Even as a teenager, he was obviously in love with painting, and with paint. There’s probably no 20th century artist other than his contemporary abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock who treated paint more voluptuously, and maybe no one who worked harder to get paint to come alive on a canvas.
Edit. I’m adding this second quote from the same piece because I lucked into hearing the same review on the radio show Fresh Air tonight. I just love this:
Several years after his first big New York success in the late 1940s with a dazzling series of black and white abstractions, he returned to one of his favorite subjects — women — and was attacked for abandoning abstraction. To which he responded: “After a while all kinds of painting becomes just painting for you — abstract or otherwise.”
“Being anti-traditional,” he told his critics, “is just as corny as being traditional.”
Yeah take that all you people who like to divvy up the world to carve yourself a little niche. Maybe we can do more than one thing or more than one style. And maybe we would do well to be a little more inclusive. Or by spending less time worrying about the boundries of what we do, and just doing it.
