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Form is an extension of content. (Anonymous)
Form is sometimes considered a mere spice added by the artist to the representation of objects in order to make it pleasurable. (Rudolf Arnheim)
I wanted to create new appearances, to extract new forms from man. (Hans Jean Arp)
If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames. (Antonin Artaud)
The conscious principle in this design has been to achieve forms that could create experiences, and that could at the same time welcome everyone's experiences with the serenity of an effortless development. (Gae Aulenti)
An illustrational form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a non-illustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact. (Francis Bacon)
I often use colour to attack form, to break it down a little or begin to dissolve it. But I am not at all interested in 'pure' colour or in colour as a transcendental presence... So if I use colours to begin to dissolve forms, I also use forms to prevent colours becoming entirely detached from their everyday existence. (David Batchelor)
Painting around an object will help you look at your subjects in a new way - as shapes and spaces... (Mary Todd Beam)
I would follow that 'significant form' was form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality. (Clive Bell)
Art strives for form, and hopes for beauty. (George Bellows)
Creation is only the projection into form of that which already exists. (The Bhagavad Gita)
No kissing please, as this creates a weak, connected shape which will distract the viewer's eye, causing a momentary pause as they puzzle it out. (Marion Boddy-Evans)
Lines as edges kill a sense of form. (Paul Brandford)
Colour acts simultaneously with form, but has nothing to do with form. (Georges Braque)
Nothing is more vexing than vague forms in shadow. These sometimes-you-see-'em and sometimes-you-don't forms have sent many an artist on long walks in the park mumbling to themselves and hurling curses at squirrels and small children. (Michael Britton)
I love to overlap forms. Whether is is a hand over a cheek, a cat in front of a dog or a tree partially obscuring the porch. The fun is combining subjects to give the illusion of depth. (Harley Brown)
The work produced is a thing among things, able to be experienced and described as a sum of qualities. But from time to time it can face the receptive beholder in its whole embodied form. (Martin Buber)
The simplest forms in the universe are the sphere and the circle. I represent them by disks and then I vary them... spheres of different sizes, densities, colours and volumes, floating in space, traversing clouds, sprays of water, currents of air, viscosities and odours – of the greatest variety and disparity. (Alexander Calder)
When the whole and the parts are seen at once, as mutually producing and explaining each other, as unity in multeity, there results shapeliness. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
The form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a predetermined form.
The organic form, on the other hand, is innate, it shapes as it develops itself
from within. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
The artist is a man who finds that the form or shape of things externally corresponds, in some strange way, to the movements of his mental and emotional life. (Graham Collier)
Look into his torso and find a new form, another shape to draw. Something outside your symbol set. (Jacob Collins)
The most important things in a painting are Form and Value. Color comes last - like a friend you welcome. (Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot)
I learned there's an amazing unexplored territory in terms of narrative. Before, I thought the unexplored territory was the form, the way you shoot a movie. Now, I'm learning about the beautiful marriage between form and narrative. (Alfonso Cuaron)
Drawing is your understanding of form. (Edgar Degas)
Form is expressed in the light tones by dark accents, in the dark tones by light accents. (Harvey Dunn)
Form is a revelation of essence. (Meister Johann Eckhart)
One must not always think that feeling is everything. Art is nothing without form. (Gustave Flaubert)
Let cloud shapes swarm, / Let chaos storm, /
I wait for form. (Robert Frost)
True art takes note not merely of form but also of what lies behind. (Mahatma Gandhi)
It was always disappointing to see that what I could really master in terms of form boiled down to so little. (Alberto Giacometti)
I see only forms that are lit up and forms that are not. There is only light and shadow. (Francisco de Goya)
The world seems to be made up of a never-ending series of overlapping forms. There always seems to be something in back of something else. (Donald Graham)
The artists of Asia have spiritually realized form, rather than aesthetically invented or imitated form, and from them I have learned that art and nature are mind's Environment within which we can detect the essence of man's Being and Purpose, and from which we can draw clues to guide our journey from partial consciousness to full consciousness. (Morris Graves)
If a form isn't right, if it's erased, the correction has meaning. It's the process of the mind, moving and making. The form didn't drop from outer space. (Elliott Green)
Where do you put a form? It will move all around, bellow out and shrink, and sometimes it winds up where it was in the first place. But at the end it feels different, and it had to make the voyage. I am a moralist and cannot accept what has not been paid for, or a form that has not been lived through. (Philip Guston)
It's not the light that makes form, it is the shadows. (Andrew Hamilton)
Short things are short all over and long things are long all over. (Jim Harrison)
There are forms that can only be seen when you are near a painting, others only appear when you are far away. (Robert Henri)
There is an inside and an outside to every form. When they are in special accord, as for instance a nut in its shell or a child in the womb, or in the structure of shells or crystals, or when one senses the architecture of bones in the human figure, then I am most drawn to the effect of light. Every shadow cast by the sun from an ever-varying angle reveals the harmony of the inside to outside. Light gives full play to our tactile perceptions through the experience of our eyes, and the vitality of forms is revealed by the interplay between space and volume. (Barbara Hepworth)
- Dynamic Anatomy, 1958
There are three kinds of forms in the human figure: Ovoid forms - egg, ball and barrel masses; Column forms - cylinder, cone; Spatulate forms - box, slab and wedge blocks. (Burne Hogarth)
I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play; it has a poignancy to it. (Jim Jarmusch)
Form and substance are one and the same. Form is the life expression and substance the living painting. (Asger Jorn)
The artist must have something to say, for mastery over form is not his goal but rather the adapting of form to its inner meaning. (Wassily Kandinsky)
I'm not interested in edges. I'm interested in the mass and color, the black and white. The edges happen because the forms get as quiet as they can be. I want the masses to perform. When I work with forms and colors, I get the edge... (Ellsworth Kelly)
Work from the pithy eye out, swimming in language sea. Something that you feel will find a form. (Jack Kerouac)
Something that you feel will find its own form. (Jack Kerouac)
It's only through form that we can realize emptiness. (Jack Kerouac)
The way to form transcends its own destination, goes beyond the end of the way itself. (Paul Klee)
Every phenomenon manifests itself of its own accord. This manifestation is always distinct from form, and is the essence of the immediate, the trace of the immediate. (Yves Klein)
It just seems as though there are forms in some experience in your life that have an excitement for you... those sort of forms in your experience do, in some way, not dominate, but they become the things that you are involved with. (Franz Kline)
Since form (phenomena) is emptiness and emptiness is form, then instead of a hand grasping at nothing, it is better to grasp at someone's nose because this is closer to reality. (Dalai Lama)
A mind that is very selective to forms... is apt to use its images metaphorically, to exploit their possible significance for the conception of remote or intangible ideas. (Suzanne Langer)
My aim is for ripeness of form. I want to make my forms so full, so juicy that one could add nothing more to them. (Henri Laurens)
'Scenes' are temporary; form is eternal. (Lynda Lehmann)
Artists of many diverse types began using simple forms to their own ends. (Sol LeWitt)
Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms. (Roy Lichtenstein)
Every real form is a world. And any plastic surface is more alive than a (drawn or painted) face from which stares a pair of eyes and a smile. (Kasimir Malevich)
Nothing is more beautiful than a line that brings out a form. (Mary Beth McKenzie)
Out of the formless the forms appear. (Mooji)
Our knowledge of shape and form remains, in general, a mixture of visual and of tactile experiences... A child learns about roundness from handling a ball far more than from looking at it. (Henry Moore)
If you give a child something very complex to paint, such as a bouquet of flowers or a natural landscape, if he is very good, eventually he will get back – like Cezanne – to the essential forms of what he sees. (Robert Motherwell)
If form is mechanically applied, it may indeed result in work that is conventional, if not pedantic or stupid. But form used well can become the very vehicle of freedom, of discovering the creative surprises that liberate mind-at-play. (Stephen Nachmanovitch)
I asked of every thing / if it had / something more, / something more than shape and form, / and I learned that way that nothing is empty -- / everything is a box, a train, a boat / loaded with implications, / every foot that walked along a path / left a telegram written in the stone, / and clothes in the washing water / dripped out their whole existence. (Pablo Neruda)
As forms, architectural elements are often complex and invariably interesting foils for light and shadow. (Michael Nevin)
My work is not about 'form follows function,' but 'form follows beauty' or, even better, 'form follows feminine.' (Oscar Niemeyer)
- Painting in Color, 1967...
When the conception of internal form is governed by edge, color (even when stained into raw canvas) appears to remain on or above the surface. I think, on the contrary, of color as being seen in and throughout, not solely on, the surface. (Jules Olitski)
The secret of many of my deformations – which many people do not understand – is that there is an interaction, an intereffect between the lines in a painting: one line attracts the other and at the point of maximum attraction the lines curve in toward the attracting point and form is altered. (Pablo Picasso)
From the point of view of art, there are no concrete or abstract forms, but only forms which are more or less convincing lies. (Pablo Picasso)
We see the form through a myriad of variations, but the strength of our variation lies in its ability to awaken the form in our minds. The energy of art comes from our recognition of the Truth through our endless variety. (Peter Prest)
Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms. (Marcel Proust)
The mind is matter in solution and matter is mind in form. (Phineas Quimby)
No matter to what degree you carry the detail, it should always be secondary to the pattern. The form is what is important not the story. (William F. Reese)
- The Great American Humorist, 1823-1900...
There are three forms of visual art: Painting is art to look at, sculpture is art you can walk around, and architecture is art you can walk through. (Dan Rice)
Always stand by form against force. (John Ruskin)
The Body is formed where world and self meet one another. (Robert Sardello)
The medium is as unimportant as I myself. Essential is only the forming. (Kurt Schwitters)
Form is the shape of content... (Ben Shahn)
Forms in art arise from the impact of idea upon material... so that thinking and belief and attitudes may endure as actual things. (Ben Shahn)
So really what I am trying to do is create and understand form. But then too, color enters into it because a lot of things are color changes without a value change, which wouldn't show up if you were just using a non-color medium. (Nelson Shanks)
Draw with the brush. Carve the form. Don't be carried away by subtleties of modeling and nice pigmentation at the expense of losing the form. (John Sloan)
It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape. (Mark Strand)
I have to be clear of the form before I can really work out my problems there in terms of composition. (Deon Venter)
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