Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising.

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you.

I guess I have no motivation to make an abstract painting, even if they sometimes read as abstract. I think, with abstraction, it’s easy to fall into a sort of pastiche.

The freer the soul, the more abstract painting becomes.

I was worried in the ‘80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall.

When I see people making ‘abstract’ painting, I think it’s just a dialogue and a dialogue isn’t enough. That is to say, there is you painting and this canvas. I think there has to be a third thing; it has to be a trialogue.

An abstract painting need in 50 years by no means look “abstract” any longer.

If the abstract paintings show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lifes show my yearning.

Even with painting, even abstract paintings, you need the incoming of, light on the canvas.

In every respect, fantasy is like doing abstract paintings.

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.

Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential.

I loved surrealism and abstract painting, and anything related to those. I always thought painting was the highest form of art. What led me to drawing was seeing so much self-important, pretentious, conceptual-type art in university. I wanted to reject that by making quick, fun art.

We speak of concrete and not abstract painting because nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a color, a surface.

Abstract paintings must be as real as those created by the 16th century Italians.

When realistic images or patterns are seen in an abstract painting, they are often parallels brought about by processes in painting which echo processes in nature.

Abstract painting is dead. That’s why it has become so interesting again.

When I’m not working on a children‘s book, I’m painting abstract paintings. That’s probably the most joyous thing for me as an artist. But I do love children’s books.

Think of an abstract painting as very, very low relief – a thing, not a picture.

Experience has proved that there is no difference between a so-called realist painting – of a landscape, for example – and an abstract painting. They both have more or less the same effect on the observer.

Painting is a duality and abstract painting is an entirely aesthetic thing. It always remains on one level. It is only really interesting in the beauty of its patterns or its shapes.

I’m interested in color belonging to something, where it takes on a completely new kind of vibrancy, rather than being what you would call straight abstract paintings. And anyway it is so much more exciting trying to find out about the three dimensions of color and sticking it down on a two dimensional surface.