it was the Cubist who created the space and color that everywhere today assails our eyes in uniform architecture and monotonous design; the various branches of modern art through tedious & exhaustive experiment & research creating a massive cultural sinkhole whose banal discoveries unveil for all the sameness of form, line and color; Quote from Gorky's 'Camouflage', 1942: I like the heat; the tenderness; the edible; the lusciousness; the song of a single person in a bathtub full of water. I like Ucello, Grunewald, Ingres, the drawings and sketches for paintings of Seurat and that man Pablo Picasso; I measure all things by weight. In text for MoMA, describing the 'Garden in Sochi' - series, 26 June 1942 I love Mougouch, Gorky's wife. What about papa Cézanne; I like the wheat fields, the plow, the apricots, those flirts of the sun. And bread above all. My lever is the purple; About 194 feet away from our house in Armenia on the road to the spring my father had a little garden with a few apple trees which had retired from giving fruit; this garden was identified as the 'Garden of Wish Fulfillment' often I had seen my mother and the other village women exposing their naked bosoms, taking the soft, dependable ******* in their hands & rubbing them on the rocks; above all this standing an enormous tree all bleached under the sun, rain & cold, deprived of leaves. This was the Holy Tree [quoted in 1942] In text for MoMA, describing the 'Garden in Sochi' - series, 26 June 1942 I don't like that word 'finished'. When something is finished, that means it's dead, doesn't it? I believe in everlastingness; I never finish a painting – I just stop working on it for a while. I like painting because it's something I can never come to the end of; sometimes I paint a picture, then I paint it all out. Sometimes I'm working on fifteen or twenty pictures at the same time; I do that b/c I want to – b/c I change my mind so often; The thing to do is always to keep starting to paint; never finishing the painting [quoted in 1948]