“A work of art can never be the imitation of life but only, and on the contrary, the generation of life.

A dancer must not only master his body but he must be a generation of life in bringing the space to life wherein he dances, and this as the answer to his entire personality.

A painter who attempts to imitate physical life (a naturalist) can never be a creator of pictorial life, because only the inherent qualities of the means can create physical life. That makes the esthetic difference between creation and imitation.

Creation asks for the capacity of empathy.

I do not study nature but I’m completely taken in by its secrets and mysteries, and this includes the secrets and mysteries of the creative means through which I attempt to realize one through the other.

Picasso makes this quite clear when he says: ‘First I eat the fish, then I paint him.’ This is the transformation from culinary empathy to pictorial empathy.”

(Hans Hofmann to Dore Ashton, quoted in Ashton’s The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning, pp. 83–84.)