Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.
I like an empty wall because I can imagine what I like on it.
I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.
Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.
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.