Barnett Newman

“Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds.”

“The sublime is now.”

“The first man was an artist.”

“I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality.”

“What is the explanation of the seemingly insane drive of man to be a painter and poet if it is not an act of defiance against man's fall and an assertion that he return to the Adam of the Garden of Eden?”

“Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting.”

“The self, terrible and constant, is for me the subject matter of painting.”

“We are reasserting man's natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions.”

“I think the idea of a 'finished' picture is a fiction.”

“I am an intuitive painter, a direct painter.”

“An artist paints so that he will have something to look at; at times he must write so that he will have something to read.”

“Art is a form of love.”

“The present painter is concerned not with his own feelings or with the mystery of his own personality but with the penetration into the world mystery.”

“To the artist, the tragedy of the world is that it is formless.”

“I feel that my zip activates the field and gives it a scale.”