A newspaper that you’re not reading can be used for anything; and the same people didn’t think it was immoral to wrap their garbage in newspaper.
I got so I was really just sick of sculpture.
I had been working purely abstractly for so long, it was important for me to see whether I was working abstractly because I couldn’t work any other way, or whether I was doing it out of choice.
I think a painting is more like the real world if it’s made out the real world.
You have to have the time to feel sorry for yourself in order to be a good abstract expressionist.
The only thing that I could get with chance, and I never was able to use it, was that I would end up with something quite geometric or the spirit that I was interested in, indulging in, was gone.
Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made – I try to act in the gap.
A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpentine, oil and fabric.
If you don’t have trouble paying the rent, you have trouble doing something else; one needs just a certain amount of trouble.
I think that in the last twenty years or so, there’s been a new kind of honesty in painting where painters have been very proud of paint and have let it behave openly.
It’s when you’ve found out how to do certain things, that it’s time to stop doing them, because what’s missing is that you’re not including the risk.
A canvas is never empty.
Having to be different is the same trap as having to be the same.
I’m not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings.
And I think that even today, New York still has more of this unexpected quality around every corner than any place else. It’s something quite extraordinary.
This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.
I don’t think any one person, whether artist or not, has been given permission by anyone to put the responsibility of the way things are on anyone else.
I am sick of talking about What and Why I am doing. I have always believed that the WORK is the word. Action is seen less clearly through reason. There are no shortcuts to directness.
But I was in awe of the painters; I mean I was new in New York, and I thought the painting that was going on here was just unbelievable.
Very quickly a painting is turned into a facsimile of itself when one becomes so familiar with with it that one recognizes it without looking at it.