Sometimes I wonder, laying in a great black stripe on a canvas, what animal bones (or horns) are making the furrows of my picture.. ..black grows deeper and deeper, darker and darker before me. It menaces me like a black gullet. I can bear it no longer. It is monstrous. It is unfathomable. 'As the thought comes to me to exorcise and transform this black with a white drawing, it has already become a surface.. .Now I have lost all fear, and begin to draw on the black surface' [Hofmann is referring here to a quote of Jean Arp ]. Only love – for painting, in this instance – is able to cover the fearful void.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Sometimes I wonder, laying in a great black stripe on a canvas, what animal bones (or horns) are making the furrows of my picture.. ..black grows deeper and deeper, darker and darker before me. It menaces me like a black gullet. I can bear it no longer. It is monstrous. It is unfathomable. 'As the thought comes to me to exorcise and transform this black with a white drawing, it has already become a surface.. .Now I have lost all fear, and begin to draw on the black surface' [Hofmann is referring here to a quote of Jean Arp ]. Only love – for painting, in this instance – is able to cover the fearful void." in the context of "Hans Hofmann, in: 'Search for the Real', Hans Hofmann, Addison Gallery of modern Art, 1948" to mean that wisdom is timeless.