“The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature — translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive, and every work of art should be alive.”

— Hans Hofmann

'Painting and Culture' p. 55
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

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Hans Hofmann 67

American artist 1880–1966

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Painting and Culture' p. 58
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“When the impulses which stir us to profound emotion are integrated with the medium of expression, every interview of the soul may become art. This is contingent upon mastery of the medium.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Painting and Culture' p. 58
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“As Akins observes, it is not the point of our sensory systems that they should detect "basic" or "natural" properties of the environment, but that they should serve our "narcissistic" purposes in staying alive; nature doesn't build epistemic engines.”

Daniel Dennett book Consciousness Explained

citing Kathleen Akins. "On Piranhas, Narcissism and Mental Representations: An Essay on Intentionality and Naturalism" (1989)
Consciousness Explained (1991)

“The difference between the arts arises because of the difference in the nature of the mediums of expression and the emphasis induced by the nature of each medium. Each means of expression has its own order of being, its own units.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Painting and Culture' p. 57
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“The work of art should be entirely conceived and formed by the mind before its execution. It should receive nothing from Nature’s formal properties or from sensuality or sentimentality... The picture should be constructed entirely from purely plastic elements, that is to say, planes and colours. A pictorial element has no other significance than 'itself', and therefore the picture has no other significance than 'itself.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote from the first and only! issue of the art-magazine 'Art Concret', Paris 1930
1926 – 1931

“The brain is the medium of expression of the human mind. Similarly the entire physical universe would be the medium of expression of the mind of a natural God.”

Paul Davies book God and the New Physics

Source: God and the New Physics (1983), Ch. 17: 'The physicist's conception of nature', p. 223

“Creation is dominated by three absolutely different factors: First, nature, which works upon us by its laws; second, the artist, who creates a spiritual contact with nature and his materials; third, the medium of expression through which the artist translates his inner world. Of those three components only one, the medium, is material.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

As quoted in Hans Hofmann (1963) by William Chapin Seitz, p. 15
1960s

“Mystic Art is spirit expressed into matter. A mystic artist
receives and transmits revelation, providing their art as a medium
for messages from the divine matrix of Creation.”

Alex Grey (1953) American artist

Art Psalms (2008), Seven Statements on Mystic Art

“So, ungentle reader, (as you and I value what we should ashamed—after witnessing a few minor circus-marvels—to call our "lives,") let us never be fooled into taking seriously that perfectly superficial distinction which is vulgarly drawn between the circus-show and "art" or "the arts." Let us not forget that every authentic "work of art" is in and of itself alive and that, however "the arts" may differ among themselves, their common function is the expression of that supreme alive-ness which is known as "beauty."”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

This being so, our three ring circus is art—for to contend that the spectacle in question is not an authentic manifestation of "beauty" is as childish, as to dismiss the circus on the ground that it is "childish," is idiotic.
"The Adult, the Artist and the Circus." Vanity Fair (October 1925)

“What part should nature play in a work of art? Where should the line be drawn? And from the standpoint of practical procedure - should one work directly from nature or merely study and remember it? Too much freedom frightens me, poor imitator that I am, and yet my head is filled with so many images evoked by what I see around me at all times that nature seems insignificant and banal.”

Paul Sérusier (1864–1927) French painter

Quote from a letter to Maurice Dennis, 1889; as quoted by John Rewald in Pierre Bonnard; MoMA - distribution, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1918, p. 14 - note 7

“The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature — translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive, and every work of art should be alive.”

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