Painting is the act of discovery and you're constantly enlarging your horizon or finding yourself every time you paint.

Practically all great artists accept the influence of others. But... the artist with vision sees his material, chooses, changes, and by integrating what he has learned with his own experiences, finally molds something distinctly personnel.

If you're any kind of artist, you make a miraculous journey, and you come back and make some statements in shapes and colors of where you were.

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.

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

It was not my aim to paint about the Negro in America in terms of propaganda. It is to depict the life of my people as I know it, passionately and dispassionately as Brueghel.

Black art has always existed. It just hasn't been looked for in the right places.