When I eat a tomato I look at it the way anyone else would. But when I paint a tomato, then I see it differently.
The main function of color should be to serve expression.
Seek for the boldest color possible, content is irrelevant.
Time extracts various values from a painter’s work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is.
I have been no more than a medium, as it were.
Instinct must be thwarted just as one prunes the branches of a tree so that it will grow better.
To arrive is to be in prison.
There are wonderful things in Jazz, the improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.
An artist is an explorer. He has to begin by self-discovery and by observation of his own procedure. After that he must not feel under any constraint.
An artist must not feel under any constraint.
There’s nothing clinically wrong with me, only an emotional imbalance – I pass too quickly from the wildest enthusiasm to the blackest despair.
Drawing is of the spirit; color is of the senses.
A rapid rendering of a landscape represents only one moment of its existence. I prefer, by insisting upon its essential character, to risk losing charm in order to gain greater stability.
A new painting is a unique event, a birth, which enriches the universe as it is grasped by the human mind, by bringing a new form into it.
For my part I have never avoided the influence of others. I would have considered it cowardice and a lack of sincerity toward myself.
I do not repudiate any of my paintings but there isn’t one of them that I would not redo differently, if I had it to redo. My destination is always the same but I work out a different route to get there.
An artist who wants to transpose a composition onto a larger canvas must conceive it over again in order to preserve its expression; he must alter its character and not just fill in the squares into which he has divided his canvas.
If my story were ever to be written truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone.
The Barnes Foundation is the only sane place to see art in America.
I am curious about color as one would be visiting a new country, because I have never concentrated so closely on color expression. Up to now I have waited at the gates of the temple.