People From Wyoming

"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'."

"Certainly I know that he [Jackson] did see the Indians doing sand paintings. You know, that's a fact. But I don't know why he chose to work on the floor. All I can say is that he did.. .He would never have said, 'That's why I am working on the floor, because I saw the Indians' sand painting.'. But I've heard him say that he did see the Indians' sand painting. I think by now that's been established. I wouldn't know why he worked on the floor, but obviously that was the way he worked. And that's that!.. .No, I didn't work on the floor."

"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.."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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'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 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]."

"He [Pollock] is the one who would pull me out of a state when I would say, 'the work has changed and I can't stand it. It's just like so and so's work.' Then he would come [they lived and worked together] and look and say, 'You are crazy, It is nothing like so and so's work. Just continue painting and stop hanging yourself up.' We had that kind of rapport."

"A dripping wet canvas covered the entire floor.. .There was complete silence.. Pollock looked at the painting. Then, unexpectedly, he picked up can and paint brush and started to move around the canvas. It was as if he suddenly realized the painting was not finished. His movements, slow at first, gradually became faster and more dance like as he flung black, white, and rust colored paint onto the canvas. He completely forgot that Lee [ Lee Krasner, his wife] and I were there; he did not seem to hear the click of the camera shutter.. .My photography session lasted as long as he kept painting, perhaps half an hour. In all that time, Pollock did not stop. How could one keep up this level of activity? Finally, he said 'This is it.'"

"He [Pollock] had an intuitive sense of rhythmical relations. He knew what counted.. .Even as an utter novice he never made anything ugly."

"His chief difficulty was with the basic art of drawing."

"To me, Pollock is the height of American painting. It's very lyrical."

"What the insurance companies have done is to reverse the business so that the public at large insures the insurance companies."

"The goal of a free nation is to reveal by example the enlightened possibilities of the human race, not to wield its power of destruction and death over the helpless, the poor, the starving and the war torn masses. The goal of a free nation must be no different outside its borders than within them. In America we do not massacre whole towns because they may be the chosen domicile of a criminal or a conspiracy of criminals. Instead we carefully root out the felons and bring them to justice. In the same way, the goal of a free nation must be to first view all people as members of the human race, and, as such, to insist that they possess fundamental human rights. They are, as we, citizens of the world. The rule of law shows us the way."

"Power can win the body count but it cannot win this war. Because the enemy is not human. This is a war against a malicious spirit. Only fools attempt to defeat a spirit with guns and rockets and bombs."

"A new fascism promises security from the terror of crime. All that is required is that we take away the criminals’ rights – which, of course, are our own. Out of our desperation and fear we begin to feel a sense of security from the new totalitarian state."

"The Internet has become the phenomenon of the new century. It has become the voice of the people in the first genuine experiment in democracy yet conducted in America. It stands ready to serve every facet, every faction. It creates neighbors where once we were foreigners. It carries our individual voices to new communities formed through the magic of electronics. The electronic village has been born, and the village voice, via the internet is being heard."

"I dream of a time when the people will retake their airways and use them to achieve a voice to rediscover democracy, and to see the divine potential of man."

"Nearly every day on the television set the hero cop breaks into the bad guy’s house and beats a confession out of him and we cheer on the cop. Propaganda smears our clear vision. It causes us to accept the diminishment of our constitutional protections as something to be lauded — after all, the cop was protecting us."

"We cannot, as a people, remain mute and free."

"How much of our lives could we buy back if we cherished our lives instead of our trinkets?"

"The less of one's life one must exchange for money, the more freedom one may enjoy."

"No artist's masterpiece can match a mother's creation of a successful child, one who has been freed to explore and to grow. ... Success is measured not only by who we are, but by what gifts we give. As the old chief said, "The gift is not complete until it is given again." Ah, the mother whose gift to the world is a person!"

"Money in doses disproportionate to our needs enslaves."

"The new and most powerful union of all will be a union of one — one man, one woman, one worker with special skills, an inquiring mind, and an independent attitude, his creativity intact, his love of life blooming. The union of one will be peopled by one man or one woman who is alive. Such a person is always sought by the intelligent manager."

"To bargain freedom for security is the devil's bargain. Having made the bargain, one enjoys neither freedom nor security."

"There are only two races (and they are not distinguished by color): those who are free and those who are not."

"I say, embrace fear as a friend. It is nature's gift to us. It is the best weapon for liberty. We do not give our permission to be enslaved by acknowledging its presence. Instead, it permits us to escape into the forest if we must. But it does not prevent the boy from rising off the ground one more time to defeat the bully. Fear is presented to us as a signal of danger. It permits us to escape or to fight with power beyond our ability."

"Teach the child to respect that which is not respectable and you teach the child the first requirement of slavery: submission to unjust authority. Children are persons. They are small persons whose perfect souls have not yet been ground through the meat grinder of slavery."

"The gift of self cannot be given to us. It is an incomparable gift that has already been given. We have possessed it from the beginning."

"Each of us has been endowed with the perfect power to be free. Slavery is a state of mind that fails to acknowledge the slave's own power."

"To accept capitalism and Free Enterprise as articles of faith without agreeing that we must be free to consider whether what is offered is free and freeing is itself enslavement."

"Although the ideal of free enterprise could, indeed, lend itself to the uplifting of the human condition, when it is practiced for profit alone, it becomes but a license for the powerful to further enslave the weak."

"When any system has for its goal the advancement of the system over the betterment of its individual members, such a system is embedded in slavery."

"As we drive down the freeways, we see the new cars, but not the massive new-car loans that enslave their drivers to the banks."

"Today the insatiable quest for profit promotes the new slavery. In bewildering ways, the new is more pernicious than the old, for the New American Slave is told he is free, and he clings to that myth as if his life depended upon it, a suspicion that cannot be totally ignored."

"The people of a nation are enslaved when, together, they are helpless to institute effective change, when the people serve the government more than the government serves them."

"My intent is to tell the truth as I know it, realizing that what is true for me may be blasphemy for others."

"Today the courts are choked with lawsuits brought by people against the New King. When they sue each other as a result of an automobile accident they in fact sue the King, for both parties are likely insured. ... Steadily the courts have become clearing-houses for the insurance industry."

"The function of the law is not to provide justice or to preserve freedom. The function of the law is to keep those who hold power, in power."

"The major functions of the government are, as in the communist nations, operated by deeply embedded, hopelessly entangled bureaus where nothing is accomplished because the function of the bureau is to intercept every living idea and smother it."

"To freely bloom — that is my definition of success. The question then is, How does arguing with our children advance our goal that our children freely bloom."

"When we come before the school board, most often we do not face those interested in the education of our children, but those interested in the maintenance of power. These contests are war. Any other paradigm is an illusion. It is not a mere contest, like athletes plunging down the hill on skis for the fastest time. It is not a dance in which the most graceful will be rewarded with a medal. This is war. Once we understand that the struggle is war, we can wage war and win. The key to winning any war is to control the war. This does not mean I seek to control my opponent."

"The power argument is an argument so powerful in its structure, so compelling in its delivery that when we assume the power stance the argument cannot be defeated. The power argument need not fill the air with noise. It need not create pandemonium. It need not destroy the opponent. It can be quiet. Gentle. It can embrace love, not anger, understanding, not hate."

"There are no rules that say lawyers cannot write or speak from their heart. Passion has never been formally outlawed, although it is a little-known experience among most lawyers and nearly all academicians."

"If I am real, if I am speaking from the heart zone, the right words will come. They will come a spoonful at a time, in the proper mixture."

"Words that do not create images should be discarded. Words that have no intrinsic emotional or visual content ought to be avoided. Words that are directed to the sterile intellectual head-place should be abandoned. Use simple words, words that create pictures and action and that generate feeling."

"I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief."