To create one's own world in any of the arts takes courage.
Nobody sees a flower - really - it is so small it takes time - we haven't time - and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.
It's not enough to be nice in life. You've got to have nerve.
You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare.
I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.
When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.
I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree, past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.
Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue - that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man's destruction is finished.
I hate flowers - I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move.
I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality, I can see myself, and it has helped me to say what I want to say in paint.
I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at - not copy it.
Anyone who doesn't feel the crosses simply doesn't get that country.
I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.
It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it.
It was all so far away - there was quiet and an untouched feel to the country and I could work as I pleased.
One can't paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.
I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.
Marks on paper are free - free speech - press - pictures all go together I suppose.
