Sometimes I start in a very realistic fashion, and as I go on from one painting to another of the same kind, it becomes simplified until it can be nothing but abstraction.
When you get so that you can’t see, you come to it gradually. And if you didn’t come by it gradually, I guess you’d just kill yourself when you couldn’t see.
I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.
To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.
Slits in nothingness are not very easy to paint.
I don’t very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.
I’m glad I want everything in the world – good and bad – bitter and sweet – I want it all.
One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.
I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at – not copy it.
I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.
The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that make one’s life.
Did you ever have something to say and feel as if the whole side of the wall wouldn’t be big enough to say it on, and then sit down on the floor and try to get it onto a sheet of charcoal paper?
I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me – shapes and ideas so near to me – so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.
Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint.
I look at my work and make up my mind about it. After that, neither flattery nor criticism matters to me.
I’ve been afraid every single day of my life, but I’ve gone ahead and done it anyway.
The unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big fat beyond my understanding – to understand maybe by trying to put it into form. To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill.
So I said to myself-I’ll paint what I see-what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking the time to look at it-I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.
I do not like the idea of happiness – it is too momentary – I would say that I was always busy and interested in something – interest has more meaning to me than the idea of happiness.
A flower touches everyone’s heart.