Joan Mitchell quotes:

Abstract is not a style. I simply want to make a surface work. This is just a use of space and form: it's an ambivalence of forms and space.

My paintings repeat a feeling about Lake Michigan, or water, or fields...it's more like a poem...and that's what I want to paint.

My paintings are titled after they are finished. I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me - and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I could certainly never mirror nature. I would more like to paint what it leaves with me.

White... is death. It's hospitals. It's my terrible nurses. White is absolute horror. It is just the worst.

Sunflowers are like people to me.