In a similar vein - Soulage makes a more clinical, if
not mystical distinction between abstraction and
non-abstraction painting...
“...for me my painting has always stood apart from
the figurative versus non-figurative. I do not start
out from either an object or a landscape, later to
distort them. Nor conversely, do I seek to conjure
them up in my painting. It seems to me that what
happens in a painting, which from an object in
the making, [that] suddenly comes alive, defies
description.” Pierre Soulage
If you know the work he produced, this statement
does sort of justify the extreme ‘black’ abstracts
that he became renown for. This ‘type of work’ was
also created by another artist (Hans Hartung) some
years before Soulage (1934), which really broke the
ground for ‘instinctive’ neo-abstraction creation..
“Painting is a state of being. Painting is self
discovery. Every good artist paints what they are. “
Jackson Pollock