Grace Hartigan Quotations

Grace Hartigan was an Abstract Expressionist painter. She gained her reputation as part of the New York School of artists who emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s.

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I feel that we are living a very fragmented life; the whole world — you too. So I perceive the world in fragments. It is somewhat like being on a very fast train and getting glimpses of things in strange scales as you pass by. A person can be very, very tiny. And a billboard can make a person very large. You see the corner of a house or you see a bird fly by, and it's all fragmented. Somehow, in painting I try to make some logic out of the world that has been given to me in chaos. I have a very pretentious idea that I want to make life, I want to make sense out of it. The fact that I am doomed to failure that doesn't deter me in the least.
- Quoted in Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast, Contemporary Artists: A-K (St. James Press, 2002, ISBN 1558624880), p. 680

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I have found 'my subject', it concerns that which is vital and vulgar in American life and the possibility of its transcendence into the beautiful.