"As
soon as I started using the figure my whole idea of
my painting changed. Maybe not in the most obvious
structural sense, but these figures distorted my sense
of interior or environment, or the painting itself--in
a way that I welcomed. Because you don't have this
in abstract painting....In abstract painting one can't
deal with...an object or person, a concentration of
psychology which a person is as opposed to where the
figure isn't in the painting...And that's the one
thing that's always missing for me in abstract painting,
that I don't have this kind of dialogue between elements
that can be...wildly different and can be at war,
or in extreme conflict."
"Abstract literally means to draw from or separate.
In this sense every artist is abstract... a realistic
or non-objective approach makes no difference. The
result is what counts."
"I can never accomplish what I want – only
what I would have wanted had I thought of it beforehand."
"All paintings start out of a mood, out of a
relationship with things or people, out of a complete
visual impression."
"I don't go into the studio with the idea of
"saying" something. What I do is face the
blank canvas and put a few arbitrary marks on it that
start me on some sort of dialogue."
"I
have found in my still-life work that I seem to be
able to tell what objects are important to me by what
tends to stay in the painting as it develops."
"My freedom consists in my moving about within
the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each
one of my undertakings."
"If you get an image try to destroy it."
"It is not a matter of painting life. It's a
matter of giving life to a painting."
"My freedom will be so much the greater and more
meaningful, the more narrowly I limit my field of
action and the more I surround myself with obstacles."
"I
keep plastering it until it comes around to what I
want, in terms of all I know and think about painting
now, as well as in terms of the initial observation."
"In a successful painting everything is integral
– all the parts belong to the whole. If you
remove an aspect or element you are removing its wholeness."
"... putting down what I felt in terms of some
overall image at the moment today, and perhaps being
terribly disappointed with it tomorrow... trying to
make it better and then despairing and destroying
partially or wholly... getting back into it and just
kind of frantically trying to pull something into
this rectangle that made sense to me... "
"As a work progresses, its power to elicit and
dictate response mounts. There seems to be an optimum
moment when this power is at its greatest which just
precedes the point where 'elicit' is no longer apt
usage. 'Dictates' is the word for this condition and
tyranny is the adversary."
"Reality has to be digested, it has to be transmuted
by paint. It has to be given a twist of some kind."
"If it doesn't sit right I'm not really saying
it. Getting it to sit right is another thing –
complicated, time-consuming, wasteful. It comes around
to what is contained in 'sitting right.' This is what
the picture is about."
"I would like the colors, their shapes and positions
to be arrived at in response to and dictated by the
condition of the total space at the time they are
considered."
"I came to mistrust my desire to explode the
picture and supercharge it in some way... what is
more important is a feeling of strength in reserve
– tension beneath calm."
"When I am halfway there with a painting, it
can occasionally be thrilling... But it happens very
rarely; usually it's agony... I go to great pains
to mask the agony. But the struggle is there. It's
the invisible enemy."
"Maybe the given person, cup, or landscape is
lost before one gets to painting. A figure exerts
a continuing and unspecified influence on a painting
as the canvas develops. The represented forms are
loaded with psychological feeling. It can't ever just
be painting."
"I trust the symbol that is arrived at in the
making of the painting. Meaningful symbols aren't
invented as such, they are made or discovered as symbol
later."
"If what a person makes is completely and profoundly
right according to his lights then this work contains
the whole man. A work which falls short of this content,
is only of passing value and lends itself to arbitrariness
and fragmentation."
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