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For an Impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject, but to realize sensations.

I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere.

I'm still very sure that painting is one of the most basic human capacities, like dancing and singing, that make sense, that stay with us, as something human.

Nature engenders the science of painting.

Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

My struggle has been to return painting to the tangible object, which is like returning the personality to touching and feeling the world around it, to offset the tendency to vagueness and abstraction. To remind people of practical activity, to suggest the sense and not to escape from the senses.

See, when I paint, it is an experience that, at its best, is transcending reality.

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

Painting, for me, is a dynamic balance and wholeness of life; it is mysterious and transcending, yet solid and real.

Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.