back : deck index : next

Symbol

I use symbols to imply abstract ideas. My main objective is to
construct a synthesis of the natural, the abstract, and the imaginary,
and so bring into existence a language of personal symbolism.
- Kent Addison

How could one explain so much with so little? How could three simple
symbols reach out and grab hold of me? They held rhythm, excitement,
spontaneity and were certainly part of my 'inner child'
-- they were pieces of art itself.
- Alan Bruce on Sengai's 'The Universe'

It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives,
works and has his being.
- Thomas Carlyle

I trust the symbol that is arrived at in the making of the painting.
Meaningful symbols aren't invented as such, they are made or
discovered as symbol later.
- Richard Diebenkorn

Everything can be linked together in some fashion, in either a
physical, psychological, or symbolic manner.
- Buckminster Fuller

I paint to evoke a changing language of symbols, a language
with which to remark upon the qualities of our mysterious capacities
which direct us toward ultimate reality.
- Morris Graves

These symbols of his own creation... give him a greater pleasure than
the object seen. He reforms them, he rearranges them, he focuses them to
his own inner seeings and longings.
- John Marin

I have to create an object which resembles the tree. The sign for a
tree, and not the sign that other artists may have found for the tree.
- Henri Matisse

All art is at once surface and symbol.
- Oscar Wilde

We photographers are poets in the language of symbols.
- Jan Phillips

If modern art has produced symbols that are unfamiliar,
that was only to be expected.
- Herbert Read

: back to deck index :

All images and content © 2003 Amy Kollar Anderson