Mark Tobey Quotations

We look at the mountain to see the painting, then we look at the painting to see the mountain.

Problems are an important part of maturing--meet them straight on. Work them out. It's like the chick in the egg. It has to break through the eggshell on its own. That's how it gains its first strength. If you break the shell for the chick, you end up with a puny little runt.

I am accused often of too much experimentation.., but what else should I do when all other factors of man are in the same condition. I thrust forward into space as science and the rest do.

I've tried to decentralize and interpenetrate so that all parts of a painting are of related value...

Sitting on the floor of a room in Japan, looking out on a small garden with flowers blooming and dragonflies hovering in space, I suddenly felt as if I had been too long above my boots.

An artist must find his expression closely linked to his individual experience or else follow in the old grooves resulting in lifeless forms.

There has been 32 isms since the advent of cubism, yet after all there are essentially the same two old strings, the Romantic and the Classical. We've just be confused by the storm. Science and psychology have played a great part to say nothing of sex.

But there was escape, too, even in those days, for there was Whistler living in the grey mists with a faded orange moon. The nocturne transformed itself into dreamy rooms with Chopin's music creating a mood that softened the hard core of self.

Now it seems to me that we are in a universalising period... If we are to have world peace, we should have an understanding of all the idioms of beauty because the members of humanity who have created these idioms of beauty are going to be a part of us. And I would say that we are in a period when we are discovering and becoming acquainted with these idioms for the first time.

The Cubists used the figure, but they broke it up..