Marsden Hartley quotes

.. the virtue of Yankee upbringing spiritually speaking is of more downright value to me than any past heritages. (Marsden Hartley)
It is never difficult to see images – when the principle of the image is embedded in the soul. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Marsden Hartley
I don't want to escape via intellectual ruses – I want affirmations via passionate embraces & you can't have life unless you live it. View quote
Marsden Hartley
the place [Dogtown, in Gloucester, Massachusetts] 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. View quote
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. View quote
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 chrysalises 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)
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Marsden Hartley
I learned this bit of wisdom from a principle of William Blake's which I discovered early and followed far too assiduously the first half of my aesthetic life, and from which I have happily released myself and this axiom was: "Put off intellect and put on imagination; the imagination is the man." From this doctrinal assertion evolved the theoretical axiom that you don't see a thing until you look away from it which was an excellent truism as long as the principles of the imaginative life were believed in and followed. I no longer believe in the imagination. View quote
Marsden Hartley
.. [Picasso had] a depth of understanding and insight into the inwardness of things.... doing very exceptional things of a most abstract psychic nature.. View quote
Marsden Hartley
I am not a 'book of the month' artist, and I do not paint pretty pictures; but when I am no longer here my name will register forever in the history of American art. View quote
Marsden Hartley
What I have to express is not handled with words. It must 'come' tot the observer. It must carry its influence over the mind of the individual into that region of him which is more than the mind. The pictures must reach inwards into the deeper experiences of the beholder – and mind you they care in no sense religious tracts – there is no story to them or literature – no morals – they are merely artistic expressions of mystical states – these in themselves being my own personal motives as drawn from either special experiences or aggregate ones. View quote
Marsden Hartley
They [The Mason family where Hartley stayed 1935 - 1941] maintain an enviable balance between the material & spiritual worlds (so) they symbolize for me the term ideal. View quote
Marsden Hartley
For wine, they drank the ocean – for bread, they ate their own despairs; counsel from the moon was theirs – for the foolish contention - Murder is not a pretty thing – yet seas do raucous everything to make it pretty – for the foolish or the brave, a way seas have. (Marsden Hartley)
These people [the Mason-family in Nova Scotia] have that sort of incandescence, which is peculiar to those who know the meaning of simplicity & humility. They are illumined from within makes them essentially mystical in their sense of life. View quote
Marsden Hartley
Every painter must traverse for himself that distance from Paris to Aix (Aix-en-Provence where Paul Cézanne frequently painted in open air] or from Venice to Toledo [where w:El Greco lived and painted for many years]. Expression is for one knowing its own pivot. Every expressor relates solely to himself – that is the concern of the individualist. View quote
Marsden Hartley
Blake would not laugh at my fantasies if he saw them [in contrary to the public in New York, as Hartley realized well, before]. View quote
Marsden Hartley
I have joined, once and for all, the ranks of the intellectual experimentalists. I can hardly bear the sound of the words "expressionism," "emotionalism," "personality," and such, because they imply the wish to express personal life, and I prefer to have no personal life. Personal art is for me a matter of spiritual indelicacy. View quote
Marsden Hartley