I was trying to show colour, but I realized at the private view that the public were prisoners of a preconceived point of view and that, confronted w… - Yves Klein

I dash out to the banks of the river [river the 'Loup', at Cagnes, France] and find myself amongst the rushes and the reeds. I grind some pigment over all this and the wind makes their slender stalks bend and appliqués them with precision and delicacy on to my canvas, which I thus offer to quivering nature: I obtain a vegetal mark. Then it starts to rain; a fine spring rain: I expose my canvas to the rain.. ..and I have the mark of the rain! – a mark of an atmospheric event.

This period of blue monochrome was the product of my pursuit of the indefinable in painting which that master, Eugène Delacroix [Romantic French painter] was able to indicate even in his day.

It was pure chance that led me to judo. Judo has helped me to understand that pictorial space is above al the product of spiritual exercises. Judo is in fact the discovery by the human body of a spiritual space.