Quotes from Romare Bearden

The essence of art is to recapturel the fantasy and the imagination of a child again, but without the innocence of a child.

You should always respect what you are and your culture because if your art is going to mean anything, that is where it comes from.

My purpose is to paint the life of my people as I know it.

It was not my aim to paint about the Negro in America in terms of propaganda. It is to depict the life of my people as I know it, passionately and dispassionately as Brueghel.

The function of the artist is to organize the facets of life according to his imagination.

Memory embellishes Life. Forgetfulness makes it possible.

The artist has to be something like a whale swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs.

When I conjure these memories, they are of the present to me, because after all, the artist is a kind of enchanter in time.

Painting is the act of discovery and you're constantly enlarging your horizon or finding yourself every time you paint.

What I've attempted to do is establish a world through art in which the validity of my Negro experience could live and make its own logic.

Black art has always existed. It just hasn't been looked for in the right places.

Art is the soul of a people.

The artist confronts chaos. The whole thing of art is, how do you organize chaos?