To make your unknown known – that’s the important thing.
I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree, past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.
I have lived on a razors edge. So what if you fall off. I’d rather be doing something I wanted to do. I’d walk it again.
I am trying with all my skill to do a painting that is all woman, as well as all of me.
My painting is what I have to give back to the world for what the world gives to me.
I realized that I had things in my head not like what I had been taught – not like what I had seen – shapes and ideas so familiar to me that it hadn’t occurred to me to put them down. I decided to stop painting, to put away everything I had done, and to start to say the things that were my own.
Since I cannot sing, I paint.
Someone else’s vision will never be as good as your own vision of your self. Live and die with it ’cause in the end it’s all you have. Lose it and you lose yourself and everything else. I should have listened to myself.
War is killing the individual in it unless he has learned livingness – if he had it he wouldn’t be a good soldier.
The morning is the best time, there are no people around. My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it.
It always seems to me that so few people live – they just seem to exist and I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t live always – til we die physically...
It seems to me very important to the idea of democracy to the country and to the world eventually that all men and women stand equal under the sky.
I’d been taught to paint like other people, and I thought, what’s the use? I couldn’t do any better than they, or even as well. I was just adding to the brushpile. So I quit.
I took back a barrel of bones to New York. They were my symbols of the desert, but nothing more. I haven’t seen enough to think of any other symbolism. The skulls were there and I could say something with them.
If one could only reproduce nature, and always with less beauty than the original, why paint at all?
Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense.
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.
I like to convey the idea that art is important in everyday life.
Bement was a very good teacher but he was a very poor painter. I guess he wasn’t a painter at all. He had no courage and I believe that to create one’s own world in any of the arts takes courage.
Happiness goes like the wind, but what is interesting stays.