Creativity Quote by Oskar Kokoschka

There is a strange swagger in Kokoschka’s quiet claim that uncertainty is behind him. He’s describing a point in an artist’s life when the big existential problem - What am I even doing on the canvas? - has been solved, not by theory but by accumulation: years of risk, failure, and finally a hard-won control of mood. “Fundamental mood and dimension of expression” reads like a private grammar he’s built for himself, a set of instincts now reliable enough to stop feeling like superstition.

The phrase “purely poetic work” is the tell. Kokoschka isn’t retreating into prettiness; he’s asserting that once an artist has nailed the underlying emotional architecture, the task becomes granular and surgical: “putting more life into individual places.” That’s painter-speak for local intensity - the charged corner of a portrait, the pressure point of a landscape, the single passage where a painting either breathes or dies. His ambition is no longer to invent a language, but to animate it, to make every square inch carry a pulse.

Context matters: Kokoschka came up in the Expressionist turbulence of early 20th-century Vienna, where “mood” wasn’t atmosphere but worldview, and where psychological truth often mattered more than visual correctness. The subtext is self-authorization. He’s giving himself permission to stop wrestling the medium at the level of identity and start demanding that it deliver nuance. Underneath the confidence is a modern fear: that without an internal compass, art collapses into endless trial-and-error. He’s announcing he has the compass now, and the real work - making life stick to paint - can begin.