Jules Olitski Quotes

Color in color is felt at any and every place of the pictorial organization; in its immediacy - its particularity. Color must be felt throughout.

Decisions are being made a mile a minute while you're making the work, and it has to come out of experience and vision.

In the bedroom darkness I may visualise a way of making a painting. I can see it - if I do this and this and that and this, my God! Why haven't I seen this until now? I can hardly wait to get to the studio and make the vision real.

Alas, all too often, the dream turns into a mud puddle. I am left looking at a disaster. What to do! Keep working. I ask the Almighty for help. That frees me.

When the conception of internal form is governed by edge, color appears to remain on or above the surface. I think, on the contrary, of color as being seen in and throughout, not solely on, the surface.

I work day and night without sleep. The paintings keep me fired up.

There is value in long years of obscurity, if one doesn't go insane or suicidal, in that, simply because nobody is looking, the habit of fooling around and trying things out gets ingrained.

I worked like a crazyman. I worked day and night, often days and nights at a time - without sleep. Gallons of coffee kept me awake; the paintings kept me fired up.

I think of color as being seen in and throughout, not solely on the surface.

Expect Nothing, Do Your Work, Celebrate.

What I would like in my painting is simply a spray of colour that hangs like a cloud, but does not lose its shape.

I think of painting as possessed by a structure... but a structure born of the flow of color feeling.