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

But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It's based on improvisation. The rhythms, ….

Art is the soul of a people..

The artist confronts chaos. The whole thing of art is, how do you organize chaos?.

Practically all great artists accept the influence of others. But... the artist with vision sees his material, chooses, changes, and by integrating w….

Black art has always existed. It just hasn't been looked for in the right places..

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

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..

I want to see how life can triumph..

The artist has to be something like a whale swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs..

Memory embellishes Life. Forgetfulness makes it possible..

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 ….

You don't paint what you see, you paint what you feel..

You should always respect what you are and your culture because if your art is going to mean anything, that is where it comes from..

Sometimes the mind relives things very clearly for us...There are roads out of secret places within us along which we all must move as we go to touch….

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..

My purpose is to paint the life of my people as I know it..

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 di….

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