I hope to paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room. - Mark Rothko

[I]t was with the utmost reluctance that I found the figure could not serve my purposes...But a time came when none of us could use the figure without mutilating it. [his quote in 1959, looking back to the 1930s]

I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers. They have been created from the need for a group of actors who are able to move dramatically without embarrassment and execute gestures without shame. Neither the action nor the actors can be anticipated, or described in advance. They begin as an unknown adventure in an unknown space.. .Ideas and plans that existed in the mind at the start were simply the doorway through which one left the world in which they occur. The great cubist pictures thus transcend and belie the implications of the cubist program.

It is Cézanne's feeling that determined the form of his pictorial structure. It is his pictorial structure that gives off his feeling. If all his pictorial structures were to disappear from the world, so would a certain feeling.