I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing, and stretching one's arms again transcendental experiences became possible.

If you are moved only by the color relationships, then you miss the point.

I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.

It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them.

A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer

The people that weep before my paintings are having the same religious experience that I had when I painted it.

It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism.