A flower is relatively small... Still in a way-nobody sees a flower-so I said to myself-I'll paint it big.

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense.

If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for a moment.

Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.

God told me if I painted that mountain enough, I could have it.

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

I took back a barrel of bones to New York. They were my symbols of the desert, but nothing more. I haven't seen enough to think of any other symbolism. The skulls were there and I could say something with them.