You don't paint what you see, you paint what you feel.

Sometimes the mind relives things very clearly for us...There are roads out of secret places within us along which we all must move as we go to touch others.

Art is the soul of a people.

I want to see how life can triumph.

Painting and art cannot be taught. You can save time if someone tells you to put blue and yellow together to make green, but the essence of painting is a self-disciplined activity that you have to learn by yourself.

The artist has to be something like a whale swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs.

What I've attempted to do is establish a world through art in which the validity of my Negro experience could live and make its own logic.