Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.
Bums are the well-to-do of this day. They didn’t have as far to fall.
I’ve been thinking of death a lot, and I am amazed by its inevitability, frightened, as we all are, of the totally unknown, and yet feel a long sleep is somehow earned by those of us who live on the edge.
A real friend is someone you say a sentence to and they know ten thousand words behind that sentence.
I continue to get further away from the usual painter’s tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass or other foreign matter added.
My paintings do not have a center, but depend on the same amount of interest throughout.
Energy and motion made visible – memories arrested in space.
I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident.
I am doubtful of any talent, so whatever I choose to be, will be accomplished only by long study and work.
Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.
I’ve had a period of drawing on canvas in black – with some of my early images coming thru -, think the non-objectivists will find them disturbing – and the kids who think it simple to splash a ‘Pollock’ out.
I’m very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you’re painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.
I don’t work from drawings and colour sketches into a final painting. Painting, I think, today – the more immediate, the more direct – the greater the possibilities of making a direct – of making a statement.
Well, painting today certainly seems very vibrant, very alive, very exiting. Five or six of my contemporaries around New York are doing very vital work, and the direction that painting seems to be taken here – is – away from the easel – into some sort, some kind of wall, wall painting...
I hardly ever stretch the canvas before painting.
Technic is the result of a need new needs demand new technics total control denial of the accident States of order organic intensity energy and motion made visible memories arrested in space, human needs and motives acceptance.
My concern is with the rhythms of nature I work inside out, like nature.
He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.
A man’s life is his work; his work is his life.
As to what I would like to be, it is difficult to say. An artist of some kind. If nothing else I shall always study the Arts.
New needs need new techniques.