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I've started painting much more freely, and faster. I think it's working in the theatre that did it. You know what the Glyndebourne scene-painters said about my The Magic Flute? They said they had to wear sunglasses to paint it.
--
"Portrait of the Artist as a Naughty Boy," interview with John Mortimer, In Character (1983) ISBN 0-14-006389-7 p.97

 

David Hockney

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I don’t like that word 'finish'. When something is finished, that means it’s dead, doesn’t it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting – I just stop working on it for a while. I like painting because it’s something I never come to the end of. Sometimes I paint a picture, then I paint it all out. Sometimes I’m working on fifteen or twenty pictures at the same time. I do that because I want to – because I like to change my mind so often. The thing to do is always to keep starting to paint, never finishing painting.(1947)

 

Arshile Gorky

 

There is imagery. Symbolism is a difficult idea. I’m not a symbolist. In other words, these are painting experiences. I don’t decide in advance that am going to paint a definite experience, but in the act of painting, it becomes a genuine experience for me. It’s not symbolism any more than it’s calligraphy. I’m not painting bridge constructions, skyscrapers or laundry tickets.. ..I don’t paint a given object – a figure or a table; I paint an organization that becomes a painting.. ..it’s not these things that get me started on a painting.. (1958)

 

Franz Kline

 

I like the liveness of it (theatre, fh) – that awful feeling of being on the spot. I must assume the responsibility for that moment, for those actions that happen at that particular time. I don’t find theatre that different from painting, and it’s not that I think of painting as theatre or vice versa. I tend to think of working as a kind of involvement with materials, as well as rather focused interest which changes.

 

Robert Rauschenberg

 

I paint very large pictures. I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them however, - I think it applies to other painters I know -, is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the lager picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command.

 

Mark Rothko

 

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 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."

 

Jackson Pollock