making a painting meant nothing less than recreating the world on
canvas and creating a new world—living, breathing, embraceable,
sustaining. For Hofmann, a painter could do this by trusting a few
fated ideas about what is necessary to make a painting.
The painter creates form with color. Color is key. At the same
time, the artist has to compose in relation to the picture plane,
the magical, practical reality of the canvas as a two dimensional
but limitless field with four points and a surface. The painter
must also manipulate positive and negative space so that each carries
the value of the other. The painter must understand rhythm.
But the painter had not only to employ these ideas. No, it was
much more than that. The painter paints him or her self. Hofmann
married this idea to the lessons and laws he distilled from the
masters, from Cézanne, the Cubists and Mondrian. For Hofmann,
painting required a complex of materials: nature, the medium, the
picture plane and the self. "The artist’s technical problem,"
wrote Hofmann, "is how to transform the material with which
he works back into the sphere of the spirit."