In the final analysis, a drawing simply is no longer a drawing, no matter how self-sufficient its execution may be. It is a symbol, and the more profoundly the imaginary lines of projection meet higher dimensions, the better.
Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.
When I was a child my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll be the pope.' Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.
I don't follow any system. All the laws you can lay down are only so many props to be cast aside when the hour of creation arrives.
First of all, I always see the sun! The way I want to identify myself and others is with halos here and there halos, movements of color. And that, I believe, is rhythm.
I had always done these 3D things that you could walk through. They were always done off the seat of my pants without blueprints or course.
Art is the giving by each man of his evidence to the world. Those who wish to give, love to give, discover the pleasure of giving. Those who give are tremendously strong.
Because we are saturated with life, because we are human, our strongest motive is life, humanity; and the stronger the motive back of the line the stronger, and therefore more beautiful, the line will be.
The sketch hunter moves through life as he finds it, not passing negligently the things he loves, but stopping to know them, and to note them down in the shorthand of his sketchbook.
The undercurrent and motive of all art is an individual man's idea. From each we expect what he has to give. We desire it. It is absolutely necessary for him to give it out.
Sometimes we do grip the concert in a human head, and so hold it that in a way we get a record of it into paint, but the vision and expressing of one day will not do for the next.
Don't worry about your originality. You couldn't get rid of it even if you wanted to. It will stick with you and show up for better or worse in spite of all you or anyone else can do.
I've always been fascinated by numbers. Before I was seventeen years old, I had lived in twenty-one different houses. In my mind, each of those houses had a number.
I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it's very hard to guess at a size or a color and all the colors around it and what it will really look like.
Yeah, you know, you like it to come on like gangbusters, but you get into passages that are very interesting and subtle, and sometimes your original intent changes quite a bit.
To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.
Unless you're involved with thinking about what you're doing, you end up doing the same thing over and over, and that becomes tedious and, in the end, defeating.
Mostly, drawings are things I make for myself - I do them in sketchbooks. They are mental experiments - private inner thoughts when I'm not sure what will come out.
I actually feel like the phrase 'big in Japan' is not appropriate for me. The reason is that there are more people who sympathize with my practice in America than there are domestically in Japan.
My identity is not based on performance; it's based on something that's pre-determined by someone else, and I don't even understand what that is because I'm an African who came to America.
I don't think about race before I start drawing. I think about how to make that mark to fit whatever purpose I need it to fulfill.
