Blake would not laugh at my fantasies if he saw them [in contrary to the public in New York, as Hartley realized well, before] - Marsden Hartley

My work has the abstraction underneath it all now & what I deliberately set out to do down here, for this is the perfect realistic abstraction in landscape.

Every painter must traverse for himself that distance from Paris to Aix (Aix-en-Provence where Paul Cézanne frequently painted in open air] or from Venice to Toledo [where w:El Greco lived and painted for many years]. Expression is for one knowing its own pivot. Every expressor relates solely to himself – that is the concern of the individualist.

I have always said that you do not see a thing until you look away from it. In other words, an object or a fact in nature has not become itself until it has been projected in the realm of the imagination. Therefore what has been retained in the mind’s eye is what lives. I have seldom or never worked from nature for this reason and so what I see is what I believe to be true, and that becomes the truism of the creative artist.