“My dear Brother, - I am working like one actually possessed, more than ever I am in a dumb fury of work… Perhaps something will happen to me like what Eug. Delacroix spoke of, "I discovered painting when I had no longer teeth or breath." What I dream of in my best moments is not so much of striking color effects as once more the half tones.”

— Vincent Van Gogh

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Sept. 1889; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, p. 33 (letter 604) <br class="br">1880s, 1889

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Vincent Van Gogh238

Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890) 1853–1890

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Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

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Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

Source: 1930 - 1941, from 'Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof' (2009), p. 125: Gorky's quote, in a letter to his sister Vartush Mooradian, 28 February 1938

“So the years passed and I worked a great deal. And then I became ill and although I could still work, despite the fact that my hands became more and more rigid. I could no longer pick up the paintbrush and had to use both hands to do so, always with a great deal of pain. The format of my works became very small, and I also had to find a new technique. For three years I painted these small heads like a man possessed. Then I realized that I would soon have to stop working entirely: and that's what happened, too!”

Alexej von Jawlensky (1864–1941) Russian painter

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“I am not interested in the kind of expression that you have when you paint a painting with brush strokes. It's all right, but it's already done and I want to do something new. I didn't want to get into something which is played out and narrow. I want to do as I like, invent my own interests. Of course, that doesn't mean that people who, like Newman, still paint are worn out. But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment. I think what I'm trying to deal with is something more long range than that in a way, more obscure perhaps, more involved with things that happen over a longer time perhaps. At least it's another area of experience.”

Donald Judd (1928–1994) artist

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“Today it's possible to paint one canvas with the calmness of an ancient Greek and the next with the anxiety of a Van Gogh. Either of these emotions, and any in between, is valid to me... I work on many canvasses at once. In the morning I line them up against the wall of my studio. Some speak, some do not. They are my mirrors. They tell me what I am like at that moment.”

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