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..there comes a point when something catches on the canvas, something grips on the canvas. I don’t know what it is, you can put your paint on the surface? Most of the time it looks like paint, and who the hell wants paint on a surface? But there does come a time – you take it off, put it on, goes over here, moves over a foot, as you go closer you start moving in inches not feet, half-inches – there comes a point when the paint doesn’t feel like paint. I don’t know why. Some mysterious thing happens. I think you have all experienced it.. ..What counts is that the paint should really disappear, otherwise it’s craft. That’s what I mean by something grips in a canvas. The moment that happens you are then sucked into the whole thing. Like some kind of rhythm.’
--
transcript of a public forum at Boston university, conducted by Joseph Ablow, 1966; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 67

 

Phillip Guston

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Most of the paint I use is a liquid, flowing kind of paint. The brushes I use are more a sticks rather than brushes – the brush doesn’t touch the surface on the canvas, it’s just above... [so] I am able to be more free and to have greater freedom and move about the canvas, with greater ease.

 

Jackson Pollock

 

In 1946 what I call my ‘Little Image’ began breaking through this (former) gray matter of mine. I felt fantastic relief that something was beginning to happen after all this time when there was nothing, nothing, nothing… …The canvas is down on a floor or table and I am working out of a tiny can. In other words, I have to hold the paint so I can move it. But I wouldn’t have been using Duco (industrial paint, ed.). My paint would always have been oil and I could get the consistency of a thick pouring quality in it by squeezing it into a can and cutting it with turp (turpentine, ed.) – the way I use paint today (1975, ed.)... ...The only thing I can say with absolute assurance is that my ‘Little Image’ work starts about 1946 and ends in 1949.

 

Lee Krasner

 

When inspiration took me I threw away my brushes, dipped an old paint rag into the paint and smeared around on the canvas in blissful intoxication.

 

Emil Nolde

 

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

 

..Paint never seems to behave the same. Even the same paint doesn’t, you know. In other words, if you use the same white or black or red, through the use of it, it never seems to be the same. It doesn’t dry the same. It doesn’t stay there and look at you the same way. Other things seem to affect it. There seems to be something that you can do so much with paint and after that you start murdering it..

 

Franz Kline