Every Picture One Paints Involves Not Painting

If You Give A Child Something Very Complex To Paint, Such As A Bouquet Of Flowers Or A Natural Landscape, If He Is Very Good, Eventually He Will Get Back - Like Cezanne - To The Essential Forms Of What He Sees.

The 'pure' Red Of Which Certain Abstractionists Speak Does Not Exist. Any Red Is Rooted In Blood, Glass, Wine, Hunters' Caps And A Thousand Other Concrete Phenomena. Otherwise We Would Have No Feeling Toward Red And Its Relations.

Nothing As Drastic An Innovation As Abstract Art Could Have Come In To Existence, Save As The Consequence Of A Most Profound, Relentless, Unquenchable Need. The Need Is For Felt Experience - Intense, Immediate, Direct, Subtle, Unified, Warm, Vivid, Rhythmic.

I Have Been Continuously Aware That In Painting, I Am Always Dealing With... A Relational Structure. Which In Turn Makes Permission 'to Be Abstract' No Problem At All.

It Is The Medium, Or The Specific Configuration Of The Medium, That We Call A Work Of Art That Brings Feeling Into Being.