Bement was a very good teacher but he was a very poor painter. I guess he wasn’t a painter at all. He had no courage and I believe that to create one’s own world in any of the arts takes courage.
I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.
I know I am unreasonable about people but there are so many wonderful people whom I can’t take the time to know.
We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see.
When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.
One works because I suppose it is the most interesting thing one knows to do. The days one works are the best days. On the other days one is hurrying through the other things one imagines one has to do to keep one’s life going...
A week ago it was the mountains I thought the most wonderful, and today it’s the plains. I guess it’s the feeling of bigness in both that carries me away.
In the evening I go up in the desert and spend hours watching the sun go down, just enjoying it, and every day I go out and watch it again. I draw some and there is a little painting and so the days go by.
I long ago came to the conclusion that even if I could put down accurately the thing I saw and enjoyed, it would not give the observer the kind of feeling it gave me. I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at-not copy it.
I find that I have painted my life – things happening in my life – without knowing.
I don’t really know where I got my artists idea. The scraps of what I remember do not explain to me where it came from. I only know that by this time it was definitely settled in my mind.
The meaning of a word – to me – is not as exact as the meaning of a color. Colors and shapes make a more definite statement than words.
I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions – no one seeing what they are.
I see no reason for painting anything that can be put into any other form as well.
I don’t know what Art is but I know some things it isn’t when I see them.
Art is a wicked thing. It is what we are.
The days you work are the best days.
God told me if I painted that mountain enough, I could have it.
I believe an artist is the last person in the world who can afford to be affected.
I realized that were I to paint flowers small, no one would look at them because I was unknown. So I thought I’ll make them big, like the huge buildings going up. People will be startled; they’ll have to look at them – and they did.
One can not be an American by going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, like America, love America and then work.