It was all so far away – there was quiet and an untouched feel to the country and I could work as I pleased.
I decided to accept as true my own thinking.
I have a single track mind. I work on an idea for a long time. It’s like getting acquainted with a person, and I don’t get acquainted easily.
Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.
Imagination makes you see all sorts of things.
You write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower – and I don’t.
I get out my work and have a show for myself before I have it publicly. I make up my own mind about it-how good or bad or indifferent it is. After that, the critics can write what they please. I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.
I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy them then.
Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue – that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man’s destruction is finished.
When people read erotic symbols into my painting, they’re really thinking about their own affairs.
Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.
Whether the flower or the color is the focus I do not know. I do know the flower is painted large to convey my experience with the flower – and what is my experience if it is not the color?
Filling a space in a beautiful way – that is what art means to me.
The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint.
It’s not enough to be nice in life. You’ve got to have nerve.
Now and then when I get an idea for a picture, I think, how ordinary. Why paint that old rock? Why not go for a walk instead? But then I realise that to someone else it may not seem so ordinary.
I know I can not paint a flower, I can not paint the sun on the desert on a bright summer morning but maybe in terms of paint colour I can convey to you my experience of the flower or the experience that makes the flower of significance to me at that particular time.
Color is one of the great things in the world that makes life worth living to me and as I have come to think of painting it is my efforts to create an equivalent with paint color for the world, life as I see it.
When I think of death, I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore unless the Indians are right and my spirit will walk here after I’m gone.
All the earth colours of the painter’s palette are out there in the many miles of badlands...