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

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.

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.

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

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

I want to see how life can triumph.