Annie Besant's book where she put forward the idea that theosophical mystical energies could be portrayed as colours or abstract shapes was practically the invention of abstract art. A lot of artists rushed out and read it and suddenly thought, ‘oh God you could, you could portray love as a colour, or depression as a colour” All of a sudden abstract art happens, a flowering out of occultism.
Alan MooreRelated topics
abstract art book colour depression flowering forward idea invention love occultism read sudden thought coloursRelated quotes
To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape. But grey, like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea, and so all I can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it. The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of colour.
Gerhard Richter
I watched them from the window, thy children at their play,
And I thought of all my own dear friends, who were far, oh, far away,
And childish loves, and childish cares, and a child's own buoyant gladness
Came gushing back again to me with a soft and solemn sadness;
And feelings frozen up full long, and thoughts of long ago,
Seemed to be thawing at my heart with a warm and sudden flow.
Arthur Hugh Clough
Damien Hirst's Mother and Child Divided (1993) is a work which can at first glance be read as nothing more than two brutally severed carcasses. "A freak show" was how the art critic of the Sunday Telegraph responded to its presentation in the Turner Prize in 1995. For me, the undoubted shock, even disgust provoked by the work is part of its appeal. Art should be transgressive. Life is not all sweet.
Nicholas Serota
The aim of the book is to set a limit to thought, or rather - not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i. e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).
It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
I did some reading to prep for Expelled. I read one book cover to cover, From Darwin to Hitler, and that was a very interesting book - one of these rare books I wish had been even longer. It's about how Darwin 's theory - supposedly concocted by this mild-mannered saintly man, with a flowing white beard like Santa Claus - led to the murder of millions of innocent people.
Ben Stein
