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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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