Carolina QuotesIt's been on my mind – what would something be like if it were unbalanced? It's been a vexing question for a long time. But it took the experience of working with radical kinds of symmetry, not just a rectangle, but a diamond shape, as well as extreme extensions of shapes, before I finally came to the idea of everything being unbalanced, nothing vertical, nothing horizontal, nothing parallel. I came to the fact that unbalancing has its own order. In a peculiar way, it can still end up feeling symmetrical. I don't know but what the very nature of our response to art is experienced symmetrically.
Kenneth Noland Carolinian
Source
pp. 99 – 105
- work
- "Color, Format and Abstract Art" (1977)
- year
- 1977
- locator
- pp. 99 – 105
Cite this record
“It's been on my mind – what would something be like if it we…” Kenneth Noland. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-AB744AD842. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/ab744ad842
More from Kenneth Noland
Morris Louis and I were interested in how Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler [famous for her soak-painting technique] were using paint. Of necessity we had to get more interested in the stuff of painting. We talked a lot about whether to size the painting or not to size, how to mix up paint.
We tend to discount a lot of meaning that goes on in life that's non-verbal. Color can convey a total range of mood and expression, of one's experience in life, without having to give it descriptive or literary qualities.
You see things out of the corner of your mind or the corner of your eye that affect you just as strongly as things that you focus on, if not more so.