Willem de Kooning
Perhaps I am more a novelist than a poet...I always like the word in painting.

DS: You mean you like the forms to be identifiable?
WK: Well, they ought to have an emotion of a concrete experience. I mean, like I am very happy to see that grass is green. Like at one time, it was very daring to make a figure red or blue. I think now it is just as daring to make it flesh-coloured. I found that out for myself. Content, if you want to say, is a glimpse of something, an encounter, you know like a flash - it's very tiny, very tiny, content.... I still have it now from some fleeting thing - like when one passes something, you know it makes an impression.

I was never interested in making a good painting. or a perfect work. I didn't want to pin it down at all. 

DS: thats one of the big differences isn't it, between post-war and pre-war thinking: that we now accept imperfection and we no longer have Flaubert as an ideal but Dostoyevsky. You just threw it out and let it go and you knew it was imperfect.

WK: I worked on it, not with the idea of perfection but to see how far one could go... Anxiousness and dedication to fright maybe, or ecstasy, you know, like The Divine Comedy. To be a performer; to see how long you can stay on stage, with that imaginary audience.

DS: The pictures done since the Women, are they all landscapes..? 
WK: ...They're emotions, most of them, the later ones. Most of them are landscapes and highways and sensations of that, outside the city.

DS: But in the parkway pictures you really wanted to convey the sensation of something seen from a moving car?
WK: Well, I didn't intend to do that but, when I was working on this picture, this thing came to me: it's just like Merritt Parkway.

DS: Is there always a desire to make the painting correspond with a remembered experience?
WK: A lot of it yes. More like that now. I get freer. I feel I am getting more myself in the sense of I have all of my forces......I never intended to succeed with it (the painting) but the emotion must be there. 

Robert Motherwell:  
The process of painting is a series of moral decisions about the aesthetic.... Art is basically a moral enterprise. And artistry, if you want to put it that way, is the beauty and completeness with which a moral position is asserted. But the very nature of this beauty is dependent on the moral position.

DS: So that painting becomes a clarification of what really are one's attitudes?
RM: Yes, one learns a lot from it.

RM: I think the so-called 'abstractness' of modern art is not that it is about abstract things, but that it's an art really in the tradition of French Symbolist poetry..... an art which refuses to spell everything out.

DS: But to what extent are you aware of such references, specific references, while painting a painting?
RM: I think there's always mainly a sense of overall meaning. That is, of, quite simply, one's life...That one's existence in some way makes sense. Its an act of faith. That one's being is meaningful.... So that, except when one's asleep (and maybe even in one's dreams), one is constantly reflecting, contemplating, shifting, having flashes of clarity.

RM: ...in a sense there are no criteria (in painting) except authenticity of expression.

Robert Rauschenberg: 
Now, you can put an awful lot into a picture if you keep in mind that this painting could actually be a little larger but it isn't, so that the edge of the canvas is just a stopping, a termination of activity that's been going on.....

I prefer the attitude of the picture just evolving rather than working towards some kind of conclusion ....

Sometimes when I can't get started I just simply draw a line all the way across the canvas.  And then my activity is doing something in relationship to that line, but very simple-mindedly like working above or below it or on it, or in some cases to do something to cover up the line. But I think any of these excuses is to get started and is just an aesthetic, as an extremely recognized noble intention.

Cy Twombly:
It's instinctive in a certain kind of painting, not as if you were painting an object or special things, but it's like coming through the nervous system. It's like a nervous system. It's not described, it's happening. The feeling is going on with the task. The line is the feeling, from a soft thing, a dreamy thing, to something hard, something arid, something lonely, something ending, something beginning.

Jasper Johns:
I think that one wants from painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, gesture, statement has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can't avoid saying, not what you set out to say.

I am interested in things which suggest the world rather than suggest the personality.  I'm interested in things which suggest things which are, rather than in judgments... the most ordinary thing - it seems to me to exist as clear facts, not involving aesthetic hierarchy. 

DS: except that the form you begin with is usually conventional. And your marks with which you work are personal.

In a painting the processes involved in the painting are of greater certainty... of greater meaning that the referential aspects of the painting. I think the processes involved in the painting mean as much or more than any reference value the painting has.
   

Philip Guston: 
We were talking about the picture plane, and to me there's some mysterious element about the plane...there's an existence on this imaginary plane which holds almost all of the fascination of a painting for me. The true image only comes out when it exists on this imaginary plane. I think that when its eliminated or not maintained intensely, I get lost in it.

(Painting) remains the most puzzling, enigmatic thing. But when this thing happens, this very peculiar and particular thing does finally happen....when you have these few lucid moments

DS: And when it's going, you really can stay there? You don't have to get away from the canvas and see how the picture looks?

PG: I don't even know what I'm doing at that time. It's a peculiar moment to talk about... you could see the whole thing as a moral test. I think, and you know precisely when you are kidding yourself.... I don't think it has anything to do with spontaneity either. And if it is freedom, it's a very peculiar kind of freedom.... its a freedom that must be achieved.