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.

The essence of art is to recapturel the fantasy and the imagination of a child again, but without the innocence of a child.

You put down one color and it calls for an answer. You have to look at it like a melody.

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.

The most difficult object in painting is yourself because you're always at issue

When I conjure these memories, they are of the present to me, because after all, the artist is a kind of enchanter in time.

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