I think the artist has to be something like a whale, swimming with his mouth open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs. When he finds that, he can start to make limitations. And then he really begins to grow.

I felt that the Negro was becoming too much of an abstraction, rather than the reality that art can give a subject.

As a Negro I do not need to go looking for happenings, the absurd or the surreal, because I have seen things that neither Dali, Beckett, Ionesco, nor any of the others could have thought possible.

It is not my aim to paint about the Negro in America in terms of propaganda. It is to depict the life of my people as I know it, passionately and dispassionately as Brueghel. My intention is to reveal through pictorial complexities the life I know.

I do not burden myself with the need for complete abstraction or absolute formal purity but I do want my language to be strict and classical, in the manner of the great Benin heads, for example.

I paint out of the tradition of the blues.