You are one of my nicest thoughts.
The morning is the best time, there are no people around. My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it.
I hate flowers - I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move.
A flower is relatively small... Still in a way-nobody sees a flower-so I said to myself-I'll paint it big.
My first memory is of the brightness of light — light all around.
Art is a wicked thing. It is what we are.
I do not like the idea of happiness - it is too momentary - I would say that I was always busy and interested in something - interest has more meaning to me than the idea of happiness.
When I think of death, I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore unless the Indians are right and my spirit will walk here after I'm gone.
I get out my work and have a show for myself before I have it publicly. I make up my own mind about it-how good or bad or indifferent it is. After that, the critics can write what they please. I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.
I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.
I'm frightened all the time. But I never let it stop me. Never!
I can't live where I want to, I can't go where I want to go, I can't do what I want to, I can't even say what I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.
One day a hummingbird flew in-- It fluttered against the window til I got it down where I could reach it with an open umbrella-- --When I had it in my hand it was so small I couldn't believe I had it--but I could feel the intense life--so intense and so tiny-- ...You were like the humming bird to me... And I am rather inclined to feel that you and I know the best part of one another without spending much time together-- --It is not that I fear the knowing-- It is that I am at this moment willing to let you be what you are to me--it is beautiful and pure and very intensely alive.
One works because I suppose it is the most interesting thing one knows to do. The days one works are the best days. On the other days one is hurrying through the other things one imagines one has to do to keep one's life going.
I look at my work and make up my mind about it. After that, neither flattery nor criticism matters to me.
That nervous energy that makes people like you and I want and go after everything in the world - bump our heads on all the hard walls and scratch our hands on all the briars - but it makes living great - doesn't it - I'm glad I want everything in the world - good and bad - bitter and sweet - I want it all and a lot of it too
It seems to me very important to the idea of democracy to the country and to the world eventually that all men and women stand equal under the sky.
I realized that I had things in my head not like what I had been taught - not like what I had seen - shapes and ideas so familiar to me that it hadn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to stop painting, to put away everything I had done, and to start to say the things that were my own.
The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even tho' it is vast and empty and untouchable... and knows no kindness with all its beauty.
In the evening I go up in the desert and spend hours watching the sun go down, just enjoying it, and every day I go out and watch it again. I draw some and there is a little painting and so the days go by.
I have lived on a razors edge. So what if you fall off. I'd rather be doing something I wanted to do. I'd walk it again.
One can't paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.
I know I can not paint a flower, I can not paint the sun on the desert on a bright summer morning but maybe in terms of paint colour I can convey to you my experience of the flower or the experience that makes the flower of significance to me at that particular time.
Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.
I'd been taught to paint like other people, and I thought, what's the use? I couldn't do any better than they, or even as well. I was just adding to the brushpile. So I quit.
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