What you have to do is disavow yourself from any sense other than ascendancy. That's the only direction you could possibly have towards painting. There's no other direction at all. There's no other space in art. There's no other way in which you can find yourself except in somehow feeling it. And by holding to this feeling you can once again reach out and guess and miss - and sometimes hit.

I'd fallen asleep thinking I was much too tired to go on working and if I went on working, I'd lose it. I'd get a better hold of it in the morning; feel stronger. But I looked and looked at it and it seemed to me there was nothing to do.

The act, the doing, the taking up of paint and putting it down - the immediate impact upon your psyche or soul that occurs when you do that - has so much danger in it.

As soon as you see what you're looking at you have a name for it. You don't see it. The whole process of your thinking is not to see. You overcome sight by thinking.

What you have to do is disavow yourself from any sense other than ascendancy. That's the only direction you could possibly have towards painting. There's no other direction at all. There's no other space in art. There's no other way in which you can find yourself except in somehow feeling it. And by holding to this feeling you can once again reach out and guess and miss - and sometimes hit.

As soon as you set yourself up in the position of transferring paint from one place to another, your whole culture invades you. It tells you all about the history of art.

If there's no unity in your work, then you've deliberately made yourself into that kind of person. You don't want that unity in your work. You've made some kind of satisfactory arrangement with your culture.