“I was taken away from my little village when I was five years old yet all my vital memories are of these first years, These were the days when I smelled the bread, I saw my first red poppy, the moon, the innocent seeing.”— Arshile Gorky, artsy.net
“The issue for me, and I think it existed for all the fellows [ New York School ]. What are we going to paint?”— Barnett Newman, amazon.com
“I don't think painters have particularly bright ideas. [What do they have?] I guess their talent of painting things.”— Willem de Kooning, amazon.com
“Everything that passes me I can see only a little of, but I am always looking. And I see an awful lot sometimes.”— Willem de Kooning, dekooning.org
“Most of the paint I use is a liquid, flowing kind of paint. The brushes I use are used more as sticks rather than brushes the brush doesn’t touch the surface of the canvas, it’s just above.”— Jackson Pollock, homepages.neiu.edu
“I paint on the floor and this isn’t unusual, the Orientals did that.”— Jackson Pollock, homepages.neiu.edu
“I noticed when I had something photographic, like a mouth it gave me a point of reference. It was something to hold onto.”— Willem de Kooning, amazon.com
“Everyone who creates anything knows, there is a moment. When a third hand is doing it.”— Philip Guston, vimeo.com
“There is something that is deathlike about making a unity which is quickly grasped.”— Philip Guston, vimeo.com
“I've always thought that a painter or artists first duty is to be free, to have freedom.”— Philip Guston, vimeo.com
“The paintings that didn't make it if you move a form over 6 inches it wouldn't matter. However in these paintings if you move something a half an inch it would matter. There is a sense of inevitability in the image.”— Philip Guston, vimeo.com
“It's a kind of obsessive image in which there are no corrections. But that's not the usual. Usually it's an approximate subject a free floating subject. In which I apply my means of painting unto”— Philip Guston, vimeo.com
“It's almost as if I instinctively, or compulsively ( perhaps that's better ) started to get involved in something that I was involved in much earlier in my career ( 30s/40s )”— Philip Guston, vimeo.com