Jacob Lawrence Quotes

#1. The Human subject is the most important thing. My work is abstract in the sense of having been designed and composed, but it is not abstract in the sense of having no human content I want to communicate. I want the idea to strike right away.

Jacob Lawrence

#2. All artists are constantly looking for something and they don't always know what.

Jacob Lawrence

#3. My belief is that it is most important for an artist to develop an approach and philosophy about life - if he has developed this philosophy, he does not put paint on canvas, he puts himself on canvas.

Jacob Lawrence

#4. This is my genre ... the happiness, tragedies, and the sorrows of mankind as realized in the teeming black ghetto.

Jacob Lawrence

#5. If at times my productions do not express the conventionally beautiful, there is always an effort to express the universal beauty of man's continuous struggle to lift his social position and to add dimension to his spiritual being.

Jacob Lawrence

#6. I would describe my work as expressionist. The expressionist point of view is stressing your own feelings about something.

Jacob Lawrence

#7. You bring to a painting your own experience.

Jacob Lawrence

#8. I have an assuredness of myself. I never protect myself against it.

Jacob Lawrence