Painters From The United States

"Man is the only animal that knows he's going to die, so we invent a heaven to keep from going crazy. Most people are hypnotized by organized religion from childhood."

"The wiser you get on the inside, the uglier you get on the outside. The world's great gurus have beautiful things to say but they generally look like shit."

"The first words I ever heard the alcohol rehab counselor say were 'Good morning, assholes!' With that, I liked him right away."

"Jim Morrison was a well-built boy, larger than average, and young enough to maintain the engorged silent connection right through the residue of chemicals."

"I've enjoyed the accommodations offered by police departments from Florida to Hawaii. Any time I saw a badge, something in me would snap."

"In Germany I ingested the entire contents of the hotel mini-bar before a show and stuck my fingers in this guy's nostrils because I thought they would fit."

"When logic and proportion Have fallen softly dead And the White Knight is talking backwards And the Red Queen's "off with her head!" Remember what the dormouse said: "Feed your head! Feed your head!""

"When the men on the chessboard Get up and tell you where to go And you've just had some kind of mushroom And your mind is moving low. Go ask Alice I think she'll know."

"And if you go chasing rabbits And you know you're going to fall, Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar Has given you the call. Call Alice When she was just small"

"One pill makes you larger And one pill makes you small, And the ones that mother gives you Don't do anything at all. Go ask Alice When she's ten feet tall."

"But we all do sort of the same thing and that is rearrange what you thought was real, and, uh, they remind you of the beauty of very simple things. You forget, because you're so busy going from A to Z, that there's, uh, 24 letters in between."

"She's more even -[daughter China] - I think it jumps generations. You get a screwball in one, and then the next one is straight, then you get a screwball. My grandmother was goofy, my mother was straight."

"It was the first time many of the bands had met and saw each other perform, so we were all really marveling at each other. It was just one good group of people after another. And different kinds of music — from Jimi Hendrix to Ravi Shankar, The Mamas and the Papas to The Who. They had a backstage area where there was food being served 24 hours a day, so everybody was wandering around meeting each other. It was just amazing."

"Pena Her little head clinking Like a barrel of red velvet balls Full past noise Treats filled her eyes Turning them yellow like enamel coated tacks Soft like butter hard not to pour"

"That's right, The Mascara Snake. Fast and bulbous! Also, a tin teardrop!"

"A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous. Got me?"

"You look dandy in the sky but you don’t scare me Cause I got you here in my eye In this lifetime you got my human gets me blues"

"I've written every drum bit I ever done, every note. I played the drums. I played the guitar. I played the piano. I wanted it exactly the way I wanted. Exactly. Any composer I would think would want it that way, and I don't deviate at all. Don't you think that somebody like Stravinsky, for instance, don't you think that it would have annoyed him if someone bent a note the wrong way?"

"[Beefheart] used to say, "You think you got a hard job, man? I gotta sing to that shit!""

"In the most positive sense [the impact of Jackson Pollock on Helen] I think it was a sense of being as open and free and surprised as possible, with a magic sense of -.. ..being able to know when to stop, when to labor, when to be puzzled, when to be satisfied, when to recognize beautiful or strange or ugly or clumsy, and to be free with what you are making that comes out of you.. ..I didn't paint new long canvases until I had seen his [Pollock] and I'm sure that Pollock's ambiance affected me tremendously. I was much more drawn to Pollock's painting on the raw canvas than I was to de Kooning's easel cuisine and there it's a matter of sensibility. Aesthetically, socially, in every way the de Kooning thing seemed to be much more productive, planned, admirable at the time [early 1950's]. But I didn't think so. I thought that Pollock was really the one living in nature much more than Bill [de Kooning]."

"I've always thought that with de Kooning you could assimilate and copy. And that Pollock instead opened up what one's own inventiveness could take off from. In other words, given one's own talent for curiosity that you could explore, originate, discover from Pollock as one might, say, Picasso, or [Arshile] Gorky or [Wassily] Kandinsky in a way that de Kooning was a closed oeuvre."

"in East Hampton where Pollock lived .. ..if we [the couple then Helen Frankenthaler and Clement Greenberg arrived in mid-afternoon [for a weekend-stay with the Pollock's] the activity would be going out soberly, everyone, to look at Jackson's new pictures. He always had a very immaculate studio in that barn and would unroll one after another of what he'd been working on and each would walk around it on the floor and occasionally hold a picture up and talk about it. And then, say, if it was a Friday, we'd do the same thing with the same pictures Saturday. And then look again Sunday. And maybe something that didn't look good Friday afternoon had a double take on Sunday."

"I think he [Pollock] could not relate to people. And was very depressed. And Lee [Krasner, Pollock's wife] really functioned beautifully as the mother who held him together, that he could be angry at, that he needed, that he could reject, who kept his particular sick syndrome going."

"I went out to Springs and saw Pollock and his work, not only the shows [Frankenthaler frequently visited Pollock, and his wife Lee Krasner ]. In 1951 I looked at de Kooning as much as at Pollock.. ..but these came after all the [her] Cubist training and exercise. It all combined to push me on. Like Cubism.. ..I felt many more possibilities in Pollock's work. That is, I looked.. ..and was influenced by both Pollock and De Kooning and eventually felt that there were many more possibilities for me out of the Pollock vocabulary.. .de Kooning made enclosed linear shapes and 'applied' the brush. Pollock used shoulder and ropes and ignored the edges and the corner. I felt I could stretch more in the Pollock framework. I found that in Pollock I also responded to a certain Surreal element – the understated image that was really present: animals, thoughts, jungles, expressions. You could become a de Kooning disciple or satellite or mirror, but you could depart from Pollock."

"The first Pollock show I saw was in 1951 at Betty Parson's gallery, early in the fall, probably September or October. It was staggering. I really felt surrounded. I went with Clement Greenberg [famous art-critic of American Abstract Expressionism / New York School] who threw me into the room and seemed to say 'swim'. By then I had been exposed to enough of it so it hit me and had magic but didn't puzzle me to the point of stopping my feelings."

"There is a painting called 'Prophecy' which I did just before I left for Europe. Every time the work broke, it sent me into a tailspin because I couldn’t tell what was happening. I asked Jackson to come and look at this painting and he did and said I needn't be nervous about it. He thought it was a good painting and the only thing that he objected to was this image in the upper right hand which I had scratched in with the back of a brush. It made a kind of an eye form. He advised me to take it out. I said that I didn't agree with him and left it in.. ..it is the change that I had to get used to and accept. It frightened me.. ..it frightened me, particularly because it happened just before I left for Europe. Jackson looked at it, said what he said, and I went off to Europe. Jackson was killed in the automobile accident [Aug. 1956] while I was there and when I came back I had to confront myself with this painting before I was able to start again.."

"When Jackson talked about painting he didn't usurp anything that wasn't himself. He didn't want to change anything, he wasn't using any outworn attitude about it, he was always himself. He just wanted to be in it because he loved it. The response in the person's mind to that mysterious thing that has happened before has nothing to do with 'who did it first'."

"Pollock ... left us [c. 1958] at the point where we must be preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-Second Street [New York] ... Objects of every sorts are materials for the new art, paints, chairs, food, electric and neon-lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things which will be discovered by the present generation of artists ... All will become materials for this new concrete art."

"If you're a painter, you are not alone. There's no way to be alone. You think and you care and you're with all the people who care. You think you care and you're with all the people who care, including the young people who don't know they do yet. Tomlin in his late paintings knew this. Jackson always knew it: that if you meant it enough..."

"Jackson Pollock's Scent is a heady specimen of what one worshiper calls his "personalized skywriting." More the product of brushwork than of Pollock's famed drip technique, it nevertheless aims to remind the observer of nothing except previous Pollocks, and quite succeeds in that modest design. All it says, in effect, is that Jack the Dripper, 44, still stands on his work."

"He [Pollock] just jumps in before he knows how to swim. [his reaction, when Morandi sees paintings of Pollock for the first time in his life, c. 1950]"

"He [Pollock] has broken the ice."

"[visiting Pollock's studio]: You do not work from nature. This is no good, you will repeat yourself. You work by heart, not from nature. [Pollock answered: 'I am nature']"

"My concern is with the rhythms of nature.. .I work inside out, like nature."

"Each age finds its own technique.. .I mean, the strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art."

"I am nature."

"Naturally, the result is the thing [in painting] and it doesnvery vibrantt make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement."

"Well, painting today certainly seems very vibrant, very alive, very exiting. Five or six of my contemporaries around New York are doing very vital work, and the direction that painting seems to be taken here – is – away from the easel – into some sort, some kind of wall, wall painting..."

"I don't work from drawings and colour sketches into a final painting. Painting, I think, today – the more immediate, the more direct – the greater the possibilities of making a direct – of making a statement."

"With experience it seems to be possible to control the flow of paint, to a great extent, and I don't use – I don't use the accident – 'cause I deny the accident ... it's quite different from working, say, from a still life where you set up objects and work directly from them. I do have a general notion of what I'm about and what the results will be. I approach painting in the same sense as one approaches drawing, that is, it's direct."

"Most of the paint I use is a liquid, flowing kind of paint. The brushes I use are more a sticks rather than brushes – the brush doesn't touch the surface on the canvas, it's just above ... [so] I am able to be more free and to have greater freedom and move about the canvas, with greater ease."

"Well, method is, it seems to me, a natural growth out of a need, and from a need the modern artist has found new ways of expressing the world about him. I happen to find ways that are different from the usual techniques, which seems a little strange at the moment, but I don't think there's anything very different about it. I paint on the floor and this isn't unusual – the Orientals did that."

"Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age we're living in ... All cultures have had means and techniques of expressing their immediate aims – the Chinese, the Renaissance, all cultures. The thing that interests me is that today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source, they work from within."

"The modern artist is living in a mechanical age and we have a mechanical means of representing objects in nature such as the camera and photograph. The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world – in other words – expressing the energy, the motion and the other inner forces ... the modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating."

"I think they [the public] should not look for, but look passively — and try to receive what the painting has to offer and not bring a subject matter or preconceived idea of what they are to be looking for ... and I think the unconsciousness drives do mean a lot in looking at paintings ... I think it should enjoyed just as music is enjoyed — after a while you may like it or you may not. But it doesn't seem to be too serious. I like some flowers, and others, other flowers I don't like. I think at least it gives — at least give it a chance."

"It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express his age, the airplane the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of Renaissance or of any past culture. Each age finds its own technique..."

"I don't care for 'Abstract expressionism'.. ..and it is certainly not 'non-objective', and not 'non-representational' either. I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your consciousness, figures are bound to emerge. We're all of us influenced by Freud, I guess. I've been a Jungian for a long time.. .Painting is a state of being.. .Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is."

"The important thing is that Clyff Still – you know his work? – and Rothko, and I – we've changed the nature of painting.. .I don't mean there aren't any other good painters. Bill [ Willem the Kooning ] is a good painter, but he's a 'French' painter [Pollock meant: a French-abstract style]. I told him so, the last time I saw him after his last show,. ..all those pictures in his last show start with an image. You can see it even though he's covered it up, or tried to.. ..Style – that's the French part of it. He has to cover it up with style.. [answering Seldon Rodman's question]"

"The thing that interests me is that today painters do not have to go to a subject-matter outside themselves. Modern painters work in a different way. They work from within."

"I've had a period of drawing on canvas in black – with some of my early images coming thru -, think the non-objectivists will find them disturbing – and the kids who think it simple to splash a 'Pollock' out."