My characters have undergone the same process of simplification as the colors. Now that they have been simplified, they appear more human and alive than if they had been represented in all their details.

To gain freedom is to gain simplicity.

Painting or poetry is made as one makes love - a total embrace, prudence thrown to the winds, nothing held back.

Throughout the time in which I am working on a canvas I can feel how I am beginning to love it, with that love which is born of slow comprehension.

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life.

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.

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.