Hans Hofmann on the Inner Life
The sixth sense, the sense of sensibility
I found this musing on spirituality in art by Hofmann very interesting. He mentions a sixth sense which is what I refer to in my writings as intuitive knowingness and he mentions the idea of sensibility; the ability to appreciate and respond to complex emotional or aesthetic influences with a refined sensitivity which I would say is well developed intuition. Hofmann calls it ‘an extremely complicated process’. This process I have talked about in several articles here that have to do with well disciplined inner quietude and emotional clarity.
(I did a couple of little edits for clarity)
Hans Hofmann on the Inner Life
“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. This is naturally an extremely complicated process. And that is the reason that it is extremely difficult to explain and bring out. You have to have certain experiences before you can understand what I speak about here.
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
From A CONVERSATION WITH HANS HOFMANN
By Irma B. Jaffe printed in ARTFORUM January 1971
The last paragraph of Hofmann’s quote is something I think about quite often. It is the main subject of the article Cultivating Inspiration which is the idea of the mind as a garden that is growing things and is the context in which creativity and inspiration can happen. To write about this subject in a useful way is difficult because you have to look at and articulate the subject from a variety of angles and connect the different angles together into a single overarching whole. Like Hofmann says: ‘This is naturally an extremely complicated process. And that is the reason that it is extremely difficult to explain and bring out.’ and it is experiential. It is only through practice and direct experience that this can be discovered, developed and deployed. Still, it is always a mystery in many ways and it is at the root of all mysticism all over the world. It is the esoteric - the hidden - element in the arts. Here is an interesting essay on the subject.
More on this subject here:
