“I believe in spirituality, yes, but I have to explain it in a very, very different way. First of all, what is spirituality? Geistigkeit—this a German Word; in English; spirituality. It is the result of a sixth sense, the sense of sensibility, the ability to see or look into things in depth, to discover the inner life. We see only the surface of things, but our sensibility explores the inner life of everything and has the capacity to feel every relationship within this inner life…

“If it is fear—whatever it might be—if it is something rough or smooth or beautiful—everything must in the end come to expression through spirituality. It is not merely the surface that counts. An artist never can be an imitator. He must be a creator, and as a creator he can be nothing else but a spiritual personality. Lacking this his art will be only academic and have no interest whatsoever.

“You have to reorder things—what you have experienced—into the sense of the material through which you express yourself.

“This material has inner laws, and that is my greatest discovery. On the basis of these inner laws, you create. You need not know these laws, but you must—every artist when he has temperament—he senses and feels these inner laws.

“It’s not really what you say, it’s always how you say what you have to say. If you write, if you just write poetry, if you dance, if you paint, it is all the same thing. It’s not merely what you show. It’s the process which is inherited in the created work that makes it a work of art. In other words, it reflects the artist in his full capacity of sensing, of feeling, in his capacity of thinking, of ordering, of feeling, and sensing things which only he senses.”

Hans Hofmann