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Originally published in Limited Edition
December 1945
 

"Tonal structure is the important thing in painting a picture. Color is only an extension of value. If values are right, colors will be right and I can decide upon any color scheme I wish. If a close range of values is chosen, then color helps give variation of visual effect.

For me, this is not off the beam. You must admit that knowledge of dimensions is a result of experience. Knowledge of science, of history, of history of art – the significance we attach to them – is a complex of all knowledge about things. Vision gives us little understanding of them. When I say I am reaching for a totality of vision, I mean that I take the things I know – hand, nose, art – and use them in my paintings after separating them from their associations as anatomy.

I use them as a totality of what they mean to me. It’s a primitive method, and a primitive necessity of expressing, without learning how to do so by conventional ways…It puts us at the beginning of seeing."