Quotes About Abstraction

My work sometimes can be abstract and appear not to have a direct relationship to Afro-American concerns, but, in fact, it is based on that.

The city - as the theater of experience, the refuge, the hiding place - has, in turn, been replaced by an abstraction, the fast lane. In the fast lane, the passive observer reduces everything - streets, people, rock lyrics, headlines - to landscape. Every night holds magical promises of renewal. But burnout is inevitable, like some law of physics.

The beauty of string theory is that it is all about mathematics. For that, you don't need resources or labs. Just sit in your room and do the maths.

Among the thousand-and-one faces whereby form chooses to reveal itself to us, the one that fascinates me more than any other, and continues to fascinate me, is the structure hidden in mathematical things.

One of the problems maths struggles with is that it's invisible. We haven't got explosions on our side.

At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there'd be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you.

work performance is not an abstraction: You can't say that Ted is a high-performance worker in general, only that he has proved himself good at doing some one particular thing. Fragmentation

The fall of humanity was the fall from the actual to the symbolic. Language abstracts us from the real world; keeping us from direct, intuitive perception. Words, like the ego, are merely guides. Don't mistake them for the real thing. Pull aside the filthy curtains of the social. Language makes an enigma of simple existence; it obscures the true nature of reality and of your self.

Arithmetic has a very great and elevating effect, compelling the soul to reason about abstract number, and rebelling against the introduction of visible or tngible objects into the argument.

I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.

The observer must learn to look at the picture as a graphic representation of a mood and not as a representation of objects.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Obviously a drawing of a person is not a real person, but a drawing of a line is a real line.

The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty.

If the real world is orange juice, then art is like orange-juice concentrate.

Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.

he line has almost become a work of art in itself; one can not play with it when the representation of objects perceived was all-important.

Geometry is the art of correct reasoning from incorrectly drawn figures.

All painting - the painting of the past as well as of the present - shows us that its essential plastic means were only line and color.

I honestly believe students of painting in the next century will laugh at the abstract art movement. They will marvel at such a drawn-out regression in the plastic arts.

Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification.

Sometimes the painting starts to relate very directly to either sights seen or experiences felt, other times it just goes off on a tangent that you really can't articulate.

Mathematics is the purest of the arts, as well as the most misunderstood.

All our knowledge is symbolic.