"I'm interested in making something romantic out of a very, very mechanistic geometry. Geometry and color represent to me an idealized, classical place that's very clear and very pure."
"I would like to point out that the image in my work has always been determined by what I wanted the color to do. Color function becomes my subject matter and its performance is my painting."
"My work is of an experimental nature and has centered on an investigation into the effects of complementary colors of full intensity when juxtaposed and the optical changes that occur as a result, and a study of the dynamic effect of the whole under changing conditions of light, and the effect of light on color."
"When you consider where I started from all this work progresses and slowly changes. And you move from one area to the next. It's more drastic when you can jump from, say 1958 to 1968, to see one painting from each period. But if you were to see all of them together, it would be a natural progression."
"People thought that I always wanted to shock the eye. I didn't want to shock the eye. I wanted to use colors together that had never been used together before. I'm still doing what I was doing, but in greater depth."
"I've taken color a step further than it had been taken by the Impressionists and the Neo-Impressionists."
"Art has been a way of life for me. I have never done anything else. Art was something I needed to say. It made life more than existence. I just hope that in 100 years people aren't worried about when I did something, but what I did."
"The changes in my work are not dramatic. I prefer to continue exploring what I've laid out for myself."
"Like the Impressionists, I want the viewer to mix the colors in his eye. I do not want to mix them on the palette. This way, I get greater intensity of color and greater purity, too...Unlike the Impressionists, however, I've freed such explorations from subject matter and discovered greater freedom in non-objective art."
"Subject matter is something that has to come from within you, and everybody has to find it for himself."
"My approach to painting is a kind of problem-solving one. I've always set out to experiment with some idea - some visual idea - to solve for myself"
"My thesis in graduate school at Yale dealt with the creation of space with line drawing. I explored how the line can be used to create space, and I still do that."
"There were two concurrent movements in vogue during that period: Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art which had very strong critical advocates. Well, those advocates helped to bring out the demise of Op Art. What was so hurtful, as far as I was concerned, was that as much as I was given praise and popularity before the movement, once the movement really got on the way I was attacked - and vehemently so. I felt betrayed by my own critics in this country...Also, I feel I've explored areas that hadn't been touched by other artists, including Albers - perceptual ideas that I hope will be lasting...Then there is the matter of optical mixture of color. The Impressionist and Neo-impressionists pioneered the use of color in this fashion, but I think I was the first to explore its possibilities in geometric abstraction with the use of my own color ideas."
"Albers used to talk about Cezanne, he used to talk about Klee, and that helped in appreciating the work. For the first time I started appreciating what the Impressionists were doing and I could then appreciate his color ideas - something does happen when you put two colors together, it has an effect. The colorful thing about Cezanne's work was the manipulation of the warm and cool colors. He was putting a warm shade next to a cool shade which sort of charges those colors up.... Then I could also understand Albers' interaction, where a color changes another color."
"I think the idea, which again is - I feel - one of the most important things in a work, usually takes more time than the execution."
"I sometimes refer to my painting as architectural, because I work out my plan, I work out my idea, and then I go about constructing the painting."
"The ideas I work on are essentially timeless. If you're working with present-day matter, your work can grow old and unimportant. Working with basic ideas will always be exciting, and if color or form is visually exciting in any profound sense, it will be that way ten or twenty years from now also."