I felt that everything is beautiful, but [not?] that which man tries intentionally to make beautiful; that the work of an ordinary bricklayer is more… - Ellsworth Kelly

When I left Paris in 1954, I saw no art that was being 'made' like mine and returning to the U.S. I found no one 'making' art that way either. In my own work, I have never been interested in painterliness (or what I find is) a very personal handwriting, putting marks on a canvas. My work is a different way of seeing and making something and which has a different use.

When I was a child, I spent all my spare time looking at birds and insects (beetles). My color use, and the object quality of the 'painting', and the use of fragmentation is closer to birds and beetles and fish, than it is to De Stijl or the Constructivists.

Everything that I saw became something to be made, and it had to be exactly as it was, with nothing added. It was a new freedom: there was no longer the need to compose. The subject was there already made, and I could take from everything. It all belonged to me: a glass roof of a factory, with its broken and patched panels, lines on a road map, a corner of a Braque painting, paper fragments in the street. It was all the same: anything goes.