No - I've got it," Jill announced, interrupting my musing. "He's a vampire." I laughed again, feeling there was no end to the outrageous, ridiculous excuses we were coming up with. "Seriously, it makes sense. He's always tired and pale, and keeps himself away from people so he won't bite them ... Maybe that's what he's doing when he disappears. Getting his fix of blood. — J.M. Richards

I was not an Abstract Expressionist. Nor was I an Irascible. — Hedda Sterne

Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of oddity. — Roy Lichtenstein

We are [God's] by creation, and again by redemption. He has every right to tell me what to do with my mind and body. I have. I right to do whatever I want with my body. — Randy Alcorn

Ever read a book that changed your life? Me neither. — Jim Gaffigan

Every thought vibrates through the universe. — Dorothy Richardson

How can U say one style is better than another. You ought to be able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling youve given up something ... I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that's what's going to happen, that's going to be the whole new scene. - Andy Warhol, 1963 — Legs McNeil

I am not a follower of Monet. I am not an admirer or follower of De Kooning. I am not an action painter. I am not an abstract expressionist. I am not younger or older. I will not take my hat off to any other artist living or dead in all the world. I know this. — Milton Resnick

After being an Impressionist, Cubist, and an Abstract Expressionist, I was influenced by realistic artists, including Andrew Wyeth in the late '50s, and I haven't changed my style since. — Robert Bateman

Fiction is an expressionist painting rather than a photograph. — Josip Novakovich

The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive - non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective. the only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not. — Ad Reinhardt