Lee Krasner Quotes

I like a canvas to breathe and be alive. Be alive is the point. And, as the limitations are something called pigment and canvas, let’s see if I can do it.

Painting, for me, when it really ‘happens,’ is as miraculous as any natural phenomenon – as say, a lettuce leaf. By ‘happens,’ I mean the painting in which the inner aspect of man and his outer aspects interlock.

In the late 30s the name Pollock was totally unknown and unheard of.

I think every once in a while I feel the need to break my medium… if I have been doing a very large painting I like to drop into something in small scale. It is a challenge to go into this size. It is just to hold my own interest, and then each media has its own conditions.

I knew de Kooning and I went to his studio so I knew about de Kooning’s work. But only a little handful knew about it, you know. Maybe there were ten people that knew about it.

I never violate an inner rhythm. I loathe to force anything. I don’t know if the inner rhythm is Eastern or Western. I know it is essential for me. I listen to it and I stay with it. I have always been this way. I have regards for the inner voice.

Painting… in which the inner and the outer man are inseparable, transcends technique, transcends subject and moves into the realm of the inevitable.

One could go on for ever as to whether the paint should be thick or thin, whether to paint the woman or the square, hard-edge or soft, but after a while such questions become a bore. They are merely problems in aesthetics, having only to do with the outer man.

We get used to a certain kind of colour of form or format, and it’s acceptable. And to puncture that is sticking your neck out a bit. And then pretty soon, that’s very acceptable.

I think my painting is so autobiographical if anyone can take the trouble to read it.

At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there’d be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you.

I am never free of the past. I have made it crystal clear that I believe the past is part of the present which becomes part of the future.