For me an object is something living. This cigarette or this box of matches contains a secret life much more intense than that of certain human beings.

The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.

Never, never do I set to work on a canvas in the state it comes in from the shop. I provoke accidents - a form, a splotch of color. Any accident is good enough. I let the matiere decide. Then I prepare a ground by, for example, wiping my brushes on the canvas. Letting fall some drops of turpentine on it would do just as well. If I want to make a drawing I crumple the sheet of paper or I wet it; the flowing water traces a line and this line may suggest what is to come next.

I begin painting and as I paint the picture begins to assert itself, or suggest itself, under my brush. The form becomes a sign for a woman or a bird as I work... The first stage is free, unconscious... the second stage is carefully calculated.

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.

More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed.

What I will no longer accept is the mediocre life of a modest little gentleman.