I have been no more than a medium, as it were.

My pictures are made up of four or five colors that collide with one another.

I am unable to make any distinction between the feeling I get from life and the way I translate that feeling into painting.

Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say.

Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium.

The portrait is one of the most curious art forms. It demands special qualities in the artist, and an almost total kinship with the model.

What I am after, above all, is expression.