Well, I was interested in a subjective image [in the 1940's].. ..stemming perhaps from the subconscious. Because the external world as far as I was c… - Adolph Gottlieb

I wanted to do something figurative. Well I couldn’t visualize a whole man.. .I felt that I wanted to make a painting primarily with painterly means. So I flattened out my canvas and made them roughly rectangular divisions, with lines going out in four directions. That is, vertically and horizontally.. .And then I would free associate, putting whatever came to my mind freely within these different rectangles... I thought of it as related tot the automatic writing the surrealists were interested in.

We were outcasts, roughly expressionist painters not acceptable to most dealers and collectors.(A reference to the TEN group of painters).

In times of violence, personal predilections for niceties of colour and form seem irrelevant. All primitive expression (like the myths) reveals the constant awareness of powerful forces, the immediate presence of terror and fear.