It is really so nice here-country-busy-busy with so many different kinds of things-... I must say I feel far away in another world here-... always we go to a new place...the people have a kind of gentleness that isn't usual on the mainland.

I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down.

I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.

The clean clear colours were in my head. But one day as I looked at the brown burned wood of the Shanty, I thought 'I can paint one of those dismal-coloured paintings like the men. I think just for fun I will try - all low-toned and dreary with the tree besides the door.' In my next show, 'The Shanty' went up. The men seemed to approve of it. They seemed to think that maybe I was beginning to paint. That was my only low-toned dismal-coloured painting.

The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint.

I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life - and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.

I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.