His chief difficulty was with the basic art of drawing. — Jackson Pollock

"The idea of an isolated American painting, so popular in this country during the thirties, seems absurd to me, just as the idea of a purely American mathematics or physics would seem absurd.. .And in another sense, the problem doesnt exist at all; or, if it did, would solve itself: An American is an American and his painting would naturally be qualified by the fact, whether he wills or not. But the basic problems of contemporary painting are independent of any one country."

"I have a definite feeling for the West, the vast horizontality of the land, for instance.. .I have always been very impressed with the plastic qualities of American Indian art. The Indians have the true painters approach in their capacity to get hold of appropriate images, and in their understanding of what constitutes painterly subject-matter. Their colour is essentially Western, their vision has the basic universality of all real art. Some people find references to American Indian art and calligraphy in parts of my pictures. That wasnt intentional; probably [it] was the result of early memories and enthusiasm."

"I accept the fact that the important painting of the last hundred years was done in France. American painters have generally missed the point of modern painting from beginning to end.. .Thus the fact that good European moderns [European artists who lived in the U.S. because of the Nazi-regime] are now here is very important, for they bring with them an understanding of the problems of modern painting. I am particularly impressed with their concept of the source of art being the unconscious. These idea interests me more than these specific artists do, for the two artists I admire most, Picasso and Joan Miró, are still abroad."

"The modern artist is living in a mechanical age and we have a mechanical means of representing objects in nature such as the camera and photograph. The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world – in other words – expressing the energy, the motion and the other inner forces ... the modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating."

"It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express his age, the airplane the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of Renaissance or of any past culture. Each age finds its own technique..."

"I believe easel painting to be a dying form, and the tendency of modern feeling is toward the wall picture or mural.."