I hardly ever stretch the canvas before painting.

When I say artist I mean the man who is building things - creating molding the earth - whether it be the plains of the west - or the iron ore of Penn. It's all a big game of construction - some with a brush - some with a shovel - some choose a pen.

I don't work from drawings. I don't make sketches and drawings and color sketches into a final painting.

Every good painter paints what he is.

The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.

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.

When I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.

New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements... the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.

I hardly ever stretch the canvas before painting.

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 continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc.

On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.

Bums are the well-to-do of this day. They didn't have as far to fall.

Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

My painting does not come from the easel.

I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.

When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing.

The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.

It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

The modern artist... is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.

He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.

My paintings do not have a center, but depend on the same amount of interest throughout.

Today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source. They work from within.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Love is friendship set to music.

Art is coming face to face with yourself.

It abstract art should be enjoyed just as music is enjoyed after a while you may like it or you may not.

There is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end.

Bums are the well to do of this day. They didnt have as far to fall.

A canvas is an arena in which to act.

The craft of painting has virtually disappeared. There is hardly anyone left who really possesses it. For evidence one has only to look at the painters of this century.

I don't know if it was the whole audience getting stoned out of their minds getting ready for the Floyd thing or what it was, but it was like playing to a painting.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

I don't like painting flowers in my music. I like painting guts and pain.

Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.

If the weather is good I go into the nearby wood - there I am painting a small beech forest (in the sun) with a few conifers mixed in. This takes until 8 'o clock.

The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

The worlds I paint leave a lot to engage the imagination by hinting at what lies beyond the four edges of the painting. I think getting beyond the four edges of an opportunity or challenge is one of the basic skills you need in business.

When I was in art college, I would be painting, and I would create something on a canvas that was actually quite attractive. But if I got frightened and tried to protect that, that canvas would die.

My movement from painting to film was a very conscious one.

I believe that painting should come through the avenues of meditation rather than the canals of action.

For example, in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents - as an element - the greatest difficulty in manipulation.

Coming to understand a painting or a symphony in an unfamiliar style, to recognize the work of an artist or school, to see or hear in new ways, is as cognitive an achievement as learning to read or write or add.

I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.

Painting... in which the inner and the outer man are inseparable, transcends technique, transcends subject and moves into the realm of the inevitable.

When we don't have information, we go to the simplest outlook, to black and white. But then we have to lie to ourselves. Black is never as black as you're painting it and white is never as white.

I was not out to paint beautiful pictures; even painting good pictures was not important to me. I wanted only to help the truth burst forth.