Faith & Spirit Quote by Hans Hofmann

Hans Hofmann links inner impulse to outer form, arguing that feeling becomes art only when it is fused with a medium that the artist controls. Emotion by itself is raw potential, an energy that can surge or dissipate; the medium is the channel that gives it shape, rhythm, and legibility. The phrase "interview of the soul" suggests any deep encounter with ones inner life. Each such encounter can become art, but only if it finds an adequate language. Mastery is the condition that turns expression from catharsis into communication.

For Hofmann, who trained generations of painters and articulated the push and pull of pictorial forces, mastery was not mere polish or slickness. It was fluency, the capacity to let color, line, texture, and composition carry thought and feeling without strain or distraction. In painting, this might mean knowing how a cool tone can make a warm plane advance, how a brushstroke can vibrate against a neighboring field, how negative space breathes. The same principle holds in poetry, music, or dance: technique does not smother emotion; it frees it to move, to be precise, to be shared.

Hofmann was speaking within a modernist context that prized authenticity yet knew that spontaneous gesture alone can collapse into incoherence. The discipline of a medium is not a cage but an instrument. It sets constraints that paradoxically widen expressive range, allowing a private intensity to become public meaning. When the medium is mastered, the work carries its own necessity; it feels inevitable, as if the emotion chose the exact form it required. When the medium is not mastered, feeling leaks away or congeals into mannerism.

The statement is an argument for craft as the ethics of artmaking. To honor the soul’s interviews, one must do the hard, patient work of learning the language that can bear them. Technique then becomes a conduit for truth.