The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.
The whole essence of good drawing - and of good thinking, perhaps - is to work a subject down to the simplest form possible and still have it believable for what it is meant to be.
I think the sitcom is the format for television. It's the essential form, and it represents more of the canon of TV, which is why I latched onto it.
I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness.
There are no grotesques in nature; not anything framed to fill up empty cantons, and unnecessary spaces.
I want to know exactly how the first few measures are going to go, and the rough shape of a movement or the whole piece and its essential character.
There is no evolving, only unfolding. The lily is in the bit of dust which is its beginning, lily and nothing but lily: and the lily in blossom is a ne plus ultra: there is no evolving beyond.
There is no interruption between my older paintings and my cutouts. Just that with an increasing sense of the absolute, and more abstraction, I have achieved a form that is simplified to its essence.
Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form.
For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.
Just as a chemist "isolates" a substance from contaminations that distort his view of its nature and effects, so the work of art purifies significant appearance. It presents abstract themes in their generality, but not reduced to diagrams.
