I moved around a lot when I was a child; two of the houses I grew up in have totally disappeared. One was burnt in a riot, and the other was pulled down.
Being a black artist, the first thing people want to talk about is your blackness, the importance of your blackness, and your black presence.
Painters were also attorneys, happy storytellers of anecdote, psychologists, botanists, zoologists, archaeologists, engineers, but there were no creative painters.
When my mother died, I fell apart. My father wanted to control me. As a consequence, I ran away to America.
We went down into the silent garden. Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.
Since the model he so faithfully copies is not going to be hung up next to the picture... it is of no interest whether it is an accurate copy of the model.
The painter must give a completely free rein to any feeling or sensations he may have and reject nothing to which he is naturally drawn.
You ask why I'm fascinated by the human figure? As a human animal, I am interested in some of my fellow animals: in their minds and bodies.
I always stayed in tune with my own ambitions and attitudes and I'm still my intractable old self, for better or worse.
I never learned to ride a bicycle, and it is too late now. I never learned to drive. I never learned to swim.
I've got two girls, and they both make beautiful drawings. One of them really has a gift for the way that she colors around certain lines.
I'm not a dogmatic, purist psychopath. There's an unfair image of me - mean, crazy, hostile. I'm really a very gentle person.
What he imagines evokes nothing imaginary, it evokes the reality of the world that experience and reason treat in a confused manner.
If you don't have trouble paying the rent, you have trouble doing something else; one needs just a certain amount of trouble.
But I was in awe of the painters; I mean I was new in New York, and I thought the painting that was going on here was just unbelievable.
There are countless artists whose shoes I am not worthy to polish - whose prints would not pay the printer. The question of judgment is a puzzling one.
It is generally admitted that the most beautiful qualities of a color are in its transparent state, applied over a white ground with the light shining through the color.
This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative; and have been painted in a scale of normal living rather than an institutional scale.
I also hang the pictures low rather than high, and particularly in the case of the largest ones, often as close to the floor as is feasible, for that is the way they are painted.
A lot of people use a smiley face when they write letters. But it's this huge insane compulsion, like 'I'm happy! I swear!' I'm not buying it.
I feel like there's too many paintings left unpainted that I just don't want to take the time away.
